Feb 18 2008 7:26AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Just to recap: This week I'm posting the "Alternate Influentials," my personal response to our February cover story. (Read my first blog about it here.)

First on the list? The Lenders.

Ahh, what a conflicted relationship we have with the lenders. On the positive side, they gave away all that cheap money over the last several years, letting everybody feel "house rich" and making remodeling incredibly lucrative. On the negative side, all that cheap money turned out not to be free and drove home prices up to unsustainable levels. That's created a reluctance to invest in homes, slowing remodeling and putting new construction into a freefall. If there's a villain in the current crisis, it's them.

Why they didn't make the list: This was a close one, but in the end we felt it was better to have a specific person rather than an anonymous group. Plus, by including Alan Greenspan we'd already hit the economic aspect of remodeling.