True North

The Minneapolis Board of Realtors put out today a report on the number of sales they estimate have been either foreclosures or "short sales". It is partially an attempt to get people to understand that the market for traditional sales -- where the owner is selling the house and the bank is a passive party -- has not fallen in prices nearly as fast as suggested in the aggregated data.

Not surprisingly, lender-mediated homes have seen a substantial increase in total market share over the last 24 months. The percent of total new residential listings in the Twin Cities 13-county region that are flagged as foreclosures or short sales using our methodology has shown steady growth, rising from 2.9 percent in Q1 2006 to 7.1 percent in Q1 2007 and 21.7 percent in Q1 2008.

Ed Morrissey is right in pointing out that the private sector works in how the I-35W bridge might now be open in September rather than in December.

Perhaps at some point, people will learn to harness the power of the private sector more completely for future public efforts as well. If we started to apply this lesson to non-emergencies as well as emergencies, perhaps we would have fewer of the latter. When we incentivize success, we succeed. When we incentivize bureaucracy, we get red tape, delays, and frustration.

I hope the planners of the DeSoto bridge reconstruction are paying attention. They might want to invite Flatiron to bid on the project. (If they could also reopen the old Flatiron Tavern, it'd do this St. Cloudian's heart good after I get done recovering.)

What the STrib article made very interesting to me was how they structured the incentives in the I35 contract to get faster delivery from Flatiron: