New York Magazine Cover Story

Balanced? It's less hysterical than some people posting on blogs, but NY Mag specializes in sky-is-falling reporting when it comes to real estate and political analyses. The market didn't collapse as they predicted it would 2 years ago. It didn't collapse 1 year ago as they said it would. Will it this year? I suppose if you just keep saying something you increaase your odds of getting it right eventually. Bottom line IMHO: no one knows. You need a place? Buy a place. You wanna wait? Then wait. Life is too short to get too caught up in market timing. Viewing a home like a stock in terms of investing is not wise. A home is a different type of investment because you do more than hope to make some money with it. You live in it. You don't live in a stock. You don't do anything with a stock except hope it makes you some (or a lot of) money. You can't treat them the same. "Should I buy a home or sell my home" thus can't be answered simply by focusing on the state of the real estate market. People love to think they live in extraordinary times, but in fact, history shows most times are more ordinary and less extraordinary than we think when we are in the middle of them. There are always deals to be had and others to be avoided. NY Mag is a good read, but a lot of what they say is rank conjecture that ends up getting a lot of people to wring their hands, feel paralyzed with indicision, or make emotional versus reasoned decisions about how and where to live.

Agreed. The NY Mag article in May 2005 was DEAD WRONG.

How about a NY Mag headline "We were DEAD WRONG in 2005. Trying again in 2007. Either way, we've got to sell our rag to someone."

Bottom line is the DOW is just 4% off it's all time high. Yet people love to quote what the media is blasting all over the place about foreclosures and the doom the RE market. The reality is if you take out several states such as California, Florida and Nevada the foreclosure rate is actually decreasing nationwide. I assure you that won't see this fact be posted in any Newspaper.

It's funny, when I started looking this time last year OH's were empty. Then NY Mag came out with a cover article on how NYC RE was finally bottoming out - next thing I knew OH's were crowded with buyers who were waiting by the sidelines until the market dipped, and I was out-bid on a couple of apts.

Writers at NY Magazine are just pissed off cause they make shit salaries. Actually, most "journalists" are pissed off cause they make shit salaries. thats why they're all liberals.

Not sure you can trace politics entirely to money in this town anyway. . .

I don't think reporters for the NY Sun, Wall St. Journal, or NY Post get any more money than those at the NY Times or NY Mag. And the NY Sun and WSJ aren't exactly paragons of progressive liberal idealism.

Richard Johnson makes more than Paul Krugman. Fact.

"The reality is if you take out several states such as California, Florida and Nevada the foreclosure rate is actually decreasing nationwide. I assure you that won't see this fact be posted in any Newspaper."

Right on, Spunky. One thing to note, however, is that states like CA & FL have different laws/regulations governing foreclosure procedures than, say NY, where it takes a longer time for a house to go into 'foreclosure'. This is one reason why the foreclosure rate is lower in NY than in CA (for example).

What you really have to look at is the rate at which homeowners are delinquent in their mortgage payments, I'm not sure if that data is available on an aggregate basis nationwide.