I notice the DC area being in the "very hot" real estate market. My home has tripled in value since I've bought it ten years ago. The shit is about to hit the fan, though.

Looks like the new homes are really Jewed homes...

Cost and Quality

Two other characteristics distinguish the new housing market.

First, the cost of homes has reached a dangerous multiple of average income. Figure 3 shows the ratio of total home real estate valuation to total disposable (after-tax) personal income, complied by Ian Morris, an analyst at HSBC Securities. It now has reached 1.62, its highest level in this 50-year series. However, the cost of a home becomes even worse, when the mortgage interest costs are figured in, which will be examined shortly below.

Second, the quality of homes. The homes of today have several glaring problems. The new homes that sell for $300,000 to $750,000 are frequently made with the shoddiest material. They are built with doors made of cardboard cores instead of wood; no cross-braces under the joists of floors to support them and prevent shaking; and the proverbial 2-by-4 piece of wood shaved down to 1.5 by 3.5 inches. Whereas 50% of the siding in houses in the 1970s was made of brick, today less than 30% of housing siding is made of brick.

Thousands of homes, priced at one-half million dollars and up, have their elegant looking facades made out of—stryofoam. The Maday family, for example, of Reston, Virginia, moved into a $522,000 home in late 1996, having been told they had an exterior of stucco (a mixture of cement and limestone), which is typically @c6 to 1 inch thick. They found that their house had a ¼ inch coating of styrofoam. The styrofoam trapped water and developed a "99% moisture reading," and as a result, the walls rotted away. An Aug. 29, 2001 Boston Globe article exposed the fact that thousands of McMansions from northern Virginia, to Connecticut, to Illionis have been constructed with styrofoam fronts.