Downturn or no downturn, Greater Boston remains a tough place for buyers.

If you have all the bucks in the world, the market is yours - as it would be anywhere else.

But for the rest of us without bottomless bank accounts, the cost of housing remains challenging here.

In fact, despite downward pressure on pricing, sellers are stubborn, and for good reason. They will find any way they can to avoid taking a bath, including waiting out a down market.

Here are a few comments by frustrated buyers that I recently culled from this blog. And they would hardly be out of place if this were 2005 or 2006, back during the height of the housing price bubble.

Here goes:

Jake Green wrote:

Well, I'm looking in Hingham, and I don't think the prices in this town will ever come back to "affordable levels". Houses under 1-mil are selling like hot-cakes. The few short sales and foreclosures are also being snapped up by investors and flippers. Flipping is not dead in Hingham, and investors can still make some nice coin if they manage to snag the right property. I'm seriously thinking of moving out of this still very overpriced area.

Artiefufkin wrote:

"Throw in the retirement/health benefits for state and local municipal workers that will soon become a crisis here, and I can't see any good reasons for staying."

This is getting off topic, but does anyone here know of a good resource for learning more about different states' present and potential budget issues? My wife and I are at a point where we're considering other places to live (since we don't have kids just yet, I figure we have a ~5 year window where it would be relatively easy to do so). What you get for your tax dollar would be one thing I'd want to consider. I'm not necessarily opposed to states that have a "big" government, as long as the tax money is being spent on worthwhile things. I even wonder if CA will eventually come out better in that respect than MA. I'm sure some people would laugh at that, but when I was there recently, I noticed that a lot of their over-spending seems to be on public infrastructure (including world-class public universities). Here, it seems like a lot more of our tax dollars are being spent paying politicians' brother-in-laws to be "directors of nobody's sure what".

jk7890 wrote:

I'd also like to add that buyers are not buying if there is nothing to buy. For example, we'd love to buy a house in Belmont, but there are no homes in the town's entry level range to buy! There were a bunch in spring but nothing at the moment.