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Housing Industry -- The Economy's Ugly Step-child
My personal resources are split almost equally between real estate and equity investing.  In my research, it's getting progressively more difficult to find any reference among economists and analysts to housing as a significant component of our national economy.
It seems that housing and the people who have been destroyed by its crash are expendable.  The carpenters and plumbers and excavators and electricians are apparently doing just fine bagging groceries and driving school buses.  The entire generation of folks who used their inflated home equity for cash out financing are lost, and we are trying desperately to forget them. 
Yes, many folks used their homes as ATM's to buy stuff they could have lived better without.  Yes, they made some poor decisions.  Yes, they were the consumers who grew our economy way beyond its logical limits.  Yes, many of them will never recover from their mistakes.  They are the forgotten, or let's try to forget them, generation. 
There were very few people who expected the real estate crash, and fewer who took action to defend themselves from substantial loss.  The degree of loss is mostly the result of where one was in their life's progress than good planning.  It was either ... more

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