addendum
Now eating an 8oz Columbo yogurt
My bet is once they go through their recently printed batch of "33% more than Dannon" containers, they will either concede and go the 6 oz route of Breyers, Dannon, Stoneyfield and others or raise their prices 25%.
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Housing Mart at Risk if Recovery Falters
Tue Jun 17,12:59 AM ET Add Business - Reuters to My Yahoo!
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. housing market could be in trouble if the economic recovery continues to stumble, an otherwise optimistic report released on Tuesday said.
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The housing sector is the one prop supporting an economy struggling to recover for over two years as geopolitical tension as increased and the 1990s investment bubble has burst. Analysts are watching the sector carefully for signs of weakness.
So far, housing has proven remarkably resilient, even as job losses and a slowing economy have forced more homeowners into foreclosure, according to a report from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.
But home prices have risen quickly over the last few years, forcing many consumers to spend a higher percentage of their income on housing and leaving them even more vulnerable to foreclosures if they are laid off.
If layoffs do increase, some neighborhoods could face instability and price declines from the resulting glut of homes put up for sale, the report said.
The U.S. job market has been stagnant for months. Unemployment last month reached its highest level in nearly nine years.
Despite potential trouble from the broader economy, the outlook for the housing market is still strong, the report said.
Demographics are supporting demand, as baby boomers reach their peak wealth ages and look into remodeling and buying more expensive homes, while their children buy their first homes.
Plus, the number of immigrant and minority households is growing, providing a huge source of demand, the report said.
These sources of demand should prevent broad declines in housing prices, the report said.
AFFORDABILITY A PROBLEM
But even if housing prices do not fall dramatically in the long term, housing is increasingly unaffordable, the report said. Home prices and rents have grown faster than inflation since 1975, while incomes for the bottom 40 percent of households have held more or less steady, the report said.
Thirty-six percent of households struggling with affordability are minority households, the report said.
Affordability problems increasingly affect middle-class households. Seventy-six percent of households that do not live in affordable housing are well above the poverty level, the report said. A household faces an affordability problem if it spends more than 50 percent of monthly pretax income on housing, according to the report.
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