Housing swap

Here's yet another example of the creativity — or is it desperation? — inspired by the flagging housing market: Some homebuilders around Genesee County are willing to take your old house off your hands, provided you buy one of their new houses.

Melissa Burden of The Flint Journal reports:

"With home owners struggling to sell their houses in an over-saturated market, some builders are offering a trade instead. Home owners buy a new home built by the construction company, which agrees to buy the old home.

"At least three area builders have such programs -- which builders say are helping them make deals in one of the toughest times the U.S. housing market has weathered.

"'We're seeing more of this,' said Lee Schwartz, executive vice president for government relations for the Michigan Association of Home Builders in Lansing. 'There are a number of companies now, that in order to sell existing housing stock that they have, they are buying the home of their customer. Generally it's a company with good resources behind it.'

"Builders with these programs likely are losing money on buying your house, but make a profit on the sale of the new homes."

Linoleum Shangri-La

David Cauldon's blog has some great old excerpts from The American Home magazine that reveals Flint was breaking new ground in home decorating and the fashionable use of linoleum in 1940:

"Inside, the living room, separate dining room, kitchen, and breakfast room are smoothly planned on the ground floor....The vestibule and clothes closet are conveniences lacking in many small homes. You step up to the bedroom quarters on the left side of the house where two nice room, three closets, and a tiled bath are arranged in slick order.

"Both the living and dining rooms have lemon yellow walls, white woodwork, chartreuse draperies, and blonde carpeting. The long fireplace wall of knotty pine paneling with built-in bookshelves is an effective foil for Victorian antique furniture, and in the dining room an old Welsh cupboard and drop-leaf table are space savers. Colonial wallpapers in the bedrooms are in keeping with the reproductions of old furniture, crocheted bedspreads, and net curtains. Cross ventilation and full-length closet mirrors are practical features. The modern kitchen is up to snuff with isw electric equipment, painted white walls, dark blue linoleum, chrome trim, built-in cupboards lined with blue, and the red and white curtains. There are windows on three sides of the blue leather chairs and red-topped table in the breakfast alcove.

"A fully excavated basement, including a recreation room, laundry, and fruit cupboards is at the foot of the cellar stairway while the dining room's French doors lead to a terraced lawn and rock garden beyond the small flag-stoned terrace."

The house price is listed as $7,200 in 1940, which just might be what you'd pay for it today, if it's still standing.

Housebound

Is home ownership increasing unemployment in states like Michigan? This week's New Yorker magazine suggests a link:

"Homeowners are much less likely to move than renters, especially during a downturn, when they aren’t willing (or can’t afford) to sell at market prices.
As a result, they often stay in towns even after the jobs leave. That may be why a study of several major developed economies between 1960 and 1996, by the British economist Andrew Oswald, found a strong relationship between increases in homeownership and increases in the unemployment rate; a ten-per-cent increase in homeownership correlated with a two-per-cent increase in unemployment. (In the U.S., it may be worth noting, the states that have the highest unemployment rates—states like Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi—are also among those with the highest homeownership rates.) And reluctance to move not only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it hard for businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow."