Lakewood Housing

You can't have a conversation in Lakewood with out someone loudly decrying "the high prices" ( "higher" would be more accurate if you'd done any traveling,) of homes in Lakewood.

You immediately hear what, or who, is to blame: "N.Y. investors are driving it up!", "Too many New Yorkers are moving into our town", etc.

Then you hear a litany of ideas how the community can "forcibly" bring down , or at least halt, the precipitous rise of housing prices. If only.

First, the fact of life is if you are not working you can't expect the marketplace to accommodate you. It's hard enough paying bills and keeping up with the cost of living in a two income household;- on one income, or even less then that?!

The reality is, no artificial restraint, or decree will have a serious effect. Housing prices don't work by fiat.

The good news is perhaps the Marketplace has started lowering housing prices all by itself .

Here are a few sure facts; and some claims people are making, that might be good indicators:

• top real estate investors are leaving town saying the party's over
• MLS listings have skyrocketed tenfold recently
• dozens of houses are being threatened with forecloser
• houses were reassessed much higher
• interests rates continue climbing
• it's a tenants market with cheap rentals, as owners desperately seek to fill their apt.
• Getting on to HUD (ah, programs!) is very difficult

So what should you, a prospective buyer do?

If you're using essential money to buy a house for an investment, with the present precarious real estate condition, it seems dangerous. For purchasing a home to live in, conventional wisdom says, it's always a good time to buy.

Now to discuss a Lakewood housing problem that should bother you, and one that does have a practical solution to:

Many in Lakewood are importing from Boro Park and Monsey: "look at me I've made it" homes, or more accurately, monstrosities. (You can probably see them from across the Hudson river.)

The owners must people who left seder before musser time.

Why not make a takana (don't we all love takonas?) that "a new house can't be the nicest, fanciest on the block".

If you want to show off fine,- get honored at a dinner, have a school named after you.

Don't bring lame competitiveness; immodest, chillul hashem generating ostentatious houses to the neighborhood!

Let your house be your castle- in doors!