realitytrumpsall has made a good point. We are at the threshold of a make it or break it! Maybe we've been dancing on the tip of a sinking iceberg...

I think we're at a learn-or-burn point in our history...did you get the memo?

This is part of that build it and they will come phenomena, expand to the exurb's and beyond. Part of the entrepuneur developer decades of the 90's and early 00's. Every one who had built a few houses or worked on a commercial developement figured they could get in on the act. This was of course fueled by leverage credit, no doc loans and CDO's. Yes we have increasing population but they are not yet making the wages to sustain this growth.

We have tons of realtors, developers, mortgage brokers but not enough doctors, nurses, teachers. Something is wrong here.

The good thing with the commercial downturn is that goverment infastructure building projects will now have adequate resources. Now once we end the war we can get back to building America.

The following post is sarcasm and intended as an insult to Congress and everyone else that thinks that the homeless are on the streets because they want to be. But mrcontinential .3.5 million people are just a little over 1% of the population. thats not so bad. After all when welfare reform was enacted the total price for all entitlements was only one tenth of one percent. When we reach 35 million or more then we can worry. 1776

It has been ever thus, only this time we are bedeviled by so-called structured finance or collateralized debt offerings and the loss of Glass-Steagall. Credit Suisse wrote down 2.8 billion a few days ago. Money destroyed. Overnight interbank lending has slowed to a crawl and parliament is trying save Northern Rock, an actual bank "run" in old blighty. In the meantime islamic banking is on a roll - $100/bbl oil may have something to do with that. The cranes of Dubai are like the swallows nesting in Capistrano - the sky is full of them. Repent greed heads, the end is nigh.

Like a house of cards falling down.

The morning has broken, and the leprechaun's gold is revealed to be matchsticks.

This is no "economy." It never has been; it cannot be. I don't care how many trillions or quadrillions of "dollars" you say you have.

Let's face it, if I type this into my computer:

UPDATE ACCOUNTS SET BALANCE = 1000*1000*1000*1000;

... the computer will now obediently tell me what it thinks it "knows": that every one of my depositors now has a billion "dollars." And if I execute another similar command to create a balancing entry in another ledger-account, why, I'm the richest man on earth! Or am I?

We played this game until very long after the music had stopped. We built buildings, for instance, to build them ... and to create "assets" on the balance sheets of thousands of bankrupt banks. Trouble is, the economic activity did not follow; it was never there. We invented "money" to pay the executives of those companies, but not to pay the suppliers who sold them building material. We employed workers to make something that the market did not want, because we had taught ourselves not to be concerned about those "issues."

Frankly, with a fancy-sounding shell game of paperwork, we did something just as empty and specious as the computer-command I just recited. We've been doing that for three dozen years, saying "oh, what a good boy am I!"

The music ... has stopped. The piano is covered with dust.

Is there a leader in the House? In the Senate? Anywhere?

Here's a rather disturbing link. Someone put together a photolog of all the empty commercial real estate in Sacramento CA.

http://sacrealstats.blogspot.com/2008/02/natomas-area-commercial-real-estate.html
http://sacrealstats.blogspot.com/2007/12/elk-grove-commercial-real-estate.html
http://sacrealstats.blogspot.com/2007/12/downtown-sacramento-commercial-real.html

Half occupied strip malls and empty office buildings as far as the eye can see.