Real Estate Jumps Again — and the Paper Warns the Speculators
Spokane Falls lots take 'another heavy advance' this week, and the editor worries that 'exorbitant prices do more injury than good' to a town that needs builders, not gamblers.
We are informed that real estate in this city took another heavy advance this week, and that the demand remains active at the increased prices. Of course when men buy lots for speculation prices are bound to keep moving, and as the last purchaser adds a certain per cent to the valuation for the purpose of realizing from the investment. Yet it cannot be denied that exorbitant prices do more injury than good to any city, for men cannot pay fancy figures for lots with any prospect of building to advantage. It is one of the inalienable rights of man to ask anything he pleases for his own property, and we have no objections to seeing buyers make money out of their speculations, but parties with moderate means are driven away when real estate becomes unreasonably high. We do not expect to hear of property depreciating on the strength of this mild expostulation, and growing as it is, real estate is bound to sell on a rising market, but we have no admiration for such extravagant prices as were reported this week.
“Parties with moderate means are driven away when real estate becomes unreasonably high.”
The editor's worry — that speculation drives out the moderate-means builders a town actually needs — is the same argument made about Spokane housing costs today. In the 1880s the fear was lots priced beyond carpenters; now it is rents and home prices beyond working families. The paper's 'mild expostulation' is a recognizable genre.
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