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ace, because you are posting about your take on housing driven demand influenced by population increases, and because I have the information below....I'm having difficulty understanding why you are posting such opinions.

There is evidence of an extreme glut of single family homes available, record numbers of them vacant. Prices plummet because of these market conditions, causing prices to drop further. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, driven out of homes, or abandoning them voluntarily, as prices drop below the amounts these folks owe agaist these diminishing assets. Credit ratings destroyed, these folks cannot borrow a dime, conventionally, but they still have to live somewhere, so speculators build some apartment units, anticipating demand from former homeowners who cannot pass a credit check.

Meanwhile, the malinvestment in the now vacant new, previously owned and partially built housing units is money that was not spent or invested on endeavors that reaped any benefit for those involved, and the builders who made money building and selling homes for ten years have mostly lost all of their accumulated corporate equity. The economy, the country, former homeowners, existing homeowners, lenders, builders, realtors, home improvement stores, have all been set back, trapped in illiquid residential assets, taken out of the market, or worse, bankrupted and sold off at distressed price levels.

You, however, see some sort of healthy and growing demand. The millions of vacant homes, meanwhile, are targets of vandals, squatters, lack of maintenance, fires...they ain't improving in value as they sit, month after month. They are vacant because of a lack of demand at current prices.

There are less qualified buyers to purchase these vacant homes. even at today's dramatically reduced prices, than there were two years ago, at much higher price levels.

As home prices continue to drop, more mortgagees are marginalized, and people who only owed 60 or 70 percent of the market value of their homes in 2006, may now or soon own negative ten percent of the loan to value ratio of their homes, as prices drop more.

I don't see your point, ace. It will take ten years to work off the present inventory of vacant homes, helped by some being torn down because they were never completed or suffer, in the coming years, from the pitfalls facing vacant homes, that I described above.

....and all of the sales of these homes will be at prices dramatically lower than what they fetched in sales of comparable homes in 2006. All I see is wealth destruction, ace, and the economy will feel and exhibit the effects from it.

If the automobile market experienced a valuation of new and used cars collapse, as housing is...would you tout the increased demand for bicycles as a sign of a healthy or recovering transport market?