Everything's Out of Whack

The Sunday Boston Globe has a story about seven figure sales in Dorchester, Fenway, Eastie and Somerville (click on link below).

http://www.boston.com/news/local
/articles/2005/09/


I’ll make sure to raise a toast to this grand accomplishment as I have dinner in Roslindale today. I see Boston quickly becoming a city of the Haves and the Have Nots – nothing in between. The once called middle class is going the way of the Nash Rambler and the Corvair – becoming extinct.

My neighborhood of so called working stiffs recently saw a single family house sell for half a million and I thought that was a lot. Ten years ago these houses were selling for one fifth the price. Twenty-five years ago, you could buy one for the same price that it costs to buy a car today.

Even though some real estate experts are predicting a slowdown, I continue to see the price wheel spinning, round and round she goes where she’ll stop no one knows. It’s gotten so crazy that people are building on any little speck of land.

Senator Edwards talked about how we live in two Americas – the rich and the poor. Affordable housing is for all intents and purpose disappeared from the Boston Realty market. People that gamble and overspend are finding that they’ll soon join the growing ranks of people who are filing for bankruptcy. Nearly 1.6 million individual bankruptcy petitions were filed in 2003, 99% higher than ten years earlier, a figure that equals to 1 out of 74 households in America. Forty percent of adults say that they are living beyond their means.

What’s going to happen this winter, especially if we have a long cold snap? How many people are going to have to do without?