The Housing Crisis is over?

In the opinion piece, The Housing Crisis is Over?, from the Wall Street Journal, reports that Cyril Moulle-Bertaux suggests that April 2008 marked the bottom of the U.S. housing market.  And in his R.O.I. column WSJ’s Brett Arends makes a similar argument. He looks at the data on housing starts since 1972, which shows that new housing starts slumped below the one million mark in March. Every time that has happened in the last 50 years, Mr. Arends writes, it proved to be the bottom of a recession. Mr. Arends points out that Bill Wheaton, a legendary real-estate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has also suggested that fears about the real-estate crash were overdone. And he points to a private portfolio manager in London, who said the homebuilding stocks on Wall Street were at last a “buy.” In the Journal editorial, Mr. Moulle-Bertaux suggests that the housing market will revive, as more first-time buyers are lured in by falling prices and lower mortgage rates. “Homes on average are back to being as affordable as during the best of times in the 1990s,” he writes. “Numerous households that had been priced out of the market can now afford to get in.”