Mar 6 2008 12:00PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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As the housing market continues to fall apart, everybody's looking for somebody to blame. You've got homeowners blaming real estate agents and builders, builders blaming lenders, lenders blaming the government, etc., etc.

One thing I've heard a lot of lately from remodelers is that it's all the media's fault. I heard a lot of it at IBS and the NAHB board meetings last month, I've heard it from many remodelers since then. Something along the lines that "If the media would just report something good about housing, people would start spending again."

Are you people really that delusional? (I'll be the first to admit the consumer media really doesn't get housing or anything having to do with economics. Most journalists chose the field so they wouldn't have to take any math classes.) The idea that we can all just make this better by saying it's better? The family-appropriate word for that is bull-tweet, as my dad used to say when I was a kid. 

As a journalist, I naturally find this to be offensive, but it goes beyond that. This idea is dangerous because it allows all of us to just pretend there's not an underlying problem in housing. The sooner we accept that our lending and housing markets are a mess, the better. House prices are still unreasonably high in many markets. There's probably going to be a lot of painful adjustment before this is all done and remodelers and builders need to adapt themselves to the new reality.

Now I admit that there is a psychological effect on some homeowners. I've written about that before. But to sit there and pretend that's the only reason? Anyone who believes that is the one with the psychological problem.