ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER SIGN OF GROWING INEQUALITY.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER SIGN OF GROWING INEQUALITY. The New York Times reports today that, contrary to what we've been told in recent months, the housing market is actually doing fine. Unfortunately, this is only the case if you happen to own a very expensive home:

It is one of the expensive suburbs of San Francisco just over the Golden Gate Bridge, and much of the housing market there seems to be doing just fine. One three-bedroom house sold for $1.4 million last month without ever being officially put on the market. The seller accepted a pre-emptive bid -- $20,000 above the asking price -- from somebody who had heard that the house was about to be listed for sale. "The homes that are having a hard time selling are the average-priced homes,," said Vanessa Justice, a real estate agent with Pacific Union GMAC in the Bay Area, where the median house price is about $750,000. For upper-end homes, she said, it's actually pretty crazy right now."

Nor is this just another vapid trend piece relying on a few vague anecdotes:

But after just about every home sale, documents must be filed with a local government office. A research firm called DataQuick Information Systems gathers these records, and a New York Times analysis of them shows that the story of today's real estate market is really two different stories....In the New York region, sales at the top end -- that is, homes in the most expensive 5 percent of the market -- have also been rising, while they have been falling in the middle and bottom of the market. The same is true in the San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; Denver; and Houston areas. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami, high-end sales are down but not by nearly as much as sales in other price segments

Another fine achievement for the ownership society. As an economist quoted in the piece puts it:

"The low end is getting creamed. The middle is struggling. The high end is running on its own dynamic."

And that, sadly, is the story of the last six and a half years of the American economy in a nutshell. --Sam Boyd