Bubble?

This is just the latest article lewrockwell.com has posted on the "housing bubble."

Needless to say, the series has been rather negative in its outlook.

I was speaking about this topic with some colleagues yesterday, and they offered a rather different perspective.  Though a lot of critics have panned the housing movement as a sign of American immaturity (people are not willing to wait to invest and save enough to buy a house, and they don't need to because of this or that federal program), perhaps it is more accurate to take the opposite stance.  Perhaps it is a good thing that so many (young, especially) Americans are buying houses.  They desire permanence, a sturdy thing to call their own.  The shift from renters to owners may be a sign of the aging of the American nation.  If I'm not mistaken the number of home-owners in Europe is very high, and that's not surprising.  There, people are must more established, and the value of land and property is age-old. 

Maybe America is just settling in, calming down after a shiftless youth of renting and rootlessness.

It's pretty incredible that the real estate market is the crutch that's been holding up the American economy.  It's an industry close to $3 trillion strong, depending on who you ask.  It has provided for the retirements of plenty of elderly people, who have sold their homes at a healthy profit and gone on to find a small, comfortable place to spend the remainder of their days (with plenty in the bank to make up for their meager Social Security checks). 

Are there fears of interest rates going up?  Not amongst those I know.  In fact, they see this "housing bubble" as fantastic.  Where would, for instance, Home Depot and Wal-Mart be without it?  It's creating a lot of wealth and, perhaps, a new culture in America. 

I think it's a good thing that, as statistics show that teenage pregnancy is going down and more kids have good relationships with their parents, young people seek to complement the spiritual permanence they feel with something symbolic and material--like a house of their own.