Dunno. Don't care who does or doesn't buy the furniture, really. I just want a picture of them ripping down the Hummer building :-).

The credit crunch and real estate mess is still very localized in the DC area. The inner suburbs are still doing fine in terms of real estate - many of them were bought before the funny loans came to exist. In some neighborhoods, they report that prices are still increasing, and foreclosures are still rather rare.

Go out 10 miles or so, and you are really in the exurbs with no mass transit at all. That's where you find new subdevelopments that were thrown up more recently, and when the funny loans and the crazy valuations. That's where there is a lot more foreclosure activity.

Where we are in Tysons, it is kind of inbetween. I am not aware of many foreclosures (there could be some, but I don't pay close attention). To be honest, one of the problems in Tysons is a general lack of housing. It is mostly office and retail, which leads to the horrible traffic that they are trying to partially correct with Metro.

I bought decent furniture ONCE, never again. Furniture for me now is the cheapest junk, used, milk crates, etc I can get away with. In the US, one has to assume they're going to be cleaned out, lucky to have the shirt on their back, every decade or so. Just like in the old Dickens novels - in fact Dickens was probably a time-traveler who came to our time, and wrote back in his trying to warn people of the evils of predatory capitalism.... etc etc etc anyway....

I had to give away the last good furniture I had, which was also the first good furniture I had. Someone at an antique store told me: "I remember in the Great Depression, all the furniture out on the street".

So yeah, Who buys furniture in a Depression? It is to be looked at only as firewood. Perhaps to build a bonfire to burn its wealthy owners on, if we are lucky!

But in a Depression, there are always people willing to try some business, desperate, willing to try anything that might bring in a few dollars to feed their family. They may have the old Hummer dealership rent-free, just to have someone in there.