I suppose it looks good from Zimbabwe.
There's a reason California is ground zero for the 2007-2010 housing bust: The entire boom since the late eighties Cali housing bust was built on a paper-pushing fantasy.
From the AP via Yahoo:
LOS ANGELES – Mike Reilly spent his lifetime chasing the California dream. This year he's going to look for it in Colorado.
With a house purchase near Denver in the works, the 38-year-old engineering contractor plans to move his family 1,200 miles away from his home state's lemon groves, sunshine and beaches. For him, years of rising taxes, dead-end schools, unchecked illegal immigration and clogged traffic have robbed the Golden State of its allure.
Is there something left of the California dream?
"If you are a Hollywood actor," Reilly says, "but not for us."
Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has represented the Promised Land, an image celebrated in the songs of the Beach Boys and embodied by Silicon Valley's instant millionaires and the young men and women who achieve stardom in Hollywood.
But for many California families last year, tomorrow started somewhere else.
The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period — more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y....MORE
From Professor Piggington's ~Econo-Almanac for the Landed Poor~:
Mortgage Defaults Come Roaring Back
As discussed in previous installments, a recent change to California state law inserted an extra 30-day waiting period at the beginning of the foreclosure process. Sure enough, mortgage defaults plummeted when the law went into effect. But a couple of months came and went without a commensurate rise -- was something else at work?
Apparently not...
