housing

By now it's clear that building green is much more than adding a green roof, using solar panels, or identifying which materials will replace the standard ones. Creating a successful green project starts much earlier with the right mindset. Building green requires optimism and a willingness to innovate and create synergy.

Much ink and paper profits have been spilt over the past few months over the financial and housing crisis.  Almost all of it has been focused on the short-term consequences of the US housing industry structurally overbuilding the wrong product in the wrong location; the fringe of our metro areas.  The market does not now and will not in the future want this product, as I have mentioned in previous postings.

There are many obvious reasons for the takeover of Fannie and Freddie yesterday by the Federal government.  They include shoring up under-capitalized lenders crucial to the economy and the housing market, restoring confidence in the US financial system, and avoiding a 1990s Japanese style economic "flat line" economy.  There are less obvious reasons.  There has been a long war between completely private mortgage lenders and brokers, such as FM Watch, whose members include firms like GE Capital and GMAC, which have been trying to put the two FMs out of business.  This animosity toward the two F

Much pain has been experienced in the American and world economy due to the collapse of sub-prime mortgages. This slow motion car wreck has resulted in: massive commercial and investment bank write-downs, the beginning of a series of bank closings, destabilized the two largest mortgage guarantors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, resulting in an explicit Federal guarantee for them