Carol Ditmore
Director
If you are a news junky and read as much as I do, very often within the span of a day or two, you will read stories that give contradicting data and analysis about political, social, health or financial issues. When confronted with completely diametrical information, you sometimes realize that both may contain some truth. Yet some matters truly cannot be understood without looking at all sides, and such unbiased analysis seems to be harder and harder to come by these days.
Some months ago, the irony of two potentially true but very different housing market headlines had me thinking about this dilemma. In this case, one – that senior housing wealth had reached a record high of $7.17 trillion, against – two, warnings of a sweeping silver tsunami, with lines of homeless seniors vying for the last bed at the nearest shelter. Yet the singular housing story that applies to the majority of Arizonans, a story never written, is that most of us will live a lifetime gaining very modest equity through real estate and, thankfully, never experience an issue with housing. As a result, talk of a housing “crisis” does not always resonate with the general public.