Housing prices in New York, San Francisco, and Boston, are soaring well above levels in the country as a whole, with comic results; here in Boston people sometimes wind up buying condos on Beacon Hill the size of closets in the houses they moved out of in Texas. Atrios says bully for "decadent liberal socialist enclaves"; Nathan Newman blames preservationists, at least in New York, for opposing new buildings.

But that's just talking about housing prices. What intrigues me is rents. In Boston at least, housing prices are continuing to go up, as in the other decadent liberal socialist enclaves, but rents have been stable or declining the past few years. And as I may have noted before, if you take rents as a measure of underlying value, that's a symptom more than anything else of a bubble in the market.