The Real Stimulus Package: A $100 House

The whole U.S. would recover fast if government would get out of the way. In an economic correction prices fall until they find buyers. The new owners have new ways of thinking and are ready to use the assets that were underproducing under old management.

Government parasites get into the mix at every level, though, with regulation, inspection, licensing and taxation. And when government gets its hands on a printing press, watch out!

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“RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.”

 

Read on at The New York Times

 

I found this story at Boing Boing