David Pierson:

Mike Zhang considered himself serious boyfriend material.

But Zhang, a 28-year-old language tutor and interpreter, couldn't afford an apartment in the capital's scorching property market.

Rather than waste any more time, his girlfriend of more than two years dumped him.

Homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today's China.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Nick Timiraos:

A new report estimates that nearly one in five mortgage defaults through the first half of 2009 were "strategic," where borrowers who appeared to have the capacity to pay their mortgages stopped doing so.

One young fish to another:

What the hell is water?

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

Decius:

Imagine if they all walked.

Ma Nuo, bai jin nu:

I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend's bicycle.

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Shana Richey:

It was scary. It's still very hush-hush.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Richey:

We're saving lots of money.

Christopher Thornberg:

It's a stealth stimulus.

John Fortune:

It's pathetic.

Whitehouse:

About half of Palmdale's 147,000 residents endure a daily commute that can extend to two hours or more one way.

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

American Dream 2: Default, Then Rent

David Leonhardt:

As long as home prices are falling, foreclosures are likely to keep rising and the toxic assets polluting bank balance sheets are likely to stay toxic.

There are reasons, though, to think that prices may be on the verge of stabilizing. Relative to fundamentals, like household incomes and rents, houses nationwide now appear to be overvalued by only about 5 percent. You can make an argument that the end of the housing crash is near.

But that’s not what I found at the auctions.

The infographic is interactive.

The Bottom for Housing Is Probably Not Near

Charles Hugh Smith:

The financial MSM and government officials alike are looking for a recovery in the housing market to bubble valuations to "restart the economy." That is not going to happen -- not this year, not in five years or even in ten years. Here's why.

Why Housing Is Not Coming Back

Kristin Longley:

Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable -- shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service.

Temporary Mayor Michael Brown made the off-the-cuff suggestion Friday in response to a question at a Rotary Club of Flint luncheon about the thousands of empty houses in Flint.

Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city's tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine "shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn't) provide services."

He did not define what that could mean -- bulldozing abandoned areas, simply leaving the vacant homes to rot or some other idea entirely.

From the archive:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map. The upper line from Decisionville, the Great Celestial Route, is not without its trials, represented by such station stops as Bearingcross, Abandonment, and Long Suffering; but the final destination, The Celestial City, is clearly more desirable than its counterpart.

Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

Brandi Hitt, reporting from Sacramento:

There are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

In The Land Of Abandoned Neighborhoods

Christopher Leinberger:

It’s not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. It’s a matter of drastically reducing real estate prices to well below replacement cost. And when you sell something for below replacement cost – that might sound like, well, “Somebody takes a hit but life goes on as usual.” No, life doesn’t go on. For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don’t get back. That is another definition of a slum. There’s no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are.

Ah, yes:

Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!
[crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically]
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll all be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: [singing] Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: [singing] Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[big finish]
Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!

How to Save the Suburbs

Packer seeks sunshine, finds cloud. Behind paywall.

Writer visits a number of inland real-estate developments near Tampa, Florida. Developers there dreamed up instant communities, parceled out lots, and built look-alike two-story beige and yellow houses. The houses sold to some of the thousand or so people who moved to Florida every day. Now many are ghost subdivisions.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

The Ponzi State

For the past few years, blog comments sections, acting as virtual town squares, have offered residents around the country a forum in which to weigh in — and vent — on a wide spectrum of local issues. But given New York’s size and diversity, not to mention its fabled brashness, political energy and high emotion, its blogosphere is taking a particularly striking shape.

The issues that are consistently "hot button" are those tied to gentrification. "Queens does not care for being cool," wrote one anonymous commenter.

From the archive:

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes.

Also:

In Atlanta, the buzzwords of soft-core urbanism are everywhere these days.

The city itself, a small splotch of fewer than half a million residents in a galaxy of sprawl, is now attracting the affluent ... with their bloated new houses ... landlords sell out ...

Finally:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

You Talkin’ to Me?

“They’re about as god-awful as they can get,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG.

“This is pretty breathtaking stuff.”

Earlier this month:

"The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way."

From the archive:

How many people should own homes, anyway?

Can't someone else do it?

Recall:

"This place is really nice and tranquil."

Beware:

It seems the perpetual garage sales were annoying some residents.

Home Sales Fell Sharply in November

Where are all the acorns?

At the Long Branch Nature Center, calls and e-mails have been pouring in from people who want to donate acorns they've gathered in areas where they are plentiful.

From earlier this year:

Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

And last month, mystery solved:

Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

I guess it was just a puzzle:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

This holiday season, remember the neediest: squirrels!

Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage