real estate doomsayer

if you want to see an article by a guy who is really, and i mean really, bearish about the bay area real estate market, give this a read. he has collected a long list of reasons why he thinks real estate is in trouble here. i have to say i find some of his points compelling, but then again, if you read this with any regularity you already knew that. he does a very thorough job rebutting the arguments i commonly hear about the “fundamentals” supporting house prices in this area, even though he gets a little sloppy and i get the sense that he takes the whole market and the business very personally. i prefaced the link, in an email i sent to several people a little while ago, with the sentence: this guy really hits it out of the park.
i think one of the reasons that i get somewhat emotional about the issue is that i watched my childhood house in LA sit on the market while prices fell 30% in the late 80′s. (and did not recover until 2000. those figures comes from this article in the IHT). for the past three years, i have been confronted with the “fact” that california real estate has never declined in value. hmmm.