The real estate market hasn't recovered from the financial crisis, and it looks like lots of folks are asking themselves whether or not owning a home is really that important anymore. Cheaper housing options could offer some answers, so here are just a few examples of homes made out of shipping containers.

• Shipping containers: a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Maybe a really fancy shipping container could compete with some mobile homes...? [url]
• Using shipping containers as housing for disaster relief projects sounds like a good idea. But doing so might attach a certain stigma to shipping container homes. [url]
• IKEA hopes you'll furnish your new shipping container home with its products... Some assembly required. [url]
• Forget the one laptop per child for $100. How about one house per family for $1000? And as with OLPC, the prototypes actually cost a lot more -- but we're getting there. [url]
• If you're looking for more architecture projects, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

The housing market has obviously seen better times, but if you're willing to live in some small spaces, there are some creative housing designs out there. Here are just a few unique floor plans that your real estate agent probably won't show you.

• Some people figuratively say that they live at the mall, but some folks do it literally. It's art.. or something like that. [url]
• There's a really thin triangular-shaped house in Warsaw that's less than 30 inches wide at one point. [Insert tasteless joke here.] [url]
• HummerHaus is a somewhat plausible way to recycle 8 Hummers into an interesting living space. Too bad it's not a mobile home, nor eligible for a farm equipment tax exemption... [url]
• If you're looking for more architecture projects, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

A little over two years ago, a civil rights group sued Craigslist, blaming the company for the fact that some of its users were posting discriminatory housing/roommate offers -- which could violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968. However, as plenty of people noted at the time, section 230 of the CDA protects Craigslist as a service provider, not a publisher, meaning that Craigslist isn't the party to sue here. The group could certainly go after the original posters for violating the law, but Craigslist is just the service provider and has no say in the content. That seemed obvious right from the beginning, but the civil rights group pushed forward and lost its case. The judge explained all of this to the lawyers... who filed an appeal anyway. The appeals court has now ruled as well, and (no surprise here) affirmed the original ruling, saying that Craigslist is a service provider, not a publisher, and therefore is not liable for discriminatory posts. As Eric Goldman points out, the ruling (again) makes this quite clear:

"Using the remarkably candid postings on craigslist, the Lawyers' Committee can identify many targets to investigate. It can dispatch testers and collect damages from any landlord or owner who engages in discrimination....It can assemble a list of names to send to the Attorney General for prosecution. But given §230(c)(1) it cannot sue the messenger just because the message reveals a third party's plan to engage in unlawful discrimination."

What will be interesting, however, is to see what happens now in a very similar lawsuit involving Roommates.com that is currently being reviewed in a different Circuit. Hopefully the court there comes to a similar conclusion and we stop getting these types of incorrectly targeted lawsuits.

Real estate professionals aren't the ones seeing the way the internet is affecting their industry. Major newspapers, which already have enough problems to deal with, are taking a major hit from lower real estate listings (via Paul Kedrosky), many of which have shifted to the internet. There are two things going on here. There's the general shift of all advertising away from newspapers and there's the housing slump, which has taken its own toll on listing volume. At this point, the newspapers are trying to make the case that the slow business is mainly the result of the housing slump, rather than anything more fundamental. Fair enough, but then you have to look at newspaper earnings during the housing boom, which were already quite poor, and adjust them down even further, in order to get an accurate picture of their past performance.