Complaints, not solutions

I approved the following comment this morning on Sold for gain and the proposed final budget but I thought it deserved starting a new thread.

Elaine,

Where have you been the last 10 years. Did we not have one of the worst housing slumps in history? That being said, I purchased a home in 2004 and sold that same home in 2010 for a 22% increase. I think you need to stop polarizing everything. I follow your blog regularly because of the level of information, which i do appreciate. But all I ever he[a]r are complaints not solutions. Saying that we should do something differently is no a solution.

Sean Sullivan

Sean raises some good points. Sean is one of the lucky ones, selling his house for $223,000, just above the average list price according to Zillow. He bought it for $183,900, so I trust his math is correct. However, I am all out of solutions. I started lebocitizens.com to get the facts out to people. I thought creating this blog would open up much needed dialog.  I have no solutions, Sean. Thanks for being a faithful reader. I am opening this up to all who follow this blog. What IS the solution?

Sold for gain and the proposed final budget

From a blog reader:

I went to Zillow (the real estate web site) to have a look at some Mt. Lebanon statistics. I'm impressed with what you can find on that site. One extremely interesting eye-opener is a metric called "sold for gain" - click HERE to have a look. The chart starts at May 1, 2002, and ends on February 1, 2012 - so far, anyway. People are selling homes in Lebo all right - but the number who are selling for no gain or at a loss has increased dramatically.

Also, I didn't want anyone to miss the 2012-13 Proposed Final Budget. http://www.mtlsd.org/district/budget/stuff/2012.13_proposed_budget_4.16.12.pdf