James Kunstler, a remarkable writer, blogs at the somewhat controversial but always on point “Clusterfuck Nation.”

If you have a tolerance for language peppered with words like “clusterfuck” then add James to your regular reading – he is prolific, he is verbose and he is always passionate.

If not, then wait on Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper to say the exact same thing, but to process it more palatably for your tender brain.

Mr. Kunstler has written about the “mutilation of American cities,” post-World War II suburban blight and sprawl, and the general economic, political and sociological “problems” of these United States, since the early 1970′s during his days as a writer for Rolling Stone and since 1975 when he dropped out and began writing books.

Today’s article, “Original Sin” details how the banking industry became propped up by suburban sprawl and how the unsustainable growth of “consumer culture” has broken down into a heap of chipboard and vinyl.

If you are a child of suburbia like I am, then I think that you’ll find some stability, and some structure to keep things as sturdy and as counterbalanced as possible in your life, by reading the works of James Kunstler.

If you live in Intown Atlanta, then you should feel better about the roots of our city in September 2009, even if you look through the somewhat jaded lens of James Kunstler.

In spite of a crime problem – don’t miss this article from today’s AJC for a blow by blow of Atlanta’s recent slide – in spite of some white collar jobs going away, in spite of some overbuilding and in spite of some zombie neighborhoods and zombie neighbors right here inside our city limits, I suggest that you should feel better about being Intown, than in being “out of town.”

Maybe Mr. Kunstler can set this expectation for you better than I can – here’s a clip from the article entitled “Original Sin:”

“…The evacuation of the cities to the new outlands proceeded as relentlessly as the landings at Normandy. It wasn’t until the program was well underway that the self-destructive essence of it became obvious — that every new housing subdivision killed the original rural character of the land, with the result that suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. With additional layer-on-layer of, first, the shopping in the form of highway strips, then malls, along with the office “parks,” these places elaborated themselves into a kind of cancer-of-the-landscape, a chronic and expensive condition that Americans had no choice but to live with, because of the monumental investments they had already made in it. The discontents it produced lent it to psychological depression and dark humor, just as chronic illness does. But we were stuck with it…”

Read the full article here and rest assured, your Intown Atlanta and Decatur real estate holdings are in a fundamentally better submarket than many of the other major American cities that have been hurt by the worldwide economic crisis.

Read the full article here and feel good about being hyperlocal, being Intown and not being so “sub-urban…”

A very wealthy man asked me if there is anything good about the real estate market right now – he owns and operates over 2000 restaurants, so he has a wise perspective.

I told him that the good news is that CASH is helping to stabilize the market for properties priced under $200,000, and particularly under $100,000.

The “funny money” that fueled the real estate speculation bubble from 1999-2007 is gone and real cash collateral is the NEW basis for the value of real properties.

I wrote about this house that I sold back in 2000 for $39,000 in Lakewood in a post written earlier this year, and included a video of the nasty recent condition of the property – when Lakewood values fall by 75%, the “butterfly effect” that I discussed, is evident.

The good news is that cash buyers are stabilizing our lowest priced submarkets with cold, hard cash and that’s a great thing.

I wrote about the relentless, gravitational pull of foreclosures in this article in May, and that “pull” is shrinking in the lower price ranges…lets look at the recent second quarter statistics to see this point.

Segmenting sales by price range shows that sales decreased in all price ranges except the lowest range (<$200K), which increased slightly (+12.2%)

Sales of foreclosed properties were strongest in the lower price ranges  – that’s a pure function of inventory. There are a lot of foreclosures because there are a lot of people and corporations who lost their residential properties in the lower price ranges in recent years.

Be on the lookout for the next foreclosure wave, which will be seen prominently with houses in the $300’s and up – that wave just started and will continue for about 3 more years…the good news is that by 2012, we can expect the Intown Atlanta submarkets to slowly gain some counterbalance.

By 2023, things will start to get much, much better – easy for me to say, right?

So, back to present reality – sales are down overall -15.7% from 2Q 2008, but with the under $200k price range up +12.2% in 2Q 2009, I contend that prices are stabilizing … but only in the lower price ranges. That will help to slow the “relentless gravitational pull” downward on the rest of the market.

Foreclosures as a percentage of total sales is still high at 27.3% of 2Q sales, down from 35.2% in 1Q 2009, but foreclosures make up 47.7% of sales in the <$200K price range. That’s compelling.

The good news is in the lower price ranges  – that’s what’s good in Intown Atlanta right now.

Stay tuned in September, and I’ll show you some details on what’s bad and what you can do to as the owner of a primary residence in Intown Atlanta to mitigate your risk in the next decade or two.