@dkmich No.

When I was invited to leave on March 15, I left.

It is worse than it was during the primary. The diaries there are crap. They're still selling corporate Dems - poor, poor Hillary.

@Phoebe Loosinhouse

When my in-laws were moving back to AZ about five or six years ago, they looked at a lot of houses and two they liked happened to be foreclosures, or "bank-owned properties" that were sitting empty, which you might imagine they would be anxious to sell.

The in-laws had good credit and enough money for a good-sized down payment, they were prepared to make full price offers, and wanted quick closing as they were in the process of moving and had already sold their house up north. In both cases, they were told by the listing agents that the escrow/closing process would take at least 6 to 8 months, and it would be at least 2-3 months to even hear if their offer was accepted or not! They couldn't possibly wait that long, obviously, so they stopped even looking at bank-owned houses, which were essentially impossible to buy for anyone needing to get into a house.

We could not understand at the time why the banks were making it impossible for regular people to buy these empty houses, and preferred letting them stay unoccupied for months. It seemed bizarre.

It looks like maybe the whole game was set up to make sure that only these big investment companies could buy them, and intentionally keep out people who wanted to buy a home to occupy and live in. Now I see what they were up to.

housing crisis: creating the boom by underwriting bad and/or fraudulent mortgages, securitizing bad mortgages, foreclosing on bad mortgages, reselling foreclosed properties, buying bundled foreclosed properties at a discount and then dominating the rental housing market. As a side bonus, their greed has made a hash of the American title and deed system and robbed every city and town of mortgage recordation fees. And this was all facilitated over the last eight years by the executive branches of a Democratic administration, whose Justice Department turned a blind eye to rampant frauds being perpetrated and whose HUD and Treasury departments were feckless, incompetent or worse in offering any meaningful help to homeowners. But hey, Go Dems!

Now that the American Dream of individual home ownership has been greatly curtailed, the PTB can now turn their attention to ruining another sector of the American economy, rental housing.

I was aware when the bulk buying of single family homes was going on and I made a prediction that it would NOT work out for the hedge funds getting involved, largely because single family homes do not scale out and balance the costs of maintenance and repairs the same way an apartment complex does. In an apartment complex, an on-site repair crew can provide timely and efficient response to whatever issues arise - electrical, plumbing, etc. This is not the case with single family housing which is spread out over a larger area and requires additional time to even get to the property. It's hard enough to make a profit on one single family home run as an investment, once taxes, insurances, maintenance and repairs are factored in, plus any down time between tenants or if a tenant stops paying rent, and then there's the cost of eviction. Now, even assuming the funds got a great buy on the original house, they have all those factors PLUS they are expected to be making a profit for their investors while paying for the overhead of their own company to boot. Trust me, the average rent in an average town is not going to make enough to cover expenses and make a reasonable return for the time,money and energy expended.

But it looks like our great Dems and President Obama put us all on the hook once again in order to "privatize profit and socialize losses" which is the basic tenet underlying all their financial actions.

@Phoebe Loosinhouse

Plus, absentee corporate slumlords can more easily manage to delay/evade repairs - bonus!

housing crisis: creating the boom by underwriting bad and/or fraudulent mortgages, securitizing bad mortgages, foreclosing on bad mortgages, reselling foreclosed properties, buying bundled foreclosed properties at a discount and then dominating the rental housing market. As a side bonus, their greed has made a hash of the American title and deed system and robbed every city and town of mortgage recordation fees. And this was all facilitated over the last eight years by the executive branches of a Democratic administration, whose Justice Department turned a blind eye to rampant frauds being perpetrated and whose HUD and Treasury departments were feckless, incompetent or worse in offering any meaningful help to homeowners. But hey, Go Dems!

Now that the American Dream of individual home ownership has been greatly curtailed, the PTB can now turn their attention to ruining another sector of the American economy, rental housing.

I was aware when the bulk buying of single family homes was going on and I made a prediction that it would NOT work out for the hedge funds getting involved, largely because single family homes do not scale out and balance the costs of maintenance and repairs the same way an apartment complex does. In an apartment complex, an on-site repair crew can provide timely and efficient response to whatever issues arise - electrical, plumbing, etc. This is not the case with single family housing which is spread out over a larger area and requires additional time to even get to the property. It's hard enough to make a profit on one single family home run as an investment, once taxes, insurances, maintenance and repairs are factored in, plus any down time between tenants or if a tenant stops paying rent, and then there's the cost of eviction. Now, even assuming the funds got a great buy on the original house, they have all those factors PLUS they are expected to be making a profit for their investors while paying for the overhead of their own company to boot. Trust me, the average rent in an average town is not going to make enough to cover expenses and make a reasonable return for the time,money and energy expended.

But it looks like our great Dems and President Obama put us all on the hook once again in order to "privatize profit and socialize losses" which is the basic tenet underlying all their financial actions.

@karl pearson guesss who was in the business of doing just that?
Why our mostest progressivest SAVIOR Elizabeth Warren. Yep she who is constantly yelling at the banks and the student loan people (has she actually gotten any legislation passed that would help people) was into buying foreclosured houses and flipping them for a tidy profit. In fact she was so into doing that, she loaned money to her family members so that they too could get in on buying up foreclosed homes and making money from people's misery.
And that Barry, he was the greatest president ever since FDR, right? That's what I see written everywhere. And boy do people miss him and want him back in the WH because he did so much for Main Street Americans and made sure that the banks can't screw people again ever.
Damn him for what he did after campaigning on what he was going to do.
Biggest con artist bait and switch ever.

The Home and Garden TV channel airs a program called "Flip or Flop". Making thousands of dollars looks so easy.

@Mark from Queens

I recall seeing various articles and advertising promoting global purchases of homes all over the world as investments for consortiums years back, when I was doing a lot of internet research and had a more functional... everything, lol - there was often a lot more interesting factual info available re corruption tracing and actual stock ownership of various operations in business sections than most other places...

Personally, I'd say that the stinkers are after everything and will be sadly disappointed when they have it all and nobody and nothing but a dead planet and a lot of electronic data-dots which may not even appear as symbols if the power goes down for the count. What will they do for amusement then?

their positions in the real estate markets. And it's not just here, it's all over the world. From the NY Daily News, Juan "Gonzalez: U.S. firms buy housing in Spain, raise rent and evict tenants"

Major U.S. firms like Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs, Apollo Management and Cerberus are on a mission to conquer the housing markets of other countries as well, hoping to reap huge profits in the process.

In Spain, for instance, these firms have been vying quietly for two years to gobble up tens of thousands of residential properties in Madrid and Barcelona at fire sale prices.

None has moved more quickly than Blackstone, which is why a group of Spanish emigres in this country has joined with local housing advocates for a planned protest Wednesday outside Blackstone’s Park Ave. headquarters.

Even as unemployment has eased in our own country, Spain remains mired in deep depression — with a 25% unemployment rate, the collapse of several major banks and astronomical budget deficits. Spanish real estate prices remain 40% below their level in 2007. More than 700,000 citizens have fled the country since 2008 and some 3 million housing units sit empty.

This angers me on so many levels. These fucking scumbags took all that monopoly money in 2008, printed up in a panic by the Fed after they held the gov't hostage with a gun to its head that the world would blow up if they weren't bailed out, and not only didn't stimulate the economy with loans to people, but paid themselves grand bonuses and deepened their positions in the real estate markets and into the myriad of ponzi schemes Wall St spends most of its energy on developing, which is done largely by luring in the best and the brightest from engineering and mathematics backgrounds with promises of bigger paydays than they would if they'd gone into science.

If only voters were informed about such downright evil enterprise, you know like maybe newspaper front page/top of the hour radio reports/major prime-time tv expose/website headline instead of being tucked away to appear almost as afterthoughts, we'd be able to build a movement. Over one million people, I think, were thrown out of their homes based on fraudulent mortgages.

What we need is the proper riled up indignation that stories like these deserve. And with such a feckless media running interference for their corporate masters/bank advertisers there's no chance it will see the light it deserves. So the public remain largely ignorant to just how deep the criminality and greed goes, though they perceive the malaise in their local landscapes as they daily see shuttered businesses, new buildings being erected and rest soaring, as the rich get richer. People sort of get it, but don't seem to understand just how pervasive the criminality and greed are of these Economic Terrorists immunized from the "rule of law", and how acutely it effects their bottom line, even when they don't perceive to be directly effected.

@The Wizard I daresay that the housing market is in no way a free market. If it was, new housing would be popping up everywhere due to high prices which indicate high demand. That's how free markets work.

The housing market is crony capitalism, the unholy union of government and wealthy special interests. They ensure supply is constricted so that prices continue upwards.

The rising cost of housing is one of the major factors decimating the middle class lifestyle. In economic terms it is referred to as economic rent. You are paying someone for what the own, not for their contribution. It's speculation at its most evil. It underlies the the increase in cost of everything. All major cities in developed countries and developing countries are seeing this, from New York to London to Moscow and to Beijing. This is nuts. We subscribe to the principle that the free market is the only mechanism that can price things. In the case of housing this turns into a disaster. Some cities, for instance NYC, have realized this and implemented rent control. The slam is that it distorts the market. It depresses the rising cost of housing, and that's good. It also decreases the incentive to maintain and improve a housing unit, but that can be solved without huge transfers of wealth from the working class to the ownership class.

The basic mechanism is that the housing market inflates the cost of a housing unit, far beyond inflation. When you buy or rent a housing unit you will pay for that inflated price, plus profit for the owner. The investment community steps in, writes mortgages and makes a fortune by casting these cash-flow assets into investment vehicles. Even at 4% mortgage you will pay 3.4 times the amount borrowed over a 30 year term. Everyone at the top gets rich off of the salary cash flow of the middle class. Even in rentals, the owner has a mortgage which you are paying for, plus his profit. This inflates the cost of living for everyone and has massive secondary effects in the cost of everything, since all people have to pay for housing.

The housing market is a "catch-22". If it inflates, then the market is "healthy". But to get back to historic housing unit prices and to restore the middle class the market has to deflate.. by a lot. This will wipe out much of the wealth accumulated by the owner class. It would collapse the economy as there would be massive foreclosures, dumping housing onto a dead market. We are stuck, because we aspire to the basic rules of protecting wealth at all costs. Paying economic rent to the ownership class is what decimates our lifestyles. If you think about it, bailing out the ownership class instead of the debtor class in the crash of 2007 is proof of this analysis.