Housing Market
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Home building has stalled according to national news reports and confirmation to the fact can be found with a look out our kitchen window.
Construction on the second phase of the Genesis Creek housing development began in 2006 in the pasture behind our house. The land was leveled, the trees were cleared and the quiet backcountry prairie was replaced with an immense brown field with fresh asphalt in the shape of two cul-de-sacs and one long neighborhood street poured down its middle.
Phase one, less than a block away, completed construction earlier in 2006. The first houses to come on the market were priced in the $250,000 range and sold liberally, at first, but slowed as other similar developments sprouted across town. Several homes were still available when phase two began later in the spring.
Two years later, the real estate market, the loan crisis, Wall Street turmoil and general instability has convinced the builders from starting construction on any more houses. The few that were underway were finished – the insides painted – and now the worker trucks have disappeared.
Only four houses have been built in Phase Two to date. One stands lonely on the asphalt circle, its porch light switched on day and night to ward off graffitists.
Nature is reclaiming the land where foundations haven’t been dug yet. Feather-topped weeds sprouted this fall as the Earth has begun to heal itself. Earlier in the summer, wild sunflowers swept across the clearing, some standing more than eight feet tall and looming over the empty streets with pock-marked faces.
Progess is inevitable, I’ve been told, but I wish the stalling market could have been forecasted sooner – before the land was scarred for more houses. This argument probably holds little weight as I look out and wish all this from a house built in the same pasture once kept by a different owner. But the house was nearly 10 years old when we bought it and it very definitely was needed. We would have been displaced without it.
I think now about the wild life and the trees that were pushed away or killed by the land-scraping equipment. I am far from an environmentalist and only a partial tree hugger. Seeing this progress, though, or lack thereof, makes me regret my decision to buy a plot in a newer neighborhood when an older home would have done just as fine.
I won’t make that mistake again. I wish I could say the same for developers.
