:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 ::

More demand, but more supply, too
The demand for housing has diminished as unemployment and other financial pressures have forced college graduates to stay with their parents and whole families to move in with their relatives. But longer term, that demand is expected to be "extremely sound," says Steve Melman, director of economic services at the National Association of Home Builders, or NAHB, in Washington, D.C.

Melman expects a resurgence to occur as economic conditions improve and the children of the baby boomers, called the echo boomers, enter their peak homebuying years.

Demand for housing already has returned to some extent and may increase further in 2010. The National Association of Realtors, or NAR, recently reported that pending home sales rose for nine consecutive months through October 2009. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement that existing home sales should number 5.5 million to 6 million annually based on population growth, but that sales were "well below the 5 million mark" before the federal homebuyer tax credit was offered.

Yet even an increase in demand may not be enough to match the number of sellers, warns Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development in Los Angeles.

"Before, there was an unlimited supply of buyers because of the baby-boom generation," he says. "But now that unlimited supply of buyers is going to turn into an unlimited supply of sellers."

Myers says sellers eventually will outnumber buyers, unless a greater effort is made to "cultivate" them.

"There is a shortage of young people all over the country relative to the number of seniors in the future, so they'll all need to step up to meet the supply of homes for sale," says Myers.

The implications for current homeowners could be dire if Myers' read is correct as a supply-and-demand imbalance of such magnitude could cause home prices to decline. The solution? Myers recommends a greater investment in education so more young people will be able to afford to own a home in the future.

If the boomers were the pig in the python, the echoers are the stomach stoma. More education now is only a patch and probably not an adequate one. Simply put, more people equals more demand. And the idea that all children ever aborted would have been impoverished criminals anyway is a ridiculous cliche. Of all the people I've known I can't think of ONE who would not have been able to offer her progeny higher education had s/he not been aborted.

Since 1973 an entire generation of human beings, I call them the ripplers, has been wiped out. And we are practically stupid to think that the loss of this many people will have little or no effect on us morally, emotionally, socially, financially. Mary Shelley's message was a good one: mess with mother nature, get Frankenstein (in oh so many ways).

So I contend that part of the reason your home value may be in question is due to the rippler effect. Remember that the next time you tell someone abortion isn't your issue.

:: ashli 9:45 AM # ::
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We're buying a new house. We were in our old house for 15 years. It's a weird feeling. I like where we're going, but our old home has seen a lot of drama and contains within its walls basically all of my adult history. Also...it's the only place where my first child and me were alive and together.

The surprising thing is that I feel the loss of this house in a way I wouldn't if I had not aborted my little one thirteen years ago. I suppose I still have myself, my womb that I carry with me everywhere, but it's no consolation. There's something awful attached to that "landmark:" it was a temporary home for my child, and then it was a crime scene. It's like the hotel room where 5-year-old Shaniya Davis was defiled and victimized within an inch of her life: not only do you not ever want to go there, you feel it should be firebombed off the face of the earth. So I take no comfort in my own biology; it's no kind of positive focal point for the two of us. Gentle sentimental winds do not blow within those walls.

The new house is nice and roomy. I think how one of our family will not be making the move with us, will not be there to enjoy it or the children across the street. These are unhappy thoughts that were not expected, so I find that I'm still living the abortion experience in different ways and always will. I'm like the 79-year-old Gloria Swanson who, three years before her death, began and ended her memoirs with the loss of her child via abortion. It was the mark-maker, the beginning and end, emotionally all-encompassing.

At the restaurant today my kids and husband went to get their food leaving me sitting alone at the table. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by thought and emotion surrounding our first wee one. Tears fell on the table in such a public place. I had to wipe them quickly up and repair before anyone saw, because how can I explain that I am simply moving and it has triggered something awful and refreshed the deepest agony I have ever known.

The debilitating maternal illness from which I suffered was for a time. Abortion is forever.

I traded diamonds for dirt. Nothing was worth this. Nothing upon nothing.

:: ashli 9:31 PM # ::
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It has been 13 years today since my husband and I ended the life of our first child in a second trimester abortion. A day hasn't gone by that I did not think of him/her, want him/her, miss him/her. More important than what we miss is what s/he misses each passing day and year: life and all the wonder of it.

Tennessee, if we had not ended your life in January you'd be 13 in July. I'd have a teenager. It's amazing and sad to think of all that you are missing, because my health care sucked and I couldn't hack a severe case of HG unmanaged and virtually unassisted. These things are no excuse, but I know things could have been different for us, and they are different for many others because of you. Your life, however abbreviated, was and is important. Small consolation.

I think of myself at age 13. The bud began its blossom; 13 is a special time. The last year of Jr. High. School dances. Hormones. Crushes. Cliques. The beginning of so many new and worthwhile experiences. You will miss it all. We robbed you of it. How to navigate life after such a contradiction...

It is my faith that where you are is better. Yet there is still something so sad about you missing this life (and something unspeakably horrible about you missing it on your parents' account). This life is something special. It's such a unique experience and valuable because of that uniqueness. It's more than intuition; God provided for this life. There's a reason. What it is I cannot say. I only know that it is so, or else it wouldn't be--we wouldn't be, this life wouldn't be...but only harps and halos, and it's not. You should be here, like so many other boys and girls, and you're not. And it's a terrible, shrouded reality.

No one remembers except me...and your dad who has not said a word about it, but the crease in his forehead deepens above dark thoughts. I know he knows, for he saw me crying days ago in anticipation. It has been a strange year, this one. I may come to see you soon, if God allows. And you know your aunt, who has lost two to abortion and who yet supports abortion, has only just had a new baby. We thought that sweet little one would come on your day, and oh, what a strange conflict that would have posed with no one at all remembering you and our sorrow, and evermore would rage a family-wide celebration when silently, inwardly your day was upon our minuscule, lonely pair. I prayed so that the bairn would come early or late but not, dear God, on his due date, the anniversary of your death. And lo, the 26th found him squalling at his mother's breast and me desperately grateful. Your day remains yours without distraction or added conflict and pain. Such pathetic consolation, but there it is.

Your dad, brother and sister are out. I have been given rare alone time. Time to spend with the memory of you. Time to wrinkle time and run through impossible schematics. Time to dream of saving your life again and again. Time to imagine complete evaporation of the hideousness that abortion wrought into all our lives. Oh why, why, WHY? All this pointless pain! Such a dreadful waste; your life was no trade. You were the most precious thing I had, and I responded to my crushing by crushing you. So young and dumb, I knew no other way--or more honestly, I would consider no other way. And now I know on the other side of life how late it is. And it grows with each passing year, the gap between us, the furrow of regret. Who says it gets easier? It only grows more quiet. Cancer is often very quiet but will kill one all the same. (Reader, take heed.)

What is there to do but let you rest as you will whether or not I grant it now. So it's hopeless for here. In this life. It is indeed. Abortion has simplified everything in a most awful manner. When you were alive there were unanswered questions; we were in the heart of God's Hand, carried by the waves to where I couldn't say. When you were sadly ended it was hopeless with no chance of arriving anywhere; the bell jar was all. What a terrible thing.

Hopeless. I turn the word over and over. It will not conform. It just won't be anything else. Very stubborn is hopelessness. Very unyielding. You are gone. And I am dead inside somewhere...that part of me that was and is your mother and can't live without you. That part is gone and yet remains; my house is haunted by it's tiny, murdered occupant. And I don't regret those rattling chains a bit, because, as I have told your brother and sister time and again lately, love never dies. Abortion, while the antithesis of love, cannot touch love, cannot damage it in the least, and I am glad of that.

So this evening, in the agony of an empty you-shaped space, I hold the memory of your existence in the impenetrable womb of my soul where love grows safely in the deep black loam of the Restoration that is sure to come.

I am ever sorry, my very precious one. My regret is the deepest chasm.

To you, and to the Restoration,
Mom

:: ashli 7:04 PM # ::
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