Post-service economy: Condoconomy!

Imagine my shock when I returned to visit my hometown, Chicago, over Labor Day, 2006.  Specifically, this:

And this:

My former home, the glorious Chicago Loop, was transforming into a California condo village!  Trump knocked down the old Sun-Times building a block from where I lived and was putting up a super-condo-scraper.  Buildings that used to house productive service businesses were becoming overpriced, non-productive housing.  You could see the balconies hanging out over Washington St downtown.  It was disgraceful.  Now I hear that Delicatessen Meyer in Lincoln Square is gone ... for condos.  I feel ill.

Here we go!

Enough of scribbling on others' blogs, I have enough on my mind to have my own.

This is primarily a housing crash blog, but we will also deal with the broader issues of the credit bubble and collapse, and the severe deflation that is to come.  I am a fervent admirer of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of economics, so I will inject salient quotes from that tradition and commentary as well.

I will do my best to document the crash with text and photos from my perch here in smug Seattle.  I'm a long-distance hiker and I walk just about everywhere.  I used to like Seattle a lot more.  I still like it, but I can't wait for RE prices to return to their proper place and teach a lot of the idiots here a lesson they deserve.

Yes, the author of this blog believes that foreclosure is a Good Thing, the one true solution to the housing mess.  May we have more foreclosures!

Thank you, kind readers, for visiting Deflation Land.