Q. What is your opinion about purchasing a condo in San Diego where there is a possible housing bubble? Would you advise buying now versus waiting a year when interest rates are higher? Would you buy using an interest-only loan with 10% down, or 80-10-10 loan, or 20% down with a 30-year fixed loan? Carrie Harris.

Answer: Wow. That's a lot of questions packed into such a short e-mail. But your queries are topical and on the minds of many readers. For example, Anand in San Francisco is thinking about selling his condo and buying a house. But he wonders if he should sell now and wait a couple of years until house prices fall to a more reasonable level.

Interestingly, both your market and his are on the PMI Group's list of the five most likely places where prices will depreciate over the next 24 months. That doesn't mean they will fall back to where they were when the run up started. Rather, it means they will recede from their record highs to a more rational range.

Remember, housing prices don't tank like stock prices. If there is a bubble, it will leak air but it won't pop. And housing prices may not even fall at all. They could remain stagnant until market fundamentals catch up.

That said, let me add that the experts don't agree on whether or not there is a bubble. For every one that says the sky will soon be falling, there is another who says there's no end in sight to the housing gravy train; that mortgage payments as a percentage of income remain relatively low.

But most economists do suggest that the markets least likely to implode are those with solid foundations. The main statistic to follow is employment growth. In the most simplistic terms possible, jobs are filled by people who need somewhere to live.

Other good tell-tale signs are income growth and some kind of artificial constraint on the production of new houses, i.e., the lack of land or a politically imposed building moratorium. Also pay attention to the inventory of homes on the market. If inventories grow, that means houses aren't selling as fast as they have been. And when sellers don't sell as quickly as they had anticipated and have to buck some competition, they become spooked and start cutting their asking prices.

Don't follow the national numbers, though. If there is a bubble and it does spring a leak, it will be on a local or regional basis rather than nationwide. So follow the economic trends in your own backyard. What is the vulnerability of industries in your area to reversals in the economy, for example? Can they keep growing in spite of a lull?

Another red flag is the nature of financing in your market. Right now, interest-only loans and pay-option adjustables are the darlings of the lending industry. Why? Because lenders make money on fees. And since they don't get paid until the sale closes -- neither do realty agents, by the way -- they have an incentive to make the deal happen whether or not their borrowers are put into a precarious financial situation.

The danger, of course, is if people are in over their heads, they could be forced to sell their houses if the economy sours. If too many people are in over their heads, the market could be flooded by folks looking to get out from under their housing albatross.

Ditto for investors. The investor market is the shakiest side of the housing sector. They are in the game for the short haul, and as soon as they think the market is turning, they will dump their properties.

Concerning your questions regarding financing, unless you are going to put your monthly savings to good use in an investment that offers a better return than your house, stay away from interest-only loans. As for the other choices, do the math: Make a side-by-side comparison to determine which one is the best, not just for the immediate payback but over the long term.

Q. In previous columns, you have said that Florida is among the fastest growing states in the Union. But I have a different question. Do you know which are the slowest growing counties in the state? Mitchell Starrett

A: Many of Florida's 67 counties are growing like mad, but two -- Gulf and Monroe -- actually had negative growth between 2000 and 2004. Gulf's population fell by 5.1% and Monroe's dipped by 1.6%, according to the Census Bureau. Of course, everything is relative. In terms of actual numbers, the two jurisdictions lost only 744 and 1,305 citizens, respectively.

The other 65 counties experienced an influx of residents in the 2000-04 period, according to the Census Bureau. But many didn't grow by much. The slowest growers were: Taylor, 0.2%; Pinellas, 0.8%; Calhoun, 1.3%; Escambia, 1.5%; Leon, 1.8%, and Madison, 1.9%.

Pinellas is where St. Petersburg is located, and I suspect that it's a slow grower because the area is pretty much built-out. I'm not a Floridian, so I don't know where the others are located. But if any of them are landlocked, that's probably a big factor in the lack of growth. After all, beaches are a very big attraction in the Sunshine State.

By the way, this data came directly from www.census.gov, an extremely user-friendly site that anyone can peruse. Visit the site.