For the past few years, blog comments sections, acting as virtual town squares, have offered residents around the country a forum in which to weigh in — and vent — on a wide spectrum of local issues. But given New York’s size and diversity, not to mention its fabled brashness, political energy and high emotion, its blogosphere is taking a particularly striking shape.

The issues that are consistently "hot button" are those tied to gentrification. "Queens does not care for being cool," wrote one anonymous commenter.

From the archive:

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes.

Also:

In Atlanta, the buzzwords of soft-core urbanism are everywhere these days.

The city itself, a small splotch of fewer than half a million residents in a galaxy of sprawl, is now attracting the affluent ... with their bloated new houses ... landlords sell out ...

Finally:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

You Talkin’ to Me?

“They’re about as god-awful as they can get,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG.

“This is pretty breathtaking stuff.”

Earlier this month:

"The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way."

From the archive:

How many people should own homes, anyway?

Can't someone else do it?

Recall:

"This place is really nice and tranquil."

Beware:

It seems the perpetual garage sales were annoying some residents.

Home Sales Fell Sharply in November

Where are all the acorns?

At the Long Branch Nature Center, calls and e-mails have been pouring in from people who want to donate acorns they've gathered in areas where they are plentiful.

From earlier this year:

Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

And last month, mystery solved:

Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

I guess it was just a puzzle:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

This holiday season, remember the neediest: squirrels!

Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage

"The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way."

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Homeowners re-defaulting after getting aid

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is required to prepare economic projections for the Congress twice a year, and the housing market has been—and will continue to be—an important factor in that outlook. Over the past two years, starts of new homes have fallen sharply, and the resulting decline in real residential construction over that period subtracted an average of 1.0 percentage point from the growth rate of real gross domestic product. Looking forward, several alternative paths for residential construction are possible, ranging from a fairly quick turnaround to a severe slump that lasts several years.

This background paper examines the various factors that have determined the number of housing starts in the United States in the past and will continue to determine it in the future. Those factors include the underlying demand for new housing units, especially the role of demographics; cyclical and financial conditions, such as unemployment rates and lending standards; and the number of excess vacant units. CBO expects that housing starts will fall far enough below underlying demand for a long enough period to eliminate the current glut of vacant units and any temporary shortfall of demand due to adverse cyclical and financial conditions; this paper presents three alternative scenarios that could achieve that outcome. In keeping with CBO’s mandate to provide objective, nonpartisan analysis, this paper makes no policy recommendations.

The Outlook for Housing Starts, 2009 to 2012

Homeowners should not expect to make much headway in the years ahead.

Even though prospects for equity accrual have improved slightly in bubble markets, most homeowners will still leave their homes with large amounts of negative equity if house prices return to trend levels. For example, by the year 2012, homeowners in New York will have $101,964 of negative equity and in Los Angeles the shortfall would be $168,069. In these, and other bubble markets, households would benefit from proposals that attempt to provide affordable rental options as part of policy solutions.

For cities where the costs of owning are much closer to rental costs, it is likely that a small amount of equity will be accrued. In these markets, policies that keep owners in their homes, possibly through some form of government-guaranteed mortgage, are preferable.

Looking Forward to Negative Equity Accruals in Many Markets

Robert Shiller:

I like to think of capitalism as a game.

See also:

The first comic books appeared in 1935. Not having anything connected or literary about them, and being as difficult to decipher as the Book of Kells, they caught on with the young. The elders of the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could hardly be expected to notice that the comic books were as exotic as eighteenth-century illuminations. So, having noticed nothing about the form, they could discern nothing of the contents, either. The mayhem and violence were all they noted. Therefore, with naive literary logic, they waited for violence to flood the world. Or, alternatively, they attributed existing crime to the comics. The dimmest-witted convict learned to moan, "It wuz comic books done this to me."

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Finally:

It seems the perpetual garage sales were annoying some residents.

The Trouble With Homeownership

Great slide deck untangling the mortgage meltdown from a seminar today at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles.

Consider, as well:

The Federal Reserve and academics who give it advice are rethinking the proposition that the Fed cannot and should not try to prick financial bubbles.

While it is too soon to pronounce an about-face in Fed thinking, policy makers' views clearly are evolving.

Recall:

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitization, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

George Dyson, at Edge, republished from MAKE Volume 15:

The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks?

If you've finished Anathem, you might want to take another dip into the Baroque Cycle [1, 2, 3, 4]:

One of the things I wanted to talk about in "Cryptonomicon" was the history of computing and its relationship to society. I was talking to Stephen Horst, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, and he mentioned that Newton for the last 30 years of his life did very little in the way of science as we normally think of it. His job was to run the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. I'd been thinking a lot about gold and money, which were themes in "Cryptonomicon."

At the same time, I read a book by George Dyson called "Darwin Among the Machines," in which he talks about the deep history of computing and about Leibniz and the work he did on computers. It wasn't just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn't been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn't been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century. There's this story of money and gold in the same era, and to top it all off Newton and Leibniz had this bitter rivalry. I decided right away that I was going to have to write a book about that.

Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?

Atlanta: not so hosed, after all? Or only just not yet?

Below we highlight the percentage difference between current median home prices and the max median home prices seen in each of the twenty cities that S&P/Case-Shiller tracks. As shown, there is quite a big difference between the worst areas and the ones that have held up the best. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami and San Diego have all seen a median home price decline of more than 30% from their peaks. Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco and Tampa are in the second tier of declines between -25% and -30%.

On the flip side, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Portland, Seattle and Atlanta are all down less than 10% from their peaks, while New York, Chicago and Boston are just over -10%. While the composite indices are down about 20%, there is a pretty big discrepancy in price declines depending on what area of the country you look at.

Declines From Peaks in Housing Show Big Disparity