KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Monday January 10 Housing and Economic stories

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Matthew McConaughey's mobile home - (www.architecturaldigest.com) He may be known for his easygoing brand of beach living, but Matthew McConaughey, the star of A Time to Kill (1996) and The Wedding Planner (2001), is equally passionate about life on the open road. And if his house can travel with him, well, so much the better. “There’s an old African proverb,” offers McConaughey, apropos of his affinity for wheeled domiciles. “ ‘Architecture is a verb.’ ” “I’ve always loved drivin’,” he proclaims in his Texas twang. “Drivin’ is, number one, where I get some time with myself. Number two, it’s the main place I catch up on music. And number three, it’s the best way to see the country. In 1996 I got a big GMC van—it’s called Cosmo—and gutted it and put in a bed in the back, a refrigerator and a VCR so I could watch dailies or whatever. But still it was a pretty cramped style. So I started looking at Airstreams.” Airstreams, for the uninitiated, are aluminum-clad recreational vehicles that were originally marketed in the 1930s by Wally Byam, a Los Angeles publisher who devoted much of his time to leading Airstream expeditions around the world. The Airstream’s rounded body “is a beautiful piece of art and aerodynamically very functional,” notes McConaughey, who four years ago fell hard for a 2004 Airstream International CCD 28.

Trying to Overcome the Stubborn Blight of Vacancies - (www.nytimes.com) In its heyday in the 1930s, this Rust Belt town called itself the City of Homes, a place where a working-class man could be master of his own castle. But when it fell upon hard times, thousands of homes fell into foreclosure in one of the first modern mortgage crises. Thirty years later, many of those houses still sit, their boarded-up windows staring like dead eyes into Youngstown’s streets. As cities around the country try to pick apart the snarl left by the foreclosure crisis, Youngstown stands out as a troubling specter of how hard it is to have success. Its vacant-building rate is still 20 times the national average, according to figures provided by John D. Bralich, a researcher at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University. But despite the city’s best efforts to deal with the vacant structures — including, most recently, a handful of legal remedies meant to increase municipal control — they remain a maddeningly intractable problem.

Opposition to the Euro Grows in Germany - (www.spiegel.de) Surveys show that many Germans are worried about the future of the euro, but the country's political parties are not taking their fears seriously. The number of grassroots initiatives against the common currency is increasing, and political observers say a Tea Party-style anti-euro movement could do well. As a playwright, Rolf Hochhuth knows how to use timing to achieve the greatest possible impact. In the 1960s, he criticized the pope for remaining silent about the Holocaust. When everyone in the world was talking about globalization, he took to the theater stage and unmasked consulting companies like McKinsey as exploitation machines. Now Hochhuth is campaigning against the euro -- and his stage is Germany's Constitutional Court. "Why should we help rescue the Greeks from their sham bankruptcy?" he asks. "Ever since Odysseus, the world has known that the Greeks are the biggest rascals of all time. How is it even possible -- unless it was premeditated -- for this highly popular tourist destination to go bankrupt?" In the spring, he joined a group led by Berlin-based professor Markus Kerber that has filed a constitutional complaint against the billions in aid to Greece and the establishment of the European stabilization fund, which was set up in May 2010. Hochhuth wants the deutsche mark back. "I don't know if this is possible. I only know that Germany lived very well with the mark."

Going Bankrupt: 100 Bailed Out Banks - (www.ritholtz.com) The WSJ reports today that nearly 100 U.S. banks that got TARP funds from the federal government in Q4 2008 are in danger of going bankrupt. So far, 7 bailout recipients have failed, resulting in more than $2.7 billion in lost TARP funds. The balance of the remaining potential failures relatively small banks — the median size was $439 million in assets, and the median TARP infusion was $10 million apiece: “Nearly 100 U.S. banks that got bailout funds from the federal government show signs they are in jeopardy of failing. The total, based on an analysis of third-quarter financial results by The Wall Street Journal, is up from 86 in the second quarter, reflecting eroding capital levels, a pileup of bad loans and warnings from regulators. The 98 banks in shaky condition got more than $4.2 billion in infusions from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. When TARP was created in the heat of the financial crisis, government officials said it would help only healthy banks. The depth of today’s problems for some of the institutions, however, suggests that a number of them were in parlous shape from the beginning.”