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Home prices were down nearly 20% at the end of last year, according to two new reports. But there is plenty of further room to fall, say economists who forecast where the housing market is headed. The median sales price of existing homes fell to $175,400 in December, down 15.3% from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). And the S&P/Case-Shiller index shows that home prices in 20 cities fell 18.2% in November compared with the year before. Both measures make houses about as expensive as they were...
...calculate the ratio, Economy.com starts with the median price of a single-family home sold in a particular metro area, using data from the National Association of Realtors. That number then gets divided by what the average apartment would rent for over the course of a year, a number generated by the real-estate-research outfit Property & Portfolio Research. Since each metro area has its own characteristics - there's a lot more land to build on in Oklahoma City than there is in Oakland, Calif., for example - certain pockets of the country have naturally higher price-rent ratios than...
...survey of 4,500 captive elephants worldwide, a team of researchers from the U.K., Canada and Kenya found that once you lock up the giant, space-loving beasts, their health suffers, their median life span plummets, and they quit breeding - the last things you would want for a creature you're ostensibly trying to help survive. "Whether or not it's valid to say zoos keep species alive depends on which species you're talking about," says animal-welfare scientist Georgia Mason of the University of Guelph in Ontario. "Many species do well. Elephants don't." (See TIME...
...findings reported in the new paper, it's the life-span numbers that are the most shocking. Among African elephants, zoo-born females live a median of 16.9 years in zoos, while those in the wild make it to a wizened 56. Asian elephants, the more endangered of the two species, live 18.9 years in captivity and 41.7 in the wild. A few superannuated wild elephants have actually reached their 70s, and in Kenya, from 30% to 50% of the noncaptive population hits at least 50. "So far," says Mason, one of the authors of the new study, published...
About the only bright spot with the current housing crisis is that the median cost for housing is dropping. The Greater Fort Lauderdale area shows a drop in its median condo prices, from $160,000 last year to $115,000 today, according to the Realtor Association of Greater Fort Lauderdale. That's good for those who have money in their pockets or access to credit. While homes in the area may be more affordable, some potential buyers are having trouble coming up with the money to purchase them. But for now, Florida's governor would be happy to help homeowners...