Too many housing units, nobody to fill them

From The Real Deal:

While New York City has grown in the past decade, some areas have grown more than others. Staten Island posted the greatest increase in population among the five boroughs from 2000 to 2009, while Queens showed the slowest growth. In the suburbs, Long Island's Nassau County took the lead in a number of categories -- including the oldest population and the greatest percentage of homeowners -- as well as finishing second highest in household income. But perhaps the most notable change is that while the city's population grew by 3.2 percent, its total number of housing units jumped 4.6 percent.

So why are we building more?

From the Daily News:

The collapse of the housing market has cast a shadow across the city in hundreds of unfinished and decaying apartments, condos and houses.

Derelict and unsafe, these eyesores have blighted neighborhoods, drawing rats, squatters and junkies. They drag down property values and enrage residents who feel helpless.

As of last month, the Buildings Department recorded 682 stalled sites across the city: vacant lots, empty foundations, concrete skeletons of half-built luxury condos, boarded-up single-family houses.

New York Building Congress president Richard Anderson doesn't expect much will change: "If the trend continues, there will be hundreds and hundreds of sites in limbo for years to come."

Concentrations are high in neighborhoods where the rush to gentrify collided with the collapsing market - hipster Brooklyn, the trendy lower East Side, Riverdale and Kingsbridge in the Bronx, Staten Island's North Shore and foreclosure-plagued Southeast Queens.

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall's spokesman calls Southeast Queens "the epicenter of foreclosure in the state."

The fallout has been scores of abandoned homes and complaints about "lack of security fencing, drugs, prostitution and squatters."

Typical is the boarded-up house at 120-06 194th St.

"It attracts crime," said neighbor Ron Miles. "You've got people taking the copper piping out."

For a time one derelict made the house his hangout. "It was scary," said Yolanda Stowe. "He used to be outside naked in the morning."

Ownership gains erased

From the Wall Street Journal:

The meltdown of the U.S. mortgage market and rising foreclosures have wiped out more homeowners than were created in the 2000-07 housing boom, some industry watchers say, the latest indication of the severity of the housing bust.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, 66.5% of Americans owned homes, down from 67.2% a year earlier and the lowest rate since the end of 1998, according the Census Bureau. During the boom, when easy credit made mortgages available with less regard for income or ability to pay, the ownership rate surged to a record 69.2% in 2004's second and fourth quarters and stayed near that level until the recession deepened.

Some industry watchers expect the rate to slip below 65% as the housing market meltdown forces millions more Americans to give up their homes.

That "shows how big the bubble was and how catastrophic the bursting has been," said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist with Capital Economics. "We have pretty much reversed all of the increases in the home-owner rate generated by the housing boom."