The story is headlined "Valley's home market No. 1." The news is that median home prices in the Phoenix area are up 55.2% from the third quarter of 2004 to the third quarter of 2005. But, of course, the article immediately veers into doom and gloom, so it's important to put all that despair into perspective:

Other housing markets that led the nation for home price increases in the past few years already have started to deflate. Las Vegas and San Diego both saw home price increases of only 10 percent in the past year.

That is to say, an owner of a $300,000 home in Las Vegas reaped only $30,000 in effort-free appreciation income over the last four quarters. The shame of it all!

(There's a little bit of inside-baseball in the middle of all this. My expectation is that the numbers used in this article, provided by the National Association of Realtors, are based on MLS data. The numbers the Republic normally cites, provided by Dr. Jay Butler at ASU, are based on all recorded transactions. Both are medians, useless for understanding what's going on with a particular floor-plan in a particular neighborhood. But the MLS figures will likely be higher, all things taken together, than the County Recorder's numbers, for the simple reason that many unrepresented transactions go for far less than the fair market value of the property. I would love to have direct access to all the raw data, but the NAR's approach is closer to what the average buyer or seller is going to encounter in real life. A better approach altogether would be a 'market-basket' of homes, like the Consumer Price Index, representing very common sorts of transactions.)

Read the whole article. It's interesting. But remember that we're spoiled. Ten percent appreciation is not low, it's very high. And 6.36% interest for a 30-year fixed interest amortizing mortgage is not high, it's very low.