Thursday, December 05, 2002

No Bubble Here

I'm sure you're aware from all the New Orleans-based bloggers that there are no jobs in New Orleans. Unless you're a waiter.

The downside of this is people have to leave New Orleans and Louisiana to find a decent, well-paying job that has any kind of future. Hence all the ex-New Orleanians in Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. However, on the plus side, housing here is relatively cheap. For example, you can buy a nice Victorian with 4 bedrooms and almost 5000 square feet in Uptown New Orleans for under $600K; a similar house in in San Francisco would run close to $3-4 million.

Why do I bring this up? There's been a lot of talk about a real estate bubble forming and some folks are worried that we're seeing one in New Orleans. But not to worry. As explained in the current New Orleans CityBusiness:

“Locally, the economy is just too slow to see any unsustainable growth. There just aren’t enough jobs coming into the area to push prices up.”