Gee, I’m so shocked. Not. There is a limit, to graft, to cronyism, to the false narratives which speak of easy profit for some, but not all, at the expense of most. So many things play into this, not the least of which is that a lot of people must be starting to think about the end of various gravy trains, and asking themselves if a 1.5 hour commute to and from a “community” with no community is really worth the $2,467/mo mortgage. Also: building standards, anyone? Compare your average bungalo in Chicago’s classic 1920s ’hoods with your average exurban development, and it’s more than clear which one isn’t going to last 35 years without significant decay and rot. Yes, I’m having a schadenfreude moment, because so many of our environmental problems are a direct result of the madness that made these communities desirable, at the expense of so much. Perhaps now some of these communities will listen when people like me speak of such “unimportant” or “irrational” issues like the water table, public transportation, integration of schools, moderated development schedules, etc:

Exurbs hardest hit in recent housing slump
Distant suburbs of major cities experiencing biggest decline in price and sales since summer of 2005.
February 6 2007: 4:14 PM EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — While the U.S. housing downturn has depressed once-thriving real estate markets around the nation, far-flung suburbs of major cities have suffered the most abrupt market correction.

Home construction in these distant exurbs has slowed and prices and sales have fallen more than those of close-in suburban neighbors since a five-year U.S. housing boom ended in the summer of 2005.

Average home prices in Loudon County, Virginia, 35 miles outside of Washington, D.C., fell roughly 11 percent in 2006, according to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors. By contrast, Virginia’s Arlington County, which hugs the nation’s capital, saw a price decline of only about 2 percent.

Real estate: Who’s buying now
“It’s been hard for sellers to comprehend, and I’m usually the bearer of bad news,” said Mike Wagner, a real estate broker who works in Loudon. “The news is: Your home is worth $100,000 less than it was a year and a half ago.”

And it’s not just prices that have suffered.

The average Loudon County home sold in December spent 101 days on the market, according to the Realtor group. In Arlington, the average was 72 days.

Wagner and other local real estate agents say the area’s soft market is a hangover, in part, from a building spree and a buying binge among investors priced out of other areas.

The same holds true for California, where exurban housing markets have softened more than those close to urban centers.

Home prices in Los Angeles rose a relatively modest 5.8 percent in December from a year earlier, while sales were down 14.5 percent, the California Association of Realtors said.

Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which are on the eastern edge of Los Angeles’ suburban frontier, saw a more modest 3.9 percent increase in prices, while sales volume plummeted 40.6 percent. High Desert, about 80 miles from downtown Los Angeles, saw just a 1.3 percent increase in sales price and a 39 percent drop in the number of sales.

Some observers blame the sales stall in the Los Angeles area on home builders who for years gobbled up available land in exurban tracts and overbuilt. Areas closer to the city are already built out and have not faced a big injection of new homes, said Leslie Appleton, an economist with the California Association of Realtors.

Now, real estate agents in the exurbs trying to sell a glut of new homes, along with the inventory of previously owned houses.

“There is intense competition in the inland areas of the state between the existing stock and new homes,” said Appleton. “The absorption of this new product is going to take some time.”

And while new buyers are needed to sop up the housing stock, many investor-owners are losing their properties through bankruptcy, said Jesse Ramirez, a real estate agent in Riverside.

Short version of this post: in the long and medium runs, racism never pays.