From the Roundtable: Local housing market decline alarming, but rebound invariable

It began as a tip from a bank president—the news that government-sponsored mortgage agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had placed the Columbia metropolitan area on its list of declining real estate markets.

Including Boone and adjacent Howard counties, this designation aligns our area with McDonald County, hard on the Arkansas border in southwest Missouri. The immediate effect will be a 5 percent boost in the required down payment on many home mortgage loans.

There’s no denying the growing mortgage loan crisis in this country. Boom and bust cycles are emblematic of our national economy, with crises invariably requiring government bailouts in one form or another. Now we’re discovering that our tranquil bailiwick of relative immunity from the vagaries of business cycles is not, in fact, so isolated.

Those who track the numbers tell us homes are still being bought and sold at a healthy pace. While I won’t argue with their census of transactions, tales are beginning to pile up about the steadily increasing span between the date a property is first listed and the date the deal is closed. Just as alarming is the decline in valuation and the discount or “hit” many sellers are forced to take just to shed what was once their cherished home.

It always seems to happen. A property that sold for $100,000 sees its value double or triple over a short number of years because there’s something neat about it or it happens to be located in a trendy neighborhood. The uptick is
fine while its lasts, but these cycles of inflation invariably bust.

The tunes Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are shouting our way right now are discordant and atonal. Over time, the music the Federal Reserve Board is forcing us to face will turn more melodic and soothing. Meanwhile, we’ll pass through the painful workout that brought us here and the need to get it over with. Time will be the healer, as it always seems to be.

Remembering Carl Sneed
The violent explosion that destroyed a Columbia residence last week and shattered an honored family brings back a fleeting personal vignette. Along with the tragedy of death, family heartbreak and personal misery comes the obliteration of this family’s memories encapsulated in all the accumulated but irreplaceable memorabilia the explosion destroyed.

The late Carl Sneed was born here in Columbia in 1921 and graduated from Hickman High School in 1938. His picture appears in the Cresset, the school’s yearbook, which notes he was active in organizations including Blue Triangle, French Club and the Airplane and Radio Club. Sneed is the center of attention in the photo of this last group, demonstrating a small model airplane. The roster of his classmates includes many familiar old
Columbia family names, including Dr. Hugh Stephenson—a junior that year—whose physician father was vice president of the Board of Education.

The 70-year-old Cresset is a remarkable icon of a simpler life in Columbia, when the community was about a sixth the size it is today. Hickman was still segregated but already offered a full range of academic and athletic activities as well as more than 40 extra-curricular clubs and organizations

On a personal note, I met Dr. Sneed more than 40 years ago through a classified advertisement in one of the local newspapers. In need of some quick cash, I decided to sell my prized FM tuner that I had acquired after many hours of cutting peoples’ lawns. Dr. Sneed was interested. He drove over in his VW and brought me back to the now demolished residence on McNab Drive where I met his family and we concluded the transaction.

A man of almost universal interests, one of his passions was classical music, and the roof of his house was festooned with various antennae designed to capture elusive classical music broadcasts from wherever, whenever conditions allowed. Down in the basement, he pointed to an elaborate short-wave set-up that no longer worked as well as it used to, which is why he had the yen to try FM reception. We chatted for a while and discovered many common points of interest just as former colleagues and thousands of his students would attest to today.

I rue the loss of people like Dr. Sneed and the bald fact that most of us never have the opportunity to meet and visit with the plethora of interesting folks who are living amongst us. Here was someone with an interesting life story and a core of memories, and now he is gone. Along with it went the memorabilia that would have helped historians re-create the life of another one of our remarkable but largely un-noticed local citizens.