About to receive one of it's periodic lessons (which it never seems to learn) about depending upon oil income?
http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-dai...-is-spreading-to-houstons-real-estate-market/
They said it’d be different this time, but it appears that Houston real estate is at a tipping point. The oil price crash is just beginning to be felt in the market, which has until recently proven inexplicably resistant to a severe and increasingly prolonged downturn in the city’s primary economic driver. Housing costs are at or close to all-time highs, so much so that a study from Rice University’s Shell Center for Sustainability found that Houston has crossed the line from affordable to unaffordable in the past year.
Despite the fact that a barrel of crude—Houston’s lifeblood—is now going for about $45 a barrel.
As a man who spent his formative years growing up in Houston in the eighties oil bust, these high real estate prices seemed like magical thinking at work. Detroit real estate did not boom when GM went bust, nor did Pittsburgh or Cleveland’s markets when the American steel industry cratered. As for Houston, you keep reading that it will be “different this time,” that the Energy Capital of the World’s economy has “diversified,” as locals have been reassured ad nauseam since crude went into its spiral.
- See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-dai...tons-real-estate-market/#sthash.6BvRnh2F.dpuf
http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-dai...-is-spreading-to-houstons-real-estate-market/
They said it’d be different this time, but it appears that Houston real estate is at a tipping point. The oil price crash is just beginning to be felt in the market, which has until recently proven inexplicably resistant to a severe and increasingly prolonged downturn in the city’s primary economic driver. Housing costs are at or close to all-time highs, so much so that a study from Rice University’s Shell Center for Sustainability found that Houston has crossed the line from affordable to unaffordable in the past year.
Despite the fact that a barrel of crude—Houston’s lifeblood—is now going for about $45 a barrel.
As a man who spent his formative years growing up in Houston in the eighties oil bust, these high real estate prices seemed like magical thinking at work. Detroit real estate did not boom when GM went bust, nor did Pittsburgh or Cleveland’s markets when the American steel industry cratered. As for Houston, you keep reading that it will be “different this time,” that the Energy Capital of the World’s economy has “diversified,” as locals have been reassured ad nauseam since crude went into its spiral.
- See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-dai...tons-real-estate-market/#sthash.6BvRnh2F.dpuf
