Americans aren't the only ones with housing woes. The global credit crunch is hitting the Kazakh construction industry hard, and new homebuyers in the once booming economy are finding themselves with big mortgages on houses and apartments that construction companies can't afford to finish:

Kazakh construction companies had sold 280 billion tenge ($2.32 billion) of unfinished apartments by September, including 170 billion tenge financed by mortgages, according to government statistics.

"There was a sense the boom was going to go on,'' said Anna Walker, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London. "Then, almost overnight, lending to the banks from overseas dried up.'' [...]

"The problems that hit the Kazakh construction industry are due to the world financial crisis,'' said Aigul Aspandiarova, spokeswoman for the mayor's office in Almaty. "It's obvious that [major construction company] Kuat won't complete its projects on time.''

There are going to be a lot of stories like this before we climb out of this financial crisis.