bostonbubble.com

Boston ITer · Guest

http://tinyurl.com/2lj2s5

Yes, much of the above is comical, however, consider this...

Guest · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 9:33 pm GMT Post subject:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0703/gallery.bp_retireyoung_new.moneymag/5.html

Burlington's on the list, and most of them are college towns.

BK · Guest

Can someone explain how a College Town escape the Real Estate Bust.

The Cash/liquidity from Real Estate has been helping Parents pay Tuition, Colleges also see lots and lots of Federal Tax dollars.

I think you don't understand how much the Crazy Real Estate prices have affected every aspect of our society.

Boston ITer · Guest

College towns, like all towns, will correct along with the RE in their states, however, consider this...

The recent run ups in college towns went strictly with the excess capital of the '02 to '05 era, however, those towns basically don't create new wealth. In essence, all they do is preserve culture. Yes, America, like other nations, have a culture and unfortunately, strip malls and office parks in San Bernardino, Silicon Valley, South Jersey, etc, don't create any of it. Instead, these cultural dead zones create work centers where the kids and parents grow up living lives in isolation. What the guy in the blog was alluding to was an area where when things weren't going great economically, crime, dilapidation, etc, went up in unison. In contrast, much of the town of let's say Hanover NH, works for Dartmouth College or a small business which services it. It's obvious that this area wasn't experiencing any growth in the so-called private sector like a big IT firm or a credit card processing center. The relative wealth of Dartmouth is inflexible and really doesn't sway, with business cycles, so anyone who lives there, is a living in a socialist type of environment. Now, when families settle there with one person traveling the country for work while the other works at Dartmouth as a librarian, the idea is that the region serves as a bulwark for an orderly society as oppose to a place where hoodlums show up as soon as a Prudential or a Bristol-Myers announces layoffs (see state of NJ).

Guest · Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:37 pm GMT Post subject:

AgentGrn · Joined: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 82

The worst part about said fate is that it wasn't necessary.

BK · Guest

I have to disagree with the College Towns Thrive scenario.

Examples:
New Haven -CT - Yale
Middletown-CT - Wesleyan Univesity

College Towns will be hit by the Credit Bubble.

Consider the recent trouble at Sallie Mae - Education Financing.

Will the Feds continue to funnel massive amounts of money to Univerisities while in the middle of bailing out a Real Estate slump. I would guess funding to Colleges and Universities will diminish.

Colleges will cut back on the number of librarians and the number of grounds keepers and do fewer Capital improvement projects.

Just my view and I'm sometimes wrong! Wink

Boston ITer · Guest

BK, I'd specifically separated places like New Haven CT and Berkeley CA from my analysis. Those are 'town vs gown' environment where the locals hate the unis and vice versa. In essence, if Yale gets trashed by bandits, during the 2010s, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. It's suffering from a pseudo-gentrification process where people, bringing in outside "NY posh" money, created a facade of a viable community. New Haven has no future, period.

On the other hand, just look at Burlington VT, can you think of a more viable college town in New England? It's a beautiful location, the locals love the school, and the attendants love the town. It's a symbiotic relationship and it shows. I suspect that RE will go down there (5-10%), over the following decade, however, students will still attend and people will still work at the restaurants which serve them. It's a whole lot different from New Haven.

Guest · Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 11:25 pm GMT Post subject:

This whole thread is about the failures of the so-called free market in sustainable development for mature economies.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_craig_jo_071221_greenspan_s_housing_.htm

Boston ITer · Guest

Even without leaving Mass, wouldn't you fellows say that Pittsfield suffered from one big company, GE, outsourcing jobs for several decades?

All and all, Pittsfield isn't coming back. It's too far from the Amherst/Northampton area and doesn't retain that sort of critical university orbital radius to make it a viable community except for those GE retirees who like to reminisce on the good olde days.

FYI, Williamstown is college town and is sort of a socialistic oasis on the VT border. It mainly services a liberal arts college the size of a big high school but the overall town population is kinda low so it works. I presume that the *VT woods* proximity also helps since that's kinda a retreat from the real world.

Boston ITer · Guest

New Haven's toast...

http://www.conntact.com/article_page.lasso?id=41584

Is it only me? I was always under the impression that the greater New Haven area (see Bridgeport, Sheldon, Wallingford, etcl) were dumpsters which were gentrified during the bubble years (both in IT and RE) to make up for the losses of mainstay companies like Vicks, American Cyanamid, etc.

Ford · Guest

The worship of higher education evident in this thread is just one sign that the end of america's belief in the infinite capacity of education for social uplift is nowhere in sight. Education subsidies will only be cut, and the colleges and their towns left to fend for themselves, when the mystic aura of education dissipates, perhaps after another few generations of scientists and engineers are replaced by cheap H1B guest workers.

So have no fear, your socialist oases have got a few decades of life in them yet.

Boston ITer · Guest