roses-and-rainbows.com

The sudden rise in home prices suggests that the psychology of the market has shifted dramatically. But what should we expect in the months ahead? Not necessarily that we’re entering a new housing boom. To a large extent, where we’re heading depends on what household buyers are thinking. Some clues are discovered in the annual home-buyer surveys that Karl Case, the Wellesley economics professor, and I have run for years. For the surveys, we canvas recent household buyers in four cities ? Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Boston; the surveys are now being conducted under the auspices of the Yale School of Management. We have just received the 2009 results, with responses from June and July. This year’s survey coincides nicely with the upturn in home prices, the sharpest differentiate in detour we have ever seen. The fact denote that the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 10-City Composite Home Price Index for the United States rose 3. 6 percent between April and July. While that is not a whopping increase, it followed a decline of 4. 8 percent in the previous period, between January and April. The suddenness of this shift surprised me. In my column in June, I wrote that home prices might well continue to decline for years. As of that time, the S. & P. /Case-Shiller cost index had fallen every month for almost three years.

Add to that the prospect of continuing high unemployment and a weak economy for years to come, and the prospects for household prices did not seem rosy. But the new data are startling. Since the indexes began in 1987, the closest parallel to such a change came at the deduction of the last housing bust, at the end of the 1990-91 recession. Home prices rose 2. 3 percent from April to July 1991 after having fallen 2. 1 percent from January to April that year. By July 1996, five years after that “turnaround,” household prices were down 0. 6 percent from their July 1991 level, and down 13. 8 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Could the more extreme recent shift mean that household prices will just keep rising this time? Here is where our new survey results are helpful. We looked at both the long- and short-term attitudes of household buyers. In our survey, we ask, “On average over the next 10 years, how much do you expect the value of your property to change each year?” The average answer among 311 respondents in 2009 was ditto grow of 11. 2 percent. The median response ? with half above, half below ? was 5 percent, also high. That sounds rather like bubble thinking.

I grow some roses in OR zone 7, and they do fine, but I just bought 5 more and I want to plant them where they will be really happy. I have good soil and raise a lot of flowers and it is hot here in the summer altho it gets cool at night. It seems that if they get any a.m. shade, they tend towards mildew on their leaves and I think they like a.m. sun with afternoon shade, as do most plants here. Any good suggestions besides spraying and all ? Or any new info on raising happy rose plants. They are hybrid teas.