The Best And Worst Cities For Home Values In 2011

California touts the most metros on the list

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Poor Florida. The state that is home to Disney World, key lime pie and the Daytona 500 hasn't had much to crow about when it comes to real estate in recent years. Sorry to break it to Sunshine Staters, but they shouldn't be expecting a rebound anytime soon either.

That's according to Local Market Monitor (LMM), a Cary, N.C.-based real estate research firm that crunched the numbers for our list of the best and worst cities for home values in 2011. One list includes the 10 cities where home values are expected to rise the most in 2011, and the other the 10 cities where they are expected to fall the most.

LMM tracks 315 American real estate markets, assessing values and applying Investment Suitability ratings based on multiple factors. For the Forbes lists, LMM President Ingo Winzer and his researchers started with a U.S. Census-defined list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas with populations of 500,000 residents or more. They then analyzed key economic factors that directly affect housing markets: unemployment and job growth rates, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. LMM tracks real estate markets' valuations based on the theory that markets go through cycles.

From Forbes.com

In Pictures: The 10 Best Housing Markets Of The Decade

In Pictures: America's Most Affordable Cities

The Six Best Cities To Buy A Home

The Six Best Cities To Rent A Home

In Pictures: 10 Cities Where Home Prices Are Falling Dangerously

IN PICTURES: Cities Where Home Values Will Rise In 2011

"We see a predictable pathway that home prices follow," explains Winzer. "If you know where in the cycle a market is, you can make some predictions about where it will go in the next one, two, three years."

Assessing the progression of those market cycles means comparing average "actual" home prices to equilibrium home prices--meaning where prices should be in the absence of market distortions that result from speculation and mismatches between population growth and new home construction. Another tool is peak-to-trough analyses, which factors in the number of single-family and multi-family housing permits active in each city, as recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Do Revolutions Create Good Governments?

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Much has been written, voiced, and tweeted in eager support of the revolution that took place in Tunisia, and the movements currently fomenting in Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, and even Yemen. The prospect of democracy in places where it has been denied is undeniably exciting. But one only needs to look at revolutionary movements of the past to understand that they don't always lead to favorable or their purported outcomes. In fact, there's a long and varied history of revolutions in the world producing leaders equally if not more repressive than those they deposed, creating governments no more democratic than whatever was in place before. See the cases of Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, or Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France.

Often the new rulers end up inciting a few violent uprisings of their own in the classic case of revolution-turned-regime. Thus, a few observers are urging caution. You shouldn't always "favorpeople in the streets," says Nicholas Thompson at the New Yorker, linking to a David Remnick article that notes that Lenin himself came to power by dissolving a democratically-elected government. Technology can help both sides, he says, and Twitter support isn't everything:

The other thing to worry, or at least wonder, about is how revolutions inspired by the Internet will change their countries. Movements that center around [Twitter] hashtags often don’t center around leaders. Who is the Václav Havel of Tunisia? Headless movements have advantages: are the charismatic people who are best at leading protests really the people you want to lead your country after the government changes? But they also have disadvantages: if a government falls, who, then, will run it?

Leslie H. Gelb brings up Russia's example as well at The Daily Beast. "In rotten regimes that fall to street mobs, the historical pattern has been moderates followed by new dictators," he says. "Just remember the model of the Bolsheviks, a tiny group of extremely well-organized communists, wresting control away from the great majority of discontented and disorganized Russians in 1917."

The message: it doesn't matter if the revolution will be televised, g-chatted, or tweeted--it matters what the long term results will be.

WikiLeaks Releases New Cables About Egypt

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By ELSPETH REEVE | January 28, 2011 5:39pm

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WikiLeaks has released new secret State Department cables showing the U.S.'s growing uneasiness with the Egyptian government--including its suppression of the press. In an attempted to silence critics and stop protests that have intensified in the past week, Egypt has switched off the Internet within its borders. Mediaite's Alex Alvarez points to several revealing cables from the latest WikiLeaks dump.

In September 2009, a State Department worker said Hosni Mubarak's government had taken a "series of selective actions" against bloggers, reporters, and a poet. In January of that year, a cable warned of police brutality, and that bad training led to coerced confessions. In January 2010, a cable said the government insisted it hadn't abused prisoners "in the past ten years." Egypt's state of emergency--invoked since 1967--allows the government to indefinitely detain people arrested without charge, a rule that has been used on labor demonstrators and bloggers, a memo from January 2010 said. Mubarak's son Gamal has his eyes on his dad's office, and has worked to eliminate the competition, a, April 2007 cable said.

• WikiLeaks Helped Spark Protests, By the Way, Robyn Creswell writes at N + 1, referring to an earlier leak-dump in December. Egyptians hate their government and are furious about recent elections, but "another remote cause, however limited and difficult to assess, is the release of WikiLeaks documents. A cache of diplomatic cables relating to the Middle East was published in early December by the independent newspaper al-Akhbar, and the leaks have been intensively discussed by Arab bloggers and political activists. Few subjects anger Egyptians more than their regime’s cooperation with Israel, and several leaked documents suggest just how closely the two countries' diplomats and security forces work together" 

• Shows the Futility of Pushing Political Reform, Daniel Larison argues at The American Conservative. Larison notes that the new cables show Mubarak is skeptical of the U.S.'s urging of political reform. And maybe Mubarak is right. "One thing to take away from this is that every other time the U.S. has claimed to be seriously interested in promoting political reform in the Near East, it has either been associated with the empowerment of militants and terrorists, the devastation and occupation of an entire country, or some combination of the two." So maybe Mubarak is more savvy than the pro-reform West. "It should also drive home just how irrelevant American advocacy for reform really is: advocacy for these things has been going on all this time, and if anything Mubarak has simply become more stubborn and skeptical of the idea."

• Paying Lip Service to Internet Freedom, Wired's Spencer Ackerman writes. President Obama has called for more Internet freedom around the world, but hasn't done that much to convince protesters the U.S. is really on their side. "And it shows the Internet Freedom Agenda to be a dodge. ... Asking Mubarak to bring back the Internet pales in comparison to the annual $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid he receives. ... Keep pushing Internet freedom, and you risk weaken your allies' usefulness. ... So far, the U.S. is trying to have it both ways--which isn’t going to earn it any goodwill by the people who might take the place of the region's dictators, no matter how much the U.S. stands up for their right to tweet."

• Triumph of WikiLeaks, Stephen Blackwell writes at Death and Taxes. "The US State Department’s witch hunt for Julian Assange has toned down recently, perhaps because WikiLeaks’ potency as global news source has increased. In some ways, WikiLeaks has become an almanac for bad things that are going to happen in the world." Like many Americans, Blackwell says he had no idea Egypt wasn't a promising "beacon of semi-democracy" in the Middle East. In reality, "The Egyptian government, led by the 30-years-in-power-but-still-not-a-dictator Hosni Mubarak, jails bloggers and protesters, despises Facebook, and has shut off access to the Internet, an inglorious solution only a dictator would come to..."

SOURCES

• Latest Leaks Alex Alvarez, Mediaite
• More Than Tweets Spencer Ackerman, Wired
• Cables Were Critical Robyn Creswell, N + 1
• Remember the Shah Daniel Larison, The American Conservative

The gorilla that walks like a man

A rather intimidating video shows a Silverback gorilla strolling about on his hind legs evokes the sci-fi film, The Planet of the Apes

Ambam, the Silverback gorilla, first learned to balance upright and then mastered a human-like gait. Photo: Screen shot

The video: Ambam, a 21-year-old Silverback gorilla at Britain's Port Lympne Wild Animal Park, has startled his keepers and the internet by teaching himself to walk upright like a human. A short video of the brawny, 6-foot-tall Ambam strutting his stuff with purpose has quickly racked up more than 300,000 YouTube views. (Watch below.) Experts suspect the gorilla adjusted his stance in order to carry larger amounts of food and peer over his pen's walls. While other gorillas have been known to stand upright, few have perfected such a human-like gait.
The reaction: While this is eerily reminiscent of Planet of the Apes, saysThe Economic Times, it's also significant because it suggests "the development gap (between humans and apes) is being closed pretty rapidly." We're watching Ambam as he is "reproducing that almost mythical moment from evolutionary history" when our ancestors stood up for the first time, writes Dr. Charlotte Uhlenbroek at The Daily Mail. This may seem harmless, jokes Alex Balk at The Awl, but it's only a matter of time before the gorillas take over and we humans are overrun. "This guy is just hoping that if he keeps quiet about it for now he will get some kind of supervisory role in the new regime. Consider yourselves warned." Watch Ambam walk: