Home

Return of the 'Bond Vigilantes'

By Lou Barnes, Friday, June 19, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eliogarcia/3243329650/" target=blank>creo que soy yo</a>.

Long-term rates dipped briefly this week on shaky economic data, the 10-year Treasury to 3.59 percent and mortgages to 5.375 percent, but ran right back up in the shadow of another $104 billion in new Treasury borrowing next week.

Optimists tried to find a housing bottom in modest rises in starts and new permits, but the reports were garbled by apartment overweight, and the reality is the same: New-home construction is steady 77 percent below the 2005 total. Inflation may come, but not now, CPI up 0.1 percent in May, no way to rise with industrial capacity utilization at a new-record low ...  more...

'Rigorous' inspections becoming de rigueur

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Friday, June 19, 2009.

Q: My buddy bought this incredible house on the beach for more than $1 million. It was really stunning and had awesome views -- he fell in love with it at first sight, and closed the deal pretty quickly. He did have inspections by a contractor friend the seller was able to get to come out really fast.

My friend bought the house in the summertime, but when it started to rain, the rain literally poured inside the house. In the course of getting the roof replaced, he started to discover all these other issues wrong with the place that the seller had to have known about and concealed, including the fact that the whole foundation has some kind of dry mold issue. To make a long story short, the place needs to be torn down.  more...

Architects do more with less

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, June 19, 2009.

In 1978, the British architect Norman Foster was showing a distinguished visitor around the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an innovative new art gallery he had just completed. Now, typically, such a guest might ask the architect about his inspiration, his design philosophy, or any one of a dozen more-or-less standard questions routinely fielded by architects. But this distinguished visitor was architect/inventor/visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, and the question he memorably asked Foster was this: "How much does your building weigh?"

What Fuller was driving at -- something he drove at in nearly all his work -- was the question of how to do the most with the least. His was a lifelong concern with energy and material efficiency, not only in the field of architecture, but also in engineering and design.  more...

Pros and cons of linoleum flooring

By Paul Bianchina, Friday, June 19, 2009.

Q: Thank you for the column on kitchen floor options in the recent weekend paper. It was a helpful summary. Could you please tell me how linoleum scores in the same categories: virtues, detractions and resale?

A: You ask a great question, and one that is very relevant to the current trends of environmental responsibility.

Linoleum has been around since about the time of the Civil War. It was very popular for flooring in this country up until the 1950s, when it began to be replaced by other hard-surface flooring such as sheet vinyl (made from PVC). It has seen a resurgence of popularity in recent years, due in large part to the renewable materials used in its manufacture.  more...

First-time buyer credit not a cure-all

By Steve Bergsman, Friday, June 19, 2009.

A few weeks ago, I was taking the van service from my hotel in Manhattan to Newark Airport. It was early in the morning and the driver was listening to a talk show. I was half asleep and wasn't paying much attention to the squawking except at commercial breaks when I kept hearing advertisements from a local mortgage company about first-time homebuyer tax credits.

The reason my thought processes kept waking up at the commercials was that:

1. It was such anomaly. There was a time, in the middle of this decade, when we probably heard nothing but commercials from mortgage companies, but that was at least two years ago.  more...