Who is to blame for the subprime crisis?
Weigh in. Add your thoughts in the Reader Comments section below. Job growth matters, as it’s a sign that people are moving to a city and that they’re building the roots and wealth to buy a home. On this measure, we used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2006 to 2007 to calculate which markets are adding people to payrolls. The timing of the data also weeds out any places that saw their job growth explode in past years due heavily to housing or jobs that are now gone, and we excluded any city losing jobs from our list. Excess housing inventory and job loss don’t pair well. But fast job growth coupled with a high foreclosure rate points to a more volatile market, one where economic activity might be slowing, or where prices were untenable from the very beginning. Kermit Baker, an economist at the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, says that the equity problems that lead to foreclosures are more often than not “the result of economic conditions in the market
