What makes your house recession-proof

The real-estate bust has stripped all the smoke and mirrors from the housing market. In the starkest way possible, it is revealing which homes hold value in a recession, and why.

Certain upgrades can help recession-proof your house, but your home's price resilience mostly depends on choices you made when you purchased. Since most homeowners buy and sell several times in their lives, you're likely to have a chance to use these bulletproof principles the next time you buy.

Location, location, location (say like a house in Toronto lakefront community)
You've heard it before because it's true: Location matters. It matters most, in fact, when it comes to holding value under pressure. Why? Because houses are replaceable, but land is not. If you've got a spot everyone wants, your place will sell faster and for a better price than a similar house elsewhere.

Schools and safety. These make or break values. In some Bay Area communities, overseas investors buy homes sight unseen based on the value of the city's public-school rankings. Questions about schools and safety are the first out of buyers' mouths, says Furhad Waquad, an agent in suburban Detroit. He refers them to local police departments for neighborhood information and to the free Standard & Poor's school evaluation service, SchoolMatters.

Culture and public services. Buyers favor homes near libraries, parks, playgrounds and revitalized or charming commercial areas with shopping and coffee shops and theaters. An easy walk to light-rail terminals and bus lines is a plus. In communities full of retirees, proximity to hospitals and doctors' offices is valued.

One caution: Watch out for noise. It's good to be close to an elementary school but not next door, and it's good to be near a main street with bus service but not directly on it.

Infrastructure. Although the fringes of hot cities are popular locations when prices are rising, interest falls off quickly in a downturn. City sewer and water service help hold up prices compared with an identical home on a septic system and well water. Cities with fatter tax bases may boast quicker fire department response times, better-maintained streets and stronger schools, all of which sustain demand.

The real housing crisis

There is a housing crisis in the United States, but it’s not the one you're reading about.

The news throughout the country was all along the lines of The New York Times announcement , “Sales of Existing Homes Plunge Steeply.” Most went on to say that sales hadn’t fallen this much in decades. So, did the bubble finally burst? Was there a bubble? And, what difference does it make?

Not as much as you might think. For the nation as a whole, housing has stayed remarkably stable, with regional and neighborhood variations based on desirability. For instance, in 1964, existing homes sold for 3.32 times median income.

By 2005, the housing bubble had priced existing homes at 3.78 times median income. Not much of a bubble. Moreover, mortgage interest rates in 2005 were less than 1 percent higher than they had been in 1964.

That means that housing overall is about as affordable as it was 40 years ago. And overall, housing got better a long time ago. In a 1978 Congressional Budget Office report to Congress, Assistant Director Robert D. Reischauer noted:

In 1950, among the poorest 40 percent of all households—which roughly corresponds to the population eligible for lower-income housing assistance programs—57 percent were living in units that were dilapidated and/or lacked complete plumbing; by 1970 the fraction was 14 percent. Of course, it’s true that housing prices in the coastal cities have risen relative to the less dynamic areas, and urban neighborhoods that were once fearsome and cheap have changed hands. But, again, most of us find decent housing, if not exactly where we want to be.

The crisis, or persistent problem if you prefer, lies with those at the bottom third of the income scale. For the poor in major cities, the rent burden has increased to over 50 percent of income. Prices have increased steeply, and wages have not kept pace. Moreover, the mechanisms that kept a floor, so to speak, under housing—subsidies, rent control and union-driven wages—are either in decline or, in many places, have ceased to exist.

The result is chronic homelessness. But the swarms of battered, bereft indigents that roam the streets are only the visible part of the homeless. According to longtime housing advocate, Chester Hartman: …to a large extent, the fact that one-third of the nation still is ill-housed is a hidden problem. Lack of affordability—our number-one problem—and its broader implications on poor people's lives is not something the fortunate among us experience or even know about. Recently, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition told a House Appropriations housing subcommittee:

In the U.S., there are 9,022,000 extremely low income renter households and only 6,746,000 homes renting at prices these households can afford, paying the standard of 30 percent of their income for housing… This lack of affordable housing forces 74 percent of extremely low income renters to pay more than half of their incomes toward their homes, compared to 26 percent of renters in any income group. It’s clear that the private housing market alone is not going to address the problem without being forced to. So, Hartman argues for a constitutional right to housing, a goal that may seem unreachable. But, he notes, so were rights to voting, freedom from bondage and to organize. But why this right? Because:

Housing is more than four walls and a roof: It is part of a neighborhood and community, providing opportunities for positive social interaction and safety from crime. Housing location affects access to quality schools, jobs and community services. Hartman notes that in the preamble to the 1949 Housing Act, Congress asserted the National Housing Goal, which called for "the implementation as soon as feasible of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family." Needless to say, Congress has not acted on this goal with any alacrity. In fact, it has become a non-issue. It needs to be one. Said Hartman: We need to make politicians and candidates—for local, state and federal offices—speak to the housing problem and commit to effective ameliorative programs. And that in turn requires grassroots pressure.

We need to emphasize housing's links to problems in the areas of health, education, income support, food, crime, employment, immigration, economic and community development. In doing so, we will create coalitions of social justice activists whose power will grow exponentially. Those should be the headlines about housing, not the ones about the fortunes of speculators. We who worry about our home values ought to recall that merely having a home is something denied to too many.

--Alec Dubro

15 myths behind housing crisis in Britain (Part-2)

8) We don’t need any more homes Instead of predict-and-supply, say greens like Mark Lynas, we need to restrict the demand on new homes. ‘Addressing this doesn’t mean forced sterilisations or a Chinese-style, one-child policy’, writes Lynas, having clearly thought about ‘Plan B’, ‘but it does mean giving incentives for people to have smaller families and addressing rising levels of immigration’ (5). Well, Lynas might want to join the anti-immigrant British National Party, but there is no need to. There is plenty of land to build on, without making a dent in the countryside, and there are plenty of people to do the building. The only barrier is the one that his friends in the CPRE lobbied to have put in place, the green belt.

9) We can build our new homes on ‘brownfield’ land Under the advice of Richard Rogers’ Urban Taskforce, the government committed itself to building most homes on land that has already been developed and is now derelict, ‘brownfield’ as opposed to ‘greenfield’ development. Now, in London and other major cities, homes are being crammed into every available space that falls vacant. The BBC reports ‘garden grabbing’: ‘a rash of flats and new houses replacing gardens in high-price areas.’ (6) Shame-faced at their own role in this reinvention of Victorian overcrowding, the CPRE has amended its support for ‘brownfield development’, but still thinks this can be done without overcrowding (7).

10) Urban regeneration is the answer Britain is overwhelmingly a suburban country. Most people live in the suburbs. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, supports those campaigning to save the countryside from sprawl. That is because he wants to keep London densely populated to increase both his political and revenue base. To achieve that he has forced through lots of gardenless, dormitory-style flats, some unfortunately signposted as ‘key-worker housing’. And though newer immigrants naturally need to keep close to job prospects, Livingstone cannot prevent the ‘counter-urban cascade’ of people leaving London for the suburbs. While five per cent of England’s population live in rural areas and nine per cent live in the ‘urban core’, 43 per cent live in the suburbs and another 23 per cent live in suburban/urban areas.

11) More social housing is the answer A few people have looked at the shortfall in new homes and concluded that the decline is due to less council housing. That is not quite true. In the mid-Eighties, the private sector took up the slack, and in the Sixties, both boomed. It should not matter whether homes are public sector or private, but there is good reason to distrust the call for more social housing. Those who call for more council housing do so because they want to keep control over people, and do not trust them to make their own choices about where to buy. The green lobby supports council housing in the same way that the gentry supported almshouses for the poor - to keep them securely locked up, away from the toffs’ country houses.

12) New homes are ugly Even very intelligent people fall for this line. Considering just how big Cultural Studies is in our universities, you might have thought that somebody would have learned its basic lesson: most so-called aesthetic judgements are nothing but class snobbery dressed up as ‘taste’. Nearly every single house in Britain is a box. Much-prized Georgian terraces are boxes. Anti-growth campaigners like to show slides of urban developments from the skies, to make us all look like ants - but who lives in the skies? When people say that new homes are ugly, what they mean, but cannot bring themselves to say, is that they think of the people in them as being ugly.

13) Ireland’s new homes are especially ugly Ireland’s recent building boom is often cited as an example of what can go wrong. Those Irishmen’s homes are ugly, people say. What they mean is: ‘Wasn’t it cute when the Irish lived in little cottages with peat roofs, instead of those hateful McMansions?’ Why don’t they knock on a door and tell the person inside that his house is ugly, and see how they get on?

14) The CPRE campaigns to protect rural England In a radio debate, Shaun Spiers of the CPRE challenged me. Surely, he asked, I would not want to see the New Forest developed? The New Forest was once thickly developed with Saxon homes, until William the Conqueror burnt them out, demanding the New Forest for his deer park. The wide-open spaces of the British countryside are the barren desert left after our forebears were ethnically cleansed from the land by the aristocracy. It is the aristocracy that still takes most of the seats on the CPRE council. The real purpose of the CPRE is to put limits on people’s aspirations, a function they see in the planning laws: a core function of the planning system is to serve the long-term public interest by preventing the fulfilment of our wants as individuals (8).

15) We need to look after the environment Of course we do, but the CPRE and other green campaigners have forgotten who the environment is for. They look after empty spaces, beetles and rare birds, but treat people as cattle to be herded into overcrowded sheds. The British countryside is not under threat, but housebuilding is. The grotesque shortage of homes for people to live in shows what happens when you leave the greens in charge of just one area of policymaking. Imagine what would happen if they were allowed to have their way with energy, food, transport and medicine.

United States housing bubble (Part-3)

And a few cities in Florida and California, where home prices soared to nose-bleed heights, could have 'hard landings'." National home sales and prices both fell dramatically in March 2007 — the steepest plunge since the Savings and Loan crisis in 1989 — according to NAR data, with sales down 13% to 482,000 from the peak of 554,000 in March 2006 and the national median price falling nearly 6% to $217,000 from the peak of $230,200 in July 2006. John A. Kilpatrick, of Greenfield Advisors, was cited by Bloomberg News on June 14, 2007, on the linkage between increased foreclosures and localized housing price declines. "Living in an area with multiple foreclosures can result in a 10 percent to 20 percent decrease in property values." He went on to say, "In some cases that can wipe out the equity of homeowners or leave them owing more on their mortgage than the house is worth. The innocent houses that just happen to be sitting next to those properties are going to take a hit. He echoed his own comments from the April 5, 2007, issue of the International Herald Tribune, in which he said, "Living on a block with multiple foreclosures can result in a 10 percent to 20 percent decrease in property values. In some cases that can wipe out the equity of homeowners or leave them owing more on their mortgage than the house is worth. If you see a neighborhood with a couple of foreclosures on the block, a couple of auction signs in the yards, that's going to be a neighborhood that's stigmatized. The innocent houses that just happen to be sitting next to those properties are going to take a hit."The US Senate Banking Committee held hearings on the housing bubble and related loan practices in 2006, titled "The Housing Bubble and its Implications for the Economy" and "Calculated Risk: Assessing Non-Traditional Mortgage Products".Following the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry in March 2007, Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Banking Committee held hearings and asked executives from the top five subprime mortgage companies to testify and explain their lending practices. Dodd said that "predatory lending practices" endangered the home ownership for millions of people. Moreover, Democratic senators such as Senator Charles Schumer of New York are already proposing a federal government bailout of subprime borrowers in order to save homeowners from losing their residences.

United States housing bubble (Part-2)

Identifying the housing bubbleAny type of economic bubble is difficult to identify except in hindsight, after the crash, although many economic and cultural factors have led several economists to argue that a housing bubble exists in the U.S. The Economist magazine said that "the worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history," so any explanation must consider global causes as well as those specific to the United States. Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said in mid-2005 that "at a minimum, there's a little 'froth' (in the U.S. housing market) ... it's hard not to see that there are a lot of local bubbles"; Greenspan admitted in 2007 that froth "was a euphemism for a bubble." President Bush said of the U.S. housing boom in early 2006: "If houses get too expensive, people will stop buying them... Economies should cycle." Based on markedly declining 2006 market data, including lower sales, rising inventories, falling median prices, and increased foreclosure rates, some economists have concluded that the correction in the U.S. housing market began in 2006. A May 2006 Fortune magazine report on the US housing bubble states: "The great housing bubble has finally started to deflate ... In many once-sizzling markets around the country, accounts of dropping list prices have replaced tales of waiting lists for unbuilt condos and bidding wars over humdrum three-bedroom colonials." The chief economist of Freddie Mac and the director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) deny the existence of a national housing bubble and express doubt that any significant decline in home prices are possible, citing consistently rising prices since the Great Depression, expected increasing demand by the Baby Boom generation, and healthy employment. However, some have suggested that the funding that the JCHS receives from the real estate industry may have affected their judgment. David Lereah, former chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), distributed "Anti-Bubble Reports" in August 2005 to "respond to the irresponsible bubble accusations made by your local media and local academics."Among other statements, the reports say that people "should not be concerned that home prices are rising faster than family income", that "there is virtually no risk of a national housing price bubble based on the fundamental demand for housing and predictable economic factors", and that "a general slowing in the rate of price growth can be expected, but in many areas inventory shortages will persist and home prices are likely to continue to rise above historic norms." Following reports of rapid sales declines and price depreciation in August 2006, Lereah admitted that "he expects home prices to come down 5% nationally, more in some markets, less in others.

Extra! Extra! Toronto's real estate market shows signs of cooling down

By Chris Wattie, National Post

Toronto’s superheated real estate market is showing signs of cooling down with the imposition of the city’s land-transfer tax, recording a sharp drop in prices last month after setting multiple records last year, according to figures released yesterday.

The average price for a Toronto resale home fell nearly $20,000 in January, the Toronto Real Estate Board numbers showed, a potentially worrisome portent for 2008.

Maureen O’Neill, the president of the real estate board, said the drop in the average price of a resale home, from $394,931 in December to $373,449 in January, was the first month-to-month drop in at least seven years. “That’s quite unusual,” she said. “It’s the first time the average price has gone down since 2001, which is as far back as we checked.”



The average price is 6% higher than January, 2007, but lower than the December average price.
Ms. O’Neill said the price slump could be the beginning of a trend, as the city’s new land-transfer tax took effect on Feb. 1. The tax, approved last October by city council will amount to nearly $4,000 on an average-priced home in Toronto. Ms. O’Neill said it could drive prices down by encouraging more buyers to look outside the city limits, or by tightening how much they can afford to pay.

“Will the additional tax stop people from buying homes? No, of course not,” she said. “But it’s going to be a burden ... and people may say: ‘You know Toronto’s getting too pricey,’ and they’ll look elsewhere in the GTA.”

Micah Munro, an agent with Bosley Real Estate, said the tax appears to be having a psychological effect on many of the buyers he is showing around the east-end neighbourhoods where he concentrates. “There’s been a ton of buyers trying to get in before the tax kicked in,” he said. “They were all asking me about the tax .... I was even hearing it from first-time buyers, who are exempt from paying it.”

“It was a mad rush last month.”

Ms. O’Neill said sales were still strong across the city last month, although they did not reach the soaring numbers of January, 2007, which set a record with 5,173 sales. Last month, a total of 5,073 properties changed hands, within 2% of the record, she said.

“There’s all sorts of indications that the economy in Toronto will remain strong this year,” she said. “All the signs are there.”

The real estate board figures showed strong sales in Toronto’s downtown and east end, led by the Danforth’s 30% increase in transactions over last January and by West Agincourt, with 32% more homes sold, mainly a surge in condominium apartment sales.

Condominiums also led the way in the downtown core and in Willowdale, both of which saw a 19% overall increase.

But Ms. O’Neill said realtors will be keeping a particularly sharp eye on prices now that the new tax is in effect. “I’m going to be watching those figures this month and next very, very closely.”
Mr. Munro said it is still too early to tell what effect the municipal tax is having on the market. “I haven’t seen any effect yet,” he said. “But it hasn’t even been a week yet .... It’s still hard to tell.”

15 myths behind housing crisis in Britain (Part-1)

Too few new homes are being built in Britain to meet a combination of rising demand and the need to replace crumbling existing housing stock. The consequences are astronomical house prices and a generation struggling to afford any kind of a home. Anti-development campaigners and government policy are holding back the house-building programme so desperately needed. Here, James Heartfield, author of Let’s Build! Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the Next 10 Years, tackles the many myths about Britain’s housing crisis.

1) The government is concreting over the countryside When polled, people think that around one half of Britain is built up, one half countryside (1). That number is wildly off-target. The real number is one-tenth built up, nine-tenths not. There is no threat to the countryside. Just imagine for one moment, you could double - yes double - the number of homes in Britain, and still the countryside would cover four times as much land as the towns and cities. Of course, there is no need to double the number of homes. I estimate that we need another five million, which is to say about 20 to 25 per cent more homes than we have now. In fact, less than one per cent of land goes to homes every 50 years (2). 2) The ‘green belt’ is being worn away Between 1979 and 1993, the green belt - the undeveloped area surrounding cities - doubled in size. Since 1997 it has grown by 64,000 acres. Today, the green belt covers around 13 per cent of England. Far from shrinking, the land area that is protected, including green belts, national forests, areas of special scientific interest and so on, is expanding decade by decade as more and more farmland is retired from use. If just a small proportion of this land were earmarked for development, then we could have enough homes for everyone. 3) Britain is overcrowded There are more people per acre in Britain than in America, Africa and Australia, but less than in Holland or Belgium. Britain, though, is by no means overcrowded. Its cities are getting a little denser than they used to be, because of the policy that stops us building new homes in the countryside. In absolute terms, we have plenty of space. What people generally mean when they say that Britain is overcrowded is that they feel distaste towards the kind of people they see around them.

4) Too many homes are being built The number of homes being built is at an historic low - its lowest since the Second World War. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) disputes this fact, saying that more have been built since construction reached its absolute lowest in 2001. But the small increase in new homes being built still leaves us way below the levels of previous decades. House completions in the UK have fallen from over 400,000 per year in the late Sixties to well under 200,000 per year in the current decade. It is not enough.

UK house completions (thousands)
source: Office of National Statistics

5) More homes are being built, now that the government has acted Top-down hectoring did whip up some new building, but this small increase has not been maintained. In the year to June, completions were only up by two per cent, but more alarmingly, new starts are down by eight per cent (3). The trouble with the government proposals in this area is that they generally create more barriers to development, even when they say they are liberalising.



6) Enough homes are being built Almost every report gets this wrong, because they fail to take into account the fact that houses have to come down, as well as being built. It is no good counting the new builds and thinking that they are a running total. Over time, even the best-built homes must come down. The CPRE assumes that in England, with a housing stock of 21million, just one million homes will be demolished every 40 years. At that rate, it would take 840 years to replace Britain’s housing stock. Does anyone really believe that all the houses built today will stand for 840 years? (4) It would be more realistic to assume that houses would stand for 100 years, in which case in England alone we need to build 210,000 homes just to replace the existing stock, before considering the additional demand. In fact, completions in England have not been higher than 167,000 in the past 10 years.

7) We can build houses to last The CPRE says it does not matter that Britain’s housing stock is the oldest in Europe: it just reflects the fact that Britain industrialised earlier. But the reason that Britain’s housing stock is ageing is because it is not being replaced. We are sweating dilapidated housing. Not demolishing older homes is the way that the shortfall in new homes being built is absorbed. But every year that we fail to build enough houses to retire the old ones, the housing stock gets more run down, damp and dangerous.

United States housing bubble (Part-1)

The United States housing bubble is an economic bubble in many parts of the U.S. housing market including areas of California, Florida, New York, Michigan, the suburbs of Chicago in the Midwest, the BosWash megalopolis, and the Southwest markets. On a national level, housing prices peaked in early 2005, began declining in 2006 and have not yet bottomed. Increased foreclosure rates in 2006–2007 by U.S. homeowners led to a crisis in August 2007 for the subprime, Alt-A, CDO, CDX, mortgage, credit, hedge fund, and foreign bank markets.The U.S. Treasury Secretary called the bursting housing bubble "the most significant risk to our economy." Housing bubbles may occur in local or global real estate markets. They are typically characterized, in their late stages, by rapid increases in the valuations of real property until unsustainable levels are reached relative to incomes, price-to-rent ratios, and other economic indicators of affordability. This may be followed by decreases in home prices that can result in many owners holding negative equity—a mortgage debt higher than the value of the property. The underlying causes of the housing bubble are complex; factors include historically-low interest rates, lax lending standards, and a speculative fever. This bubble may be related to the stock market or dot-com bubble of the 1990s. This bubble is roughly coincident with real estate bubbles in the United Kingdom, Germany and even South Korea.

Bubbles may be definitively identified only in hindsight, after a market correction, which began for the U.S. housing market in 2005–2006. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said "we had a bubble in housing" and also said in the wake of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007, "I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006." The mortgage and credit crisis was caused by a large number of home owners unable to pay the mortgage as their low introductory rate (sub-prime) mortgages reverted to regular interest rates. Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron concluded, "We had a bubble",and concurred with Yale economist Robert Shiller's warning that home prices appear overvalued and that the correction could last years with trillions of dollars of home value being lost.Greenspan warned of "large double digit declines" in home values "larger than most people expect." Problems for home owners with good credit surfaced in mid-2007, causing the U.S.'s largest mortgage lender Countrywide Financial to warn that a recovery in the housing sector is not expected to occur at least until 2009 because home prices are falling "almost like never before, with the exception of the Great Depression."The impact of booming home valuations on the U.S. economy since the 2001–2002 recession was an important factor in the recovery because a large component of consumer spending came from the related refinancing boom, which simultaneously allowed people to reduce their monthly mortgage payments with lower interest rates and withdraw equity from their homes as values increased. Any collapse of the U.S. Housing Bubble has a direct impact not only on home valuations, but the nation's mortgage markets, home builders, real estate, home supply retail outlets, Wall Street hedge funds held by large institutional investors, and foreign banks, increasing the risk of a nationwide recession. Concerns about the impact of the collapsing housing and credit markets on the larger U.S. economy caused President George W. Bush and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke to announce a limited bailout of the U.S. housing market for homeowners unable to pay their mortgage debts.

Alas! There is no place like home!

In many parts of the country, housing costs and shortages have begun to show signs of adversely affecting corporations, workers, and local economies. Affordable housing — such as Boston's Orchard Gardens, — is increasingly scarce. How serious is the problem?

It's a tale of two Americas, the best of times and worst of times if you're a consumer in the current U.S. housing market. On the plus side, thanks to the 1990s' economic boom, some two-thirds of Americans, more than ever before, currently own their homes. At the same time, housing of all kinds — for buyers and renters — has become more expensive precisely because of the country's prosperity. With the wages and purchasing power of working people largely stagnant over the last two decades, the cost of adequate housing in a decent neighborhood has soared beyond the reach of many. Today, the demand for affordable housing exceeds the supply by a record 5.3 million units.

"Affordable housing is a problem that increasingly affects companies and employers, as well as the overall economy," says F. Barton Harvey (MBA '74), chairman and CEO of the Enterprise Foundation, a nationwide housing and community development nonprofit organization. Harvey explains that exorbitant housing costs encourage young, professional workers to look elsewhere for jobs, threatening the continued vitality of local industries that depend on their talents. (For example, 86 percent of the companies in one recent survey said that housing costs were a serious deterrent to attracting businesses and middle-income employees to New York City.) On the lower end of the wage scale, companies are forced to pay bonuses and to bus workers long distances to fill essential blue-collar positions. Says Harvey, "Firms must respond to these realities with higher wages, which make the goods and services they produce more expensive, which in turn makes the overall economy less competitive in a global business environment."

Where the Heart Is

Along with food, shelter is perhaps the most basic human need. In modern society, stable, safe housing is more than a matter of comfort and convenience; it positively affects childhood development, individual self-esteem, and family viability.

Housing is generally considered "affordable" when its cost does not exceed 30 percent of the median family income in a given area. In one typically hard-pressed neighborhood, Boston's South End, the average two-bedroom apartment rents for $1,400, considerably more than 30 percent of an average South End family's income. In Massachusetts as a whole, one recent study estimates that between 1990 and 1997, two hundred thousand more people moved out of the state than into it, in large part due to housing prices.

The more worse is yet to come, across the nation, government cutbacks on construction, maintenance, and subsidies for low-income housing, combined with the booming economy's overheated real-estate market, have created what many experts are calling an affordable housing crisis. They predict that the problem is likely to get worse because of a widening income gap and a shrinking stock of low-income units. As a result, business may eventually have to take a more proactive stance, as it has with education and health care, using its influence, creativity, and resources to help address the issue. Decent, affordable, and stable housing is a basic human necessity; it is also a prerequisite for maintaining a productive national work force. The bottom line speaks clearly: there's no place like home.