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Have you visited their Anthem Ranch in Broomfield yet? Anthem Colorado at Broomfield :: Anthem Ranch (http://www.anthemcolorado.com/ranch.htm - broken link)
No, haven't been there. I wish that about 2500 acres of the 12,000+ acre Banning-Lewis Ranch here in COL SGPS would get one of their golf cart communities. Cost of living here is a lot less than Denver, or the coasts, the climate is a lot milder than Phoenix, and lots of USAF and Army people would LOVE to retire here, but not necessarily to a standard sub-div style of living.
You can alway count on James Kunstler for an entertaining and pithy weekly blog on the trouble the US is in. While he definitely can "live on the edge" of hyperbole, this week's column is another sobering one (February 11th; James Howard Kunstler ). In it, he makes one statement with which I heartily agree--I have italicized it for emphasis in the following quote:
Quote:
A consensus has now formed that we're in for a "recession." The idea is that, yes, this seems to be the low arc of the business cycle. Fewer Hamptons villas will be redecorated in the interim. We'll gird our loins and get through the bad weather and when the sun shines again, we'll be ready with new algorithms for new sport-with-capital.
Uh-uh. Think again. This is not so much financial bad weather as financial climate change. Something is happenin' Mr Jones, and you don't know what it is, do ya? There has been too much misbehavior and it can no longer be mitigated. We're not heading into a recession but a major depression, worse than the fabled trauma of the 1930s. That one occurred against the background of a society that had plenty of everything except money. Back then, we had plenty of mineral resources, lots of trained-and-regimented manpower, millions of productive family farms, factories that were practically new, and more than 90 percent left of the greatest petroleum reserve anywhere in the world. It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again, and once it did, we devoted its productive capacity to building an empire of happy motoring leisure. (Tragic choice there.)
This new depression, which I call The Long Emergency, will play out against the background of a society that has pissed away its oil endowment, bulldozed its factories, arbitraged its productive labor, destroyed both family farms and the commercial infrastructure of main street, and trained its population to become overfed diabetic TV zombie "consumers" of other peoples' productivity, paid for by "money" they haven't earned.
I find it very difficult to find anything in that statement that is not absolutely true. It's a disturbing commentary on 2008 America.
It's not all bad news! Presently, there's still some good news for Grand Junction homeowners.
A resilient Grand Junction housing market bucked a depreciation trend that has swept through other parts of the nation to notch an increase in home values last year. read more (broken link)
It's not all bad news! Presently, there's still some good news for Grand Junction homeowners.
A resilient Grand Junction housing market bucked a depreciation trend that has swept through other parts of the nation to notch an increase in home values last year. read more (broken link)
I don't really find that good news at all. Grand Junction already has a housing affordability problem for people who are actually trying to make a living from the local economy. The prices increases just make it that much more difficult for those people to afford a home. Part of the current labor shortage in Grand Junction is from exactly that problem. Worse yet, it is just some more inflation of a specualtive bubble that is going to have to deflate at some point. A modest decline in home values would have been much more healthy all the way around. Now, a serious "bust" in home prices down the line may be unavoidable in that area. It's done that before, with quite unpleasant results. I think we're headed for a repeat.
It's good news to me as a homeowner! I do my best to focus on the present, without getting overly caught up in what might or could happen in the future, which I see mostly as a waste of energy.
It's good news to me as a homeowner! I do my best to focus on the present, without getting overly caught up in what might or could happen in the future, which I see mostly as a waste of energy.
For anyone trying to purchase a house in Grand Junction, the future is now. Sure, price appreciation benefits those who already own their home, but they aren't the only people on the planet. Part of the reason we are in the sub-prime mess is that housing prices grew beyond the ability of many people to own a home using less risky conventional financing. Personally, I don't think we should be bailing out people for making imprudent borrowing decisions, but I also do not think we should be trying to prop up an overinflated real estate market just to protect inflated home values, either. It's time for a home to be a place to live--not be a speculative investment, savings account, retirement plan, tax dodge, or a cash cow. Time to poke a big stick in that speculative bubble.
It's good news to me as a homeowner! I do my best to focus on the present, without getting overly caught up in what might or could happen in the future, which I see mostly as a waste of energy.
yep, why worry about stuff beyond our control? i noticed that tulsa is on top of the list...ha, ha, what housing bubble in ok? house prices here are still recovering from the last oil bust in 1986! i suspect that gj is benefiting from the current natural gas drilling throughout nw colorado, which ultimately is a good thing for co and the nation...
It's time for a home to be a place to live--not be a speculative investment, savings account, retirement plan, tax dodge, or a cash cow.
For you and others like you perhaps, but certainly not for all of us. Not everyone sees it that way. To me and others like me, my home is both a place to live AND an investment.
I'm aware that not everyone IS a homeowner and I well remember the difficulty I had positioning myself financially to afford my first home ( couldn't have done it with a VA loan ). Even though I have compassion for those folks attempting to become first time homeowners, I don't feel sorry for them in the least. If someone like myself ( no college degree, little business acumen ) can find a way to overcome the seemingly insurmountable hurdles, I trust that most others who passionately want to own a home can find a way to do it too. People are creative beings, constantly coming up with new ideas and ways of making things happen. The doomsayers use their creativity against themselves. They get so caught up in negativty that all they create is more and more negativity, then they attempt to spread their dark view of the world to everyone else. The old cliche, misery loves company, still rings true.
Last edited by CosmicWizard; 02-13-2008 at 10:27 AM..
I don't think the Sun Belt will be any retirement haven, either. Many would strongly argue that much of such sunbelt states as Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California are becoming less livable by the minute right now. Throw drastically higher energy prices--especially for gasoline and electricity--onto that car-dependent, air-conditioning-necessary, sprawled lifestyle, and the Sun Belt will turn into the Swelter and Sweat Belt pretty fast. Houses could be free and people might not want to live there.
I think you could make an argument that quality of life has gone down in California and Arizona, for sure. Oil prices will definitely go up, but truthfully, are sunbelt cities, when you look at the metropolitan area as a whole, really any more dependent on oil than cities in other regions? And why would electricity prices go through the roof? Most of the power in SW states comes from hydroelectricity (Hoover Dam, for example), a renewable resource, coal burning power plants, non renewable but there are at least several hundred years worth of coal supplies, or even nuclear power plants (such as the Palo Verde reactor west of Phoenix). We haven't even mentioned solar power-- a huge potential in one of the sunniest areas of the world. I don't see why air conditioning would become unaffordable out here.
I think you could make an argument that quality of life has gone down in California and Arizona, for sure. Oil prices will definitely go up, but truthfully, are sunbelt cities, when you look at the metropolitan area as a whole, really any more dependent on oil than cities in other regions? And why would electricity prices go through the roof? Most of the power in SW states comes from hydroelectricity (Hoover Dam, for example), a renewable resource, coal burning power plants, non renewable but there are at least several hundred years worth of coal supplies, or even nuclear power plants (such as the Palo Verde reactor west of Phoenix). We haven't even mentioned solar power-- a huge potential in one of the sunniest areas of the world. I don't see why air conditioning would become unaffordable out here.
Hydro power supplies a smaller and smaller percentage of power in the Southwest. Outside of California in the Soutwest, coal-fired plants supply the majority of power now. The cost of coal for power generation is going to skyrocket. There is plenty of coal in the ground to be sure, but mining costs are going to increase (I am very familiar with coal mining--you would be amazed how much diesel fuel and electricity it takes to mine coal). Transportation is another huge cost--in many cases transporting the coal to the plant costs far more than the coal itself. The biggest cost to transport the fuel--yup, you guessed it--diesel fuel.
In California, they can't even use coal under that state's current environmental laws. They are firing their power plants with natural gas. California has enjoyed pretty reasonable natural gas costs in the last few years because their primary source of natural gas--the Rocky Mountain region--has lacked sufficient pipeline capacity to ship what it can produce. With new pipelines coming on line to the Midwest and East from the Rockies, that is going to change.
Solar technology has a LONG ways to go (if it ever gets there) to be able to supply any significant amount of electricity. One of its major current pitfalls is that the collectors must currently be manufactured with a good deal of relatively exotic metals and other substances--many of which are pretty scarce worldwide, and many not produced in any significant quantity in the US.
People keep pining for easy ways out of this mess without making some sacrifice as to where and how they live. We have long passed the point of having that luxury. We are going to have to learn to live in much more austere circumstances than we do now, or face the prospect of quite a few of us not being able to live at all. The days of a free lunch are over.
In answer to those who say my view is negative, I truly want a bright future for the this region, this country, and for those who follow us. However, my belief is that our current behavior and "I want it all and I want it now" attitude is going to dash that wish for all of us--especially those yet unborn who have no protection from our folly.
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Still going!
