Bubble? What bubble?

This from the top 100 business blunders of 2005:

1. Bubble Trouble, Grand Prize Winner, Dumbest Moment of 2005
"If you grew up in Danvers, and you remember it as the spooky place on the hill, it might not be the right place to live."
-- William McLaughlin, an executive with AvalonBay Communities, which is converting boarded-up Massachusetts mental institution Danvers State Hospital into a 497-unit complex of high-end apartments and condos. That sound you hear? Not the ghosts of mental patients, but loud hissing from the wildly inflated housing bubble, which tops our list this year with seven priceless moments of real estate insanity. First up: the nuthouse-to-yuppie-house trend currently sweeping North America, with such conversions also planned in Detroit, New York, Vancouver, and Columbia, S.C., where the centerpiece of the development is an original brick building with the word "asylum" chiseled into the facade.

BUT, they are putting up some seriously large ultra-luxury houses on part of the grounds (or recently sold off) of MacLean hospital … and MacLean “was” not an asylum, it “is” an asylum. Would you pay $1.5 million or more for a beautiful house on the grounds of Maclean? Uh, sorry honey we gotta shut the curtains and lock the medicine cabinet, some junkies just escaped from their level 3 ward and are out huntin’ some serious pharmaceuticals. The kids? Oh, they need some diversity, let them play outside … after all those schizophrenics are heavily medicated … aren’t they? And that guy who thinks that he is a wolf? He’s harmless, right?

Talk about spooky.