April 19, 2005

Housing Riots?!

DadTalk quoted an article today from the Los Angeles Times that brings home how bad the housing market (bubble?) is in some places:

Last February, the sirens howled in Hollywood as the LAPD rushed reinforcements to the 5600 block of La Mirada Avenue. While a police captain barked orders through a bullhorn, an angry crowd of 3,000 people shouted back expletives. A passerby might have mistaken the confrontation for a movie shoot, or perhaps the beginning of the next L.A. riot.

In fact, as LAPD Capt. Michael Downing later told the media: “You had some very desperate people who had a mob mentality. It was as if people were trying to get the last piece of bread.”

The bread-riot allusion was apt, although the crowd was in fact clamoring for the last crumbs of affordable housing in a city where rents and mortgages have been soaring. At stake were 56 unfinished apartments being built by a nonprofit agency. The developers had expected a turnout of, at most, several hundred. When thousands of desperate applicants showed up instead, the scene quickly turned ugly, and the police intervened.

That's right - people were rioting in Los Angeles over housing. Maybe we are in a bubble after all...

Posted by Tom Nugent at April 19, 2005 03:25 PM
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