Anthony Soni’s 88-year-old father lives alone in a four-bedroom home in Orange County. According to Soni, he’s in great health and still drives everywhere he needs to go. He retired about seven years ago and nursed his wife through breast cancer until she died, leaving a big void in his life.

“He wants a purpose, something to keep him busy,” Soni says. “Being in a city would be a better fit for him.”

Soni’s dad often talks about living in a more urban environment where he can do his banking, go shopping and walk to a local bar to hang out with other neighborhood people — a place where everybody knows him.

The national homeowner vacancy rate reached 2.8 percent in the first quarter — the highest level on record, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today, while the home-ownership rate dipped slightly to 68.4 percent.

The homeowner vacancy rate, a gauge of the number of unoccupied units for sale vs. the total homeowner inventory, was 2.1 percent in first-quarter 2006 and has risen for seven consecutive quarters. A high vacancy rate can indicate an oversupply of housing units while a low vacancy rate can indicate a shortage in supply of housing units.

If our state legislators are considering a mortgage-bailout bill because they think it’s politically popular, they might want to think again.

My Sunday column on why a taxpayer-financed bailout of subprime mortgages is a dumb idea elicited more than 90 e-mails from readers, and only a few disagreed with me. The e-mails were interspersed with the dozens of spam messages I get every day offering EZ Credit and Guaranteed Mortgage Leads.

Granted, my in-box is hardly a scientific poll, but I was surprised at the outpouring of anti-bailout sentiment, most of it from the liberal-leaning Bay Area.

Q: In a recent article, a reader asked you what can be done when a home seller had to sell after less than 24 months’ occupancy during the last 60 months. You said if you lived in the house 18 months, for example, instead of the required 24 months, you could take 75 percent of the exemption. No real estate agent I know is aware of this. Neither could I find any tax preparer who knew about this exception. And I cannot find this information in any IRS publication. Please tell me where I can find a legal, authoritative writing that will agree with your opinion.

Have inflated appraisals helped fuel the current increase in foreclosures by credit-strapped borrowers? Are they at the core of many mortgage fraud schemes?The four largest trade groups representing appraisers say yes — and they are asking federal financial regulators to crack down on lenders and loan officers who pressure appraisers to raise valuations to allow overpriced deals to go through.

Led by the 22,000-member Appraisal Institute, the groups told regulators April 11 that subprime lenders experiencing high rates of foreclosures often have been guilty of “systematic inattention” to the accuracy and the sources of the valuations backing the mortgages they funded.