Trump rooted for the market crash that left Montana families homeless

Mr. Trump said he is poised to invest in depressed property as the downturn moves through individual cities. ‘People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is,’ he said. ‘I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.’

Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008 and millions of Americans lost their homes, Donald Trump said he was hoping for a crash. ‘I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,’ Trump said in a 2006 audiobook from Trump University, answering a question about ‘gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.’

Unfortunately, affordability is about the only piece of good news in a year when Montana’s housing markets continued to suffer their third year of decline. Residential real estate markets across Montana were generally characterized by low prices and sales volumes in 2010, with only mild upticks in a few areas balanced by sizable declines in others. Even though the national economic recession officially ended in mid-2009, it is clear that Montana’s housing malaise continued virtually unabated through last year.

The continued distress of Montana’s residential construction industry is most apparent in viewing the continued downward trend in new housing starts. Since many unincorporated areas within Montana counties do not require building permits, we combined permit data with data on new residential electric service permits (in non-permit-issuing jurisdictions) to estimate housing starts for the eight major markets in Montana. The data presented in Figure 6 show that the steep declines in new building that began in 2008 have continued, largely unabated, in 2010. Declines in new home construction continued even in markets like Yellowstone and Cascade counties that have seen smaller declines in prices. Housing starts in these two communities were down by 45.5 and 51.3 percent in 2010 from their 2007 levels, respectively.

But the construction declines have been the most severe in the counties that saw the highest construction levels prior to the housing bust – Flathead and Gallatin counties. Gallatin’s decline decelerated slightly in 2010, with 12.1 percent fewer housing starts than the previous year. Flathead County suffered the steepest home building drop of any major market in the state, with just 165 units built in 2010, a 48.1 percent drop from 2009, and a 82.9 percent decline from construction levels in 2007.

The data on the top of the first page tracks changes in the median purchase price of single family homes, and in the Montana Department of Revenue median valuation of condominiums, townhomes and manufactured housing, between 2008 and 2010. The data on median purchase price of single family homes comes from realty transfer records of properties taxed by the state from the Montana Department of Revenue for each of the indicated years. To allow for comparability, sales were limited to residential properties that did not include acreage in the sales price beyond the lot with the house. The median sale price of all single family homes statewide declined from 2008 to 2010 by 3.5% to $175,000.

There was wide variation in home purchase prices from 2008 to 2010 at the county level, ranging from a 29.42% decline in the combined sales for Prairie and Wibaux Counties to $36,000 to a 45.45% increase in Toole County to $92,000. Statistics for counties with too few sales were combined with neighboring counties for statistical purposes.

In general, counties with low sales numbers are more likely to have big changes between the two years because unusually high or low purchase amounts have a greater effect on the median. Statistics for counties with populations over 50,000 indicated that median purchases prices fell from 2008 to 2010 in Flathead (-4.7% to $223,000), Gallatin (-13.16% to $236,000) and Lewis and Clark (-3.76% to $192,000) counties, stayed nearly the same in Missoula County (0.66% at $230,000), rose by 1.83% in Cascade County to $152,750 and rose by 4.92% in Yellowstone County to $189,900 in 2010. Purchase prices statewide for single family homes in 2010 ranged from $25,000 in Daniels County to $236,000 in Gallatin County, with 27 counties under $100,000, 23 counties between $100,000 and $200,000, and six counties topping $200,000.

The numbers of homeless persons in 2010-2012 are 32% higher than the average number reported in the five years before. The regions with the biggest increases in homeless persons were Glendive, Kalispell and Missoula. The largest number of all homeless persons outside (not in shelters or transitional housing) was in the Missoula region with 108, followed by the Kalispell region that jumped from 27 in 2011 to 103 in 2012.