Texas boasts healthiest housing markets
From reading the newspapers or watching the network news, you’d think that every city in the country is cursed with a struggling housing market.
Well, you’d be wrong, especially if you lived in Texas.
Texas, according to Builder Magazine, is blessed with what one survey calls the five healthiest housing markets in the country.
According to Builder Magazine, Houston ranks as the nation’s healthiest housing market. The city’s followed closely by Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Dallas, all, of course, in Texas.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram quotes the Builder Magazine story as saying that once the housing recovery does happen, these five markets in Texas will “lead the parade.”
These five markets, as well as some others throughout the country, ranked as healthy markets because they demonstrated strong job and population growth and building-permit activity. They also have a strong relationship of home prices to home values.
These are the kind of stories that the public needs to see. It’s hard to be positive on the future of the residential real estate market when every story you read is a negative one.
The Chicago Tribune on Sunday carried an opinion column by William Isaac, who served as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 1981 to 1985. His column heaped criticism on the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties, who, Isaac said, have done nothing but frighten the public with what he calls “irresponsible rhetoric” regarding the state of the economy.
Here’s my favorite quote from the column: “What have we heard from our leadership in the past six months that would cause us to buy a new or house or even a washing machine?”
The answer, of course, is “nothing.” Our politicians, instead, have been busy bemoaning the state of the economy, usually in an attempt to point the members of the opposition party of being in the wrong.
As Isaac says, this does nothing to encourage confidence in the U.S. public. And confidence is something we sorely need today. Let’s hope that we can look forward to more stories like the one in Texas. We need all the good news we can get.
