The Bulletin gets mostly real.

When the Bulletin does one of its surveys of the local economy, I usually find myself taking a counter-view. This time around, it's more like nit-picking.

In fact, it's almost like I'm reading something that I or one of the other bubble bloggers wrote a year or two ago.

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But first, I can't help commenting on the other business page article: "Teeny Big-Box Stores."

That sounds familiar. I think we used to have a name for that. Oh, yeah. We called them "stores."

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Back to the "Warning of a slow recovery here."

Well, exactly.

My two quibbles.

Quibble One: it's seems unlikely to me that we are suddenly going to get an influx of new firms relocating because "you have lower land prices...Employees can afford to buy a house. Companies can buy property for plant expansion."

Seems to me that the national economy, the Oregon economy, and the long lead time of 'relocating' will preclude much of that happening in the next couple of years, which is the time-line most of us are thinking about.

Several years down the road? Anything is possible.

Quibble Two: Going from 89 homes sold in March to 105 in April is hardly what I would term a "surge." Indeed, seems more like a seasonal uptick. And it represents houses where the original owners lost their shirts, mostly.

The rest of the article -- and most especially the graphs -- speak for themselves.

This year is pretty much toast. I figure the 8 building permits issued in April (which could represent a garage expansion, a new deck, anything that requires a permit) represent summer building. In other words, there isn't any.

There is an overlay of very, very high end homes being built here and there, because I have customers who are working on them. But they don't represent the local economy except in the most trickle down of ways.

Mostly, it's whatever is happening now is going to happen for the rest of the year, allowing for seasonal adjustments. My guess right now is that next year will be very similar.