Apartment Choice

Coast to coast, the housing industry currently favors the home seller as prices are rising, sales surging and inventories dwindling -- which leave the residences on the market more valuable. Take Seattle as a caffeinated example. The northwest city of 3. 5 million people boasts the hottest housing market in the country since last fall, according to the Case- Shiller home price index and reported this summer in the Seattle Times. The typical single-family house in metro Seattle cost 12 .9 percent more in April than a year ago, the report notes. Other fast-rising markets are Portland, Oregon; Dallas; Denver; and Detroit, up 9.3 to 7.4 percent respectively. Those totals compare with a 5. 5 percent national price growth rate . What's good for owners and well-off buyers can be doubly troubling for at least one group: lower income property shoppers including first-time homebuyers who can't afford average and midpoint home prices or apartment rents . According to studies, the na...

Angie Friesen didn’t think much of it when her sixth-grade daughter, Annelise, told her she’d hit her elbow on a desk at school. It wasn’t until about a week later, when Annelise complained of pain from her elbow down to her hand, that the mother of four took her daughter to the family doctor for an X-ray. Nothing was broken. The pain continued . Within a few months, it had spread to Annelise’s shoulder blade. Another X-ray and a nerve study revealed no damage. Finally, a pediatrician gave a diagnosis. “I hate to even say the word,” Friesen remembers the doctor saying. He suspected her daughter had a condition called CRPS , or complex regional pain syndrome . In adults, the condition can be devastating, with burning pain that spreads, discoloration of a limb and the loss of function. Friesen’s pediatrician apparently didn ’t know it at the time, but children with CRPS often respond well to...