It just needs some paint.

@1 gets it. We have a buildable land shortage of our own making.

That said, I appreciate the reference to the more-wealthy creating the last bubble. That fits well with what I was seeing. I'd further say that since many of these were 2nd homes it was easy to walk away from them - all upside if the value goes up, with only your down payment on the line if the market crashes.

Do you think large-scale flipping is happening now? I've looked into loans not long ago, and they don't seem to be easy to get. I certainly don't see any obvious flipping, but maybe I'm just missing it.

Handyman's dream! Nds sme TLC.

I understand the urge, but neither group "caused" the great recession.

The real flipping goes on at various levels of the home mortgage industry. Your loan gets sold over and over again, up the chain, at each step an amount of profit is taken out. It's when the loan resellers could no longer find buyers for their loan traunches that shit hit the fan.

But then again, one must wonder who's fault it was that there were no more buyers.

#1 and #3 - thank you.

The current zoning means the only legal new construction on this lot is another SF home.

That's just a few blocks from Chez Vel-DuRay! That part of the neighborhood is undergoing a wholesale transformation - houses are being demolished and replaced with four-pack townhomes that are each selling for $600k.

"the worst street in Seattle, Rainier Avenue"

Clearly the words of a gentrifier whose only contact with the former Empire Way is to cross it twice a day to get to and from the Columbia City Gentrifiers' light-rail station.

Martin Luther King Jr Way is approximately twelve times worse than Rainier Avenue, by any metric you care to throw at a street. It is not even a contest at all.

likely it was a combination of both. if you wanted to flip a house and believed you could, buying it with a subprime mortgage with a teaser rate would be a great approach. the teaser rate led to the default, since any would-be seller probably could have divested at a loss within a few years if the payments didn't suddenly spike. what Mudede probably means to say is that it wasn't just "poor and stupid" that took down the housing market, but rather simply "stupid." But Mudede already knows that bashing the poor is an inescapable excuse under capitalism and is looking for a way to deflect it.

Robotslave dear, I'm not sure that I agree with your assessment. So much of MLK has been redone as part of the light rail project that it's now quite modern and remarkably high-speed. Not many pesky pedestrians, almost no cyclists, and a wide variety of auto-oriented services, as well as stores with ample surface parking. There's even a drive-thru only Starbucks! It's like a south side auto paradise.

Rainier, on the other hand, has all those old-timey business districts and so many stoplights! A motorist is always having to slow down on a road like Rainier, with the pedestrians and the buses and the local traffic. I can see why Our Dear Charles would despise it.

@11 he was half-trolling half-sardonically serious with that one.

@1: why is the land so valuable when there's a surplus of supply for housing?

That makes this "sweet home with covered front porch" up in my area look like a steal at 385k!

https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/3816-N…

Last sold in August for 200k....

@15, what on earth is the evidence of a surplus of housing?

Are there neighborhoods of empty homes I haven't heard of?

C'mon, Charles!; Don't you KNOW that pricing things is intrinsically Irrational(-istic)?

@15 ”why is the land so valuable when there's a surplus of supply for housing?”

exactly! why is the land so valuable when purple smells crinkly scoots-mcgoo?

Maybe I am missing something, but what is the big deal here? The listing is somewhat vague, but it appears as if this is simply a listing for a 6000 sq. ft. lot plus a newly constructed 3600 sq. ft. home (which has not yet been built). As far as I can tell, the list price is not for the lot alone, but also includes the new dwelling.

@9 There's no reason why an ADU or DADU couldn't be built on this lot.

So the point is people with good credit made bad decisions too? Sure, what else do you have?

@23 -- That's the plan. To quote Redfin, "... self contained ADU on lower ...".

Oh, and as far as the housing crash goes, who cares what caused it. We've have numerous housing crashes in the past, and will probably have a bunch more in the future. For the most part, no one cares. It sucks for the handful of people who spent too much money on a place to live, but otherwise, no big deal.

What caused the great recession was the lack of regulation. The government forgot the lessons from the great depression, and thought banks could just regulate themselves. They allowed insurance instruments (which are heavily regulated) to be treated like swaps (which aren't) and as a result, banks were way too heavily leveraged. Imagine if every insurance company in the U. S. was allowed to just wing it. Many would take the premium, and just put it into the stock market (or spend it). Then, if there was a catastrophe (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) they wouldn't have the money to pay the customer, and simply go bankrupt. Of course that isn't allowed (insurance companies have to have a huge cash reserve). Except in this case, it was allowed, because of bullshit labeling (calling it a swap, when it wasn't). So, basically, big banks were insuring other banks (and savings and loans) and then when people stopped paying their mortgage, the banks asked the other banks for their insurance money. Except that money was spent, and the whole fucking thing collapsed and everybody got screwed. Except of course, the super wealthy -- they came out OK.