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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (13016)	8/23/2003 5:23:24 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 306849

This guy seems like an amusing candidate for governor. I like the ask jeeves search engine. Gruener, the founder and chairman of the popular Web search engine AskJeeves.com and founding general partner of the San Francisco venture firm Alta Partners, is a Democratic candidate to replace Gov. Gray Davis in the Oct. 7 recall election. "We'll spend more money on Internet political advertising than has ever been spent," vowed campaign director Wade Randlett. Clad in casual slacks, a blue dress shirt open at the neck and a herringbone jacket, the lanky Gruener laid out his platform. He will focus on improving what he calls the "three E's": education, the economy and the environment. Using technology and innovation is the key to reforming and improving the state's education system, he said. The key to turning around California's economy, he said, is to revive the mature information technology industries, such as software and semiconductors, while nurturing the younger biotechnology industry. "When I went to California public schools, they were the best in the world, " said the product of the San Diego school system. "Now we're doing a lousy job by any measure." sfgate.com

To: Amy J who wrote (13016)	8/23/2003 3:23:34 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

People will always weigh quality of life issues against the ability to the kind of work they want to do. Owning a house was important enough for me to nix the Bay area and move but then the employment possibilities for my line of work there were actually worse, not better. Businesses always have to weigh the general taxation levels when deciding where to locate. For the most part the high real estate tax level of recently purchased homes should have kept the prices down, not up. The reason the high prices and tax didn't keep price down is because people had enough money (or saw they'd have enough money from the jobs they could get there and nowhere else) to pay both the outrageous sale price as well as the tax AND they figured they'd re-coop that high price by higher than normal real estate appreciation (so far that worked out rather well for everyone except the top of the pyramid buyers). Now they have a little less money and they have a hangover. Those that are late to the game don't see the returns the other's did. At this point it's a toss up as to whether someone would do better renting and waiting for prices to retreat than they would buying. No one has proven conclusively on this thread or any other that Prop 13 was the primary driver of the above average real estate inflation nor have they proven that without Prop 13 prices in an area like SV would be any more reasonable. Consider that the outrageous real estate price inflation (and subsequent tax increases) were the primary driver behind Prop 13 in the first place. If the law can be faulted at all it is that it failed to do what it was intended to do and that was rein in government spending.