Safehaven | American Housing Horror Show: Twice As Many Units Built Than the Demand!

September 06, 2006

American Housing Horror Show: Twice As Many Units Built Than the Demand!
by Jas Jain

Note: Permission is granted to all to forward, post or publish with credit to the author.

I will let the facts and charts do most of the talking.

Table: American Housing Horror Show: Twice As Many Units Built Than the Demand!
	End of 2001	End of 2006Q2	Net Change, 4.5 Years
Housing Stock	119,116,000	125,800,000	6,684,000
Total Occupied	106,261,000	109,450,000	3,189,000
Excess Built			3,495,000
Total Vacant Year Round	9,777,000	12,376,000	2,599,000

Here is a bar chart:

To add insult to the injury, 70-90% more homes are being built RIGHT NOW due to the pipeline of the bubble period. During June 2006 more single-family homes were completed than at any other time prior to 2006! This will continue for another year or so and the supply situation will keep on getting uglier and uglier.

Soft-landing ahead is a fantasy created by bubbleheads who find themselves too heavily into Scams and a home that they can’t afford (if you own a home with a mortgage that is more than three times the steady annual income you are in that category).

Cranks like myself were saying it all along but born-and-bred dupes kept on believing the self-serving E-Con-Whores employed by the industry. I got tired of getting articles sent to me that justified the claim that the supply was not enough to meet the "demand for housing" and that is why the home prices were going up. Now, we know that the demand was primarily a speculative demand.

As the Housing Over Supply Horror Show plays out over the next year or so, no one will be able to prevent the US economy from slipping and sliding into a recession, which will easily become a depression due to the Peak Debt coming into play. As it happened following the shallow recession of 2001, people will double and triple up to reduce the number of housing units that are occupied (yes, during 2002 that is what precisely did happen). Moms and dads, get ready to have the junior and the miss move back in.

Soon, the US will have 20,000,000 "empty housing units year round." Construction industry will be in a depression for a very long time once the current pipeline is finished (some will not be finished, though).

Jas Jain, Ph.D.
the Prophet of Doom and Gloom