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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Things are more like they are now …..than they have ever been before!  

In housing, or anything now of days for that matter, are we seeing a 
predictable cycle or is this something never seen before?  When I consider 
the 
circumstances as a whole, the current situation looks unique to me.  Whenever 
in 
history have these particular happenstances and events brought us to a point 
exactly like this?  Many doom-ish commentators are pointing to the current 
economic 
status of the US and the world as being the "perfect storm."



But as far as experts who have been in the field forever dismissing the 
current state of affairs, that’s another thing I’ve …. Well … eh … seen 
before.   
A number of times, but this illustrates what I mean:

About 1982 I set up in the printing business.  At that time if you needed 
only a small number of something printed you had these options:  1) 
Lithography 
or offset which required a large up front fee for the stencils or plates   2) 
 
Photo copying which was poor quality at the time  3) Letter press.    I got a 
12"x18" Chandler-Price letter press and several small Kelsey presses.  
Several 
small newspapers were going out of business and still had the old fonts of 
moveable type and I got a number of fonts for the price of the scrap metal.   
The business did OK but it was a lot of work for modest returns and a year 
and a 
half later I was glad to sell all the equipment for about what I had in it.



I had been plying a trade, printing with moveable type, that had continued in 
an unbroken line since the 1400’s.  Many innovations had come (and some gone) 
such as lithography, linotype, photo typesetting, offset and yet letter press 
work remained.  Then within the space of two years it was gone ….gone 
forever.  Laser printing, even in its infancy, wiped out the feasibility of 
moveable 
type for anything but a curiosity.  In 1982 one could have pointed to the 
past 
six centuries and said, "Oh, I’ve heard it all before, there’s always 
something that’s going to replace the letter press, but it *never* happens."  
It did 
…..in a twinkling.



About the time of the demise of letter press work, I was doing custom 
computer programming and one of my best efforts was a 
estimation/scheduling/billing 
program for printers.  There were seven printers in town at that time and in 
the end four of them used my program.  Being in the digital end of things I 
was 
aware of the rapidly advancing quality of computer typesetting and laser 
printing and that the price of the equipment was in a free fall.   I remember 
very 
well sitting in the office  of three of the above mentioned printers and 
being 
lectured on how they’d seen this and that come and go, but the printing 
business went in cycles.  Always had and always would.  Not worried, even a 
little 
weary hearing about it.   The niche that most of the printers occupied 
depended greatly on the trade of church bulletins, wedding invitations, 
funeral home 
memorials, restaurant menus and the like.    I suggested that with the 
advancing technology all these places one day would do their own printing.  
No, no, I 
just didn’t understand the business.



Within four years all but one of the seven printers was out of business.



Another amusing thing happened along about this time.  One of the printers 
died.  I didn’t like him and that might have been amusing enough, but that’s 
not what I mean.  His widow as a boisterous German woman and the print shop 
was 
a block away from a computer shop where I picked up programming work.  The 
conversation came around to computer typesetting and laser printing and she 
snorted, "It vill nefer be ass gut as letter press."

Several of us opined the contrary and she was unabashed that she was the 
expert here, what did we know!   A contest resulted in which she would print 
a 
page on the letter press and we’d arrange to print it on a laser printer and 
we’d compare them under a microscope.  "Und it dossen’t matter vat paper you 
usss, ze letter press vill be better!"



So we chose a sized vellum which has a microscopically coarse surface where 
starch as been used as the sizing.  In other words, we came very close to 
cheating.  In order to make the ink fill all the recesses in the vellum 
surface, 
she had to press the paper harder than is ideal for a letter press and it 
microscopically broke the fibers of the paper.  On the other hand, the starch 
was 
the ideal medium for the static of the laser printer and the edge of print as 
nearly flawless.

Her shop closed too a few weeks after that.

In both cases the experts had their attention and point of view so closely 
tied with the trade, they could not see the bus coming down the street that 
ran 
over them.  The fact that the printer, his father, and his grandfather had 
been running that shop since the ‘30’s and his sons were now taking over so 
he 
had seen all this come and go a dozen times (yawn) did not change things when 
it finally went …and did not come back again.   He failed to see that times 
were more like the were then than they had ever been before.



Now many see a housing crash looming on the horizon and we are reminded that 
it’s just another cycle.  Sales rise, sales fall.   But people always need 
housing and after all ‘they aren’t making any more land.’   True.  But they 
are 
still making old age, death, poverty, changing economics, changing demography 
and yet, the other thing they aren’t making any more of is fossil oil to heat 
the houses or drive to them.



What’s different now?



1)  Never before have houses been this big and required this much energy to 
heat and cool.
2)  Never before has a country gone this much into debt and with dubious 
financial schemes like ARMs, interest only loans, and the like.
3) Never before has consumer debt and revolving debt been so easily obtained 
and casually used to cover increasing expenses.
4) Never before has oil reached its depletion peak at the same time as a 
housing slow down.
5) Never before have people in such numbers spent the phantom "equity" in 
their homes with the assumption that the value would just keep rising.
6) Never before have large corporations such as the Toll Bros. cranked out 
houses in such numbers on an industrial scale.
7) Never before have such large numbers of people been employed in the 
building trades and then suddenly find that the demand for houses has sharply 
dropped.

Any one taken by itself might make the situation a little worse than it 
otherwise might have been but taken together they just might create the 
"Perfect 
Storm".

At any rate, everything goes in cycles -- until it quits going in cycles.   
Everything operates on a past pattern -- until it doesn’t.



Is that happening now?  I don’t know.  But for sure …things are more like 
they are now than they have ever been before!