The nation's HUD secretary, Shaun Donovan, was in New Jersey yesterday talking about the housing crisis. He pointed out that New Jersey has had a tough time of it in the foreclosure department: We've seen foreclosures rise by 17 percent over the past 12 months, while at the national level, they've declined 16 percent over the same period.
At the same time, though, we've seen prices stabilizing, and the Times ran a piece last week about how the northern half of the state was showing the symptoms of a full-blown housing recovery. They listed seven Jersey counties with the healthiest real estate markets: Bergen, Essex, Morris, Union, Mercer, Middlesex and right here in Somerset county.
What we appear to be seeing is a bifurcated housing market, where the upper end is recovering nicely and the lesser end is still struggling. There's no such thing, really, as a statewide housing market, just as there's no such thing as a national housing market; the people shopping for a home in Basking Ridge are very different from the people shopping for a home in Trenton or in Ocean City.
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