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Dramatic images from the California desert inspired the second major economy story of the day--the state of the housing market. NBC's Lee Cowan and ABC's Brian Rooney were on the scene in Victorville when the Guaranty Bank of Texas ordered the demolition of 16 freshly built homes, sticker price $300,000 each. "You can still smell fresh timber in the air," sniffed NBC's Cowan. "You can see the insulation here, some copper pipe and brand new roofing tiles," ABC's Rooney demonstrated. "This pile of rubble is all that is left of four model homes fully built and ready to move in." The median price of a home in Victorville has fallen from $325,000 to $115,000, Rooney explained, and the bank that foreclosed on the developer found it cheaper to raze the homes than to complete them and try to sell them.
NBC's Cowan estimated that there are 9,000 uncompleted homes on building sites throughout the state of California. CBS' John Blackstone took us to the "notorious" community of Mountain House, some 60 miles east of San Francisco, where last fall fully 90% of the 3,000 residents were under water, as the saying goes, owing more on their mortgage than the home was worth on the market. Unlike Victorville, the theme in Mountain House is sales instead of demolition: "The wave of foreclosures is attracting new buyers…People coming in now are getting bargains."
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