Today I was flipping through on of those free real-estate listings for the bay area. Ridiculous.

My calculations tell me that for a really cheap house located someplace not very nice, I'd have a mortgage payment upwards of $4000 a month. Prices aren't going up, so it's not a very good investment in that regard, and even if I could afford $2000 a month, I can't rent the other bedroom for the other $2000 a month. The market simply has to crash. Or at least deflate a little. Nobody's going to pay $500,000 to get murdered every 6 seconds.

One of my coworkers is going to sell his house in Richmond. He figures that after a little spiffing up it'll fetch around $500,000. Why is he selling his house? There's a bullet mark in his work van. A guy tried to rob a small nursing home next door with knife, but one of the people running the home had a gun. Knife man got shot, and gun man got stabbed, and they both went to the hospital. And on the corner of his street somebody got shot and didn't make it to the hospital.

Makes trailer parks look down right appealing.