The Sound of House Prices Crashing All Around

Hey, hey. I just took at trip to the edge of suburban sprawl - you know, the sort of place that was home to working farms half a dozen years ago - and was prompted to write about the current suburban passion for "for sale" signs. Yeah, yeah, you say, house prices slipping is nothing new. But today, on a hot Sunday in late August, game day for open houses, there was a distinct chill in the air.

I drove out on one of those new toll roads, the sort with exits to nowhere. Some of the road signs were in place, but covered up because the communities they were intended to exit to, weren't quite there. Really, there was no there, there.

Along the speedy highway were a number of "Be kind to turtles" signs, yellow diamonds with pictograms of kindly turtles meandering across the landscape, the message being that you should stop if you saw a baby turtle crossing the street. This would be fine in another setting, say a dirt road with a 25-mile-an-hour speed limit, but considering the speed on this six-lane highway was 65 miles per hour, stopping to let a turtle go would seem positively reckless. I wondered if the developers just put in the signs to create a sense of place, the thought being that really, it was a suburban Eden if only you could look past the big box stores and the gas stations.

As well as turtle signs I saw realtors signs - "home MUST be sold today!" - for places with pseudo names like "Belmont Crossing" or "Vista Landing." And strangely enough, these landscapes filled with hardiplank homes were hardly occupied. I never saw a soul. If you ask me, there just aren't enough people to fill these houses.

Of course, the mortgage loan mess was bound to happen as soon as those ingenious interest-only and exotic ARMS passed their honeymoon period. And naturally, we can point to all those mortgage risk assessment departments that seemed to take a vacation in the late 1990s until this August - why were they lending money to people who couldn't afford the repayments? - , but let me be honest: I think that we have just reached saturation point. Quite simply, there are too many new homes for the people who can legitimately afford them.

We've reached the end of the road as far as luxury upgrades and over-the-top custom finishes. I know I can't bear to see another chip of granite, a sumputous bathroom the size of a football pitch or a cathedral ceiling that puts a cathedral to shame: I just want to live somewhere I can afford, where the rooms aren't built for giants and I can commute to and from without GPS. Come on America, let's live where there's life, and let's leave the turtles alone.