Should we blame media for housing woes?
It’s human nature to look for culprits.
When something goes wrong, our first instinct is to look for a villain. The housing crisis provides a whole host of them.
You can blame homeowners who greedily stretched themselves thin to get into bigger, more expensive homes, residences that they couldn’t really afford. You can blame mortgage loan officers who gave out money to borrowers with huge debts, low incomes and terrible credit histories. How about the real estate agents and the appraisers, who worked together to boost housing prices to record highs, highs that were too high, as it turns out.
How about government officials? They ignored the signs that a real estate bubble was a real threat. Home builders, too, are not without blame. They kept building and building and building, saturating the market. Not only that, they kept plunking subdivisions in cornfields located far, far away from major metropolitan areas. These subdivisions are now filled with vacant homes.
So, there are loads of villains here.
Why not add the media to this list? A lot of real estate agents, mortgage loan officers and home builders certainly are. Check out this short story on the Chicago Tribune’s Web site. The Tribune’s architecture critic wonders in the piece what will happen to Chicago’s Waterview Tower, a towering high-rise, complete with hotel and condo project by Shangri-La Hotel, that has gone bust. The tower is partially built, but thanks to the economy and the housing collapse, the condos planned for the building are no longer going to happen.
The very first comment following Kamin’s post takes the critic, and other journalists, to task for focusing too relentlessly on negative news. The media are partly responsible, the commenter says, for prolonging the housing slump and for making it more painful than it has to be. The media have scared the public, and have done nothing to get nervous buyers back into the market, the commenter adds.
Is there any truth to this? As someone who covers residential real estate, I’d like to say that the commenter is an idiot. But … there is a tiny grain of truth in the comment. I’ve grown tired of reading the newspapers myself. They’re just too grim. There’s always a company going out of business, a key indicator spelling future doom for the economy, another newspaper or magazine going bust.
It is depressing. And, yes, maybe it does prolong the misery a bit, or at least throw it in everyone’s faces.
But newspaper writers and TV reporters have a job to do. They’re paid to report the news, whether it’s good or bad. Journalists can’t ignore dismal home sales or falling home prices.
Of course, if there’s good news, such as the fact that homes are more affordable today than they’ve been in years, then the media have a responsibility to focus on that, too.
Back to that list of villains. You can add the media to it if you’d like. But put them way on the bottom of the list. Put them way after the mortgage loan officers, real estate agents, appraisers and greedy buyers. They’re the ones we should all be ticked at.
