Is the Orange County Housing Juice Worth the Squeeze?
Welcome to the Sweet Orange Housing Blog where I will be answering the question: Is the Orange County housing juice worth the squeeze? I’ll do this mostly by focusing on the housing numbers in Irvine and Costa Mesa (more later on why I choose these two cities). However, since the numbers don’t give the complete picture of a community, at times, I will write about the people, places, and things that make these cities what they are.
In some ways, this will be a continuation of my past life as a Redfin blogger. In that life, I wrote about development in Irvine and Costa Mesa, and I gained some insight into these two cities. During my Redfin days, when I was writing about Irvine and Costa Mesa, I noticed how very different these two Orange County cities are. However, in spite of that, they are also very much the same in some basic Orange County sort of way. I wanted to follow through with these two cities to see what these different-but-the-same cities might tell us about what makes a city what it is.
Another reason that I decided to continue with both the Irvine and Costa Mesa development news instead of concentrating on just one or the other brings me to another insight I gained from my Redfin blogging day: At times, these different-but-the-same cities give a view into Orange County as a whole and the country at large. The reverse is also true: what happens at the Orange County and national level can affects what happens in Irvine and Costa Mesa. For example, the crash of AIG is having financial consequences for Orange County, including Irvine and Costa Mesa, and the crash of the subprime mortgage industry in Orange County had national consequences.
I want to follow through with what I was learning about the interconnection between what happens in one location or part of the economy affecting what happens in another location or part of the economy. Therefore, that will all be in the mix on this blog. (Here are two examples that show that what happens locally and nationally are interconnected: “Good O.C. borrowers brought down by bank’s bad loans” and “Bear Stearns Wraps Buy of Subprime Lender.”)
Time to wrap up this introduction and start squeezing the housing numbers. So until tomorrow…