Housing Woes Hit Affluent Middle-Class Homeowners

"We put a lot of cash down, we didn’t take out a subprime loan. But we never thought we’d have a hard time selling a great home in a wonderful neighborhood."

...

THE market here isn’t like those of Florida or California, which have followed a boom-and-bust pattern, or of Cleveland, where foreclosures have overwhelmed entire neighborhoods.

Instead, what’s playing out here is a kind of paralysis, with wide swaths of the market frozen and only the very top end showing signs of life.

This may hint at what’s in store for other real estate markets around the nation that managed to avoid the excesses of the last decade but still find themselves struggling now.

Indeed, the recent economic trajectory of Greensboro, a city of 242,000 smack in the middle of the rolling Carolina Piedmont, has run parallel to that of the country as a whole.