OK, so I am usually a dyed-in-the-wool champion of the free market… unless, of course, it’s doing something bad to me. In this case, the national slump in new home sales has driven the builder of my subdivision to take a different approach. Instead of selling their new construction outright, they are coaxing people into “lease-options”… effectively turning all the unsold houses the subdivision into very large stand-alone apartments. I don’t have any particular problems with apartments, per se as I lived in them for a long time and enjoyed it, but the approach he decided to take does all sorts of weird shit to the value of the existing stock of houses, particularly to those of us who bought into the subdivision early. The builder is in it to make a profit and I can’t fault him for that, but still, it creates a giant pain in the ass for me… and we all know what I think of things that do that.