The dark side....

[alexfardreamer@aol.com]

No...not of the Force, but of house flipping.

Here in Miami Dade County, several developers are under investigation or under arrest for promising the county that they'd build affordable housing for the less wealthy, then either they pocketed money from the Housing Agency and built no houses, or built a few homes but sold them to flippers instead of people on the county list.

The flippers weren't poor people who were looking to improve their financial situation, either, but rather business people with money who didn't care that the money used to build the housing was taxpayers' money and that the houses were not meant to be "flippable."

[bartongrl1]

That is a shame that things like that happen. Its hard for lower income people to find decent places that are affordable.

[alexfardreamer@aol.com]

That's one reason why I have such mixed feelings about the concept of house flipping. Obviously I'm not against it in principle, but I've noticed that when it became a better-known investment strategy, unsavory persons decided to take advantage of the situation.

[bartongrl1]

People tend to take advantage, they even took advantage after hurricanes in Florida and after the hurricane in Louisiana.

There are unscrupulous people out there just waiting on a chance to pull some kind of get rich scheme on the poor people that cant protect themselves.

[alexfardreamer@aol.com]

Unfortunately, it seems that Florida, especially South Florida, tends to attract an unusually large number of unsavory types, ranging from petty thieves all the way to corrupt politicians.

Right now, the region is in the grip of a very bad housing crunch; there is too little available building space left in the state as it is, but (a) developers with political clout, (b) a cash-starved group of local and state governments, and (c) 900 persons a day moving to Florida are contributing to the crisis. Worse still, much of the "building boom" that ended in 2006-07 concentrated on high end condos (hi rises, mostly) and ignored affordable housing for the less-wealthy.

Add to that too many people interested in flipping and unscrupulous "lenders" with dubious honesty and mixed motives, and you can understand why, sometimes, I tend to be less than enthusiastic about buying homes and then reselling them.