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I live in South Florida, one of the areas that was supposed to be hardest hit. From the news, I expected that the area had imploded between my last visit and actually moving.
For the most part, nothing changed.
Yeah, there are vacant houses, but that is because everybody upgraded to brand new houses and then people that shouldn't have qualified, moved into the houses people moved out of. Then they lost them and went back to rentals. There was always excess inventory ... housing starts in the 2000's were insane. Some of that excess is being bought by investors at a fraction of the value pre-foreclosure and are turning them into rentals that the same people who got booted can now afford.
Of course retail will suffer. Everybody was refinancing on the inflated values of their houses and spending it buying new shit.
That cash cow died and so did a lot of the retail supporting it.
It's not doom and gloom. It is a correction. We built too much shit, spent too much money and now we have to recover from that.
Unemployment is an issue but it's less than 1 out of 5 unemployed. While bad, it's not devastating and not something that cannot be fixed.
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