A new study from the Federal Reserve confirms what you may have known in your gut: High levels of student debt are starting to hurt the American economy.

"Student loan debt is the only form of consumer debt that has grown since the peak of consumer debt in 2008," said economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently, as they released new data from the fourth quarter of 2012.

If you like window shopping for real estate, you probably also love window shopping for great neighborhoods. The Internet is your enabler in this, letting you search for maps, restaurants, playgrounds, schools and that indefinable something that makes you long to live in a place.

USA Today and USA Today Travel's 10Best came up with 10 supercool neighborhoods around the country where, I don't know about you, but I'd just love to live.

A handful of new reports show the real-estate market continuing to climb out of the housing recession.

Trulia, the online real-estate marketplace, has been handicapping the recovery with its "Housing Barometer." Today, the barometer shows the market at 56% of normal, based on March numbers. That's up from 43% six months ago.

Earth Day has just passed. The Natural Resources Defense Council suggests continuing the celebration at home by tossing out "the five stupidest chemicals that shouldn't be in your house."

You may be surprised to learn that companies aren't required to give safety data to the Environmental Protection Agency on new chemicals in their products. Most chemicals in use today have never been tested for safety, The New York Times says.

"Unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides, industrial chemicals do not have to be tested before they are put on the market," according to The Times.

Lauren Conrad, whose latest projects are designing clothing and writing books, has just bought a house in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles for $3.745 million.

The 27-year-old TV personality, who starred in “The Hills,” is no stranger to real estate, despite her youth. She sold the home that appeared in “The Hills” in 2011 (for $360,000 less than she paid in 2008) and bought a Beverly Hills condo for $1.3 million. She also has a house in Laguna Beach.

Residential steel-and-glass skyscrapers are so ubiquitous today that it’s hard to imagine they were once a novel idea. But back in 1949, when architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed a pair of modern, minimalist towers for Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, the plan was considered so radical the developer had trouble getting financing.

The "Glass House," completed in 1951, became the prototype for many more steel-and-glass residences around the country.

Developer Herbert Greenwald reserved a southeast corner apartment for himself, with a view of Lake Michigan. More than three decades later, in the late 1980s, new owners combined it with the apartment above it to create the building’s only two-story apartment. It’s now listed for sale for $1.95 million.

After almost two years, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne have finally sold their home in the Hidden Hills suburb of Los Angeles. The buyer was pop star Jessica Simpson.

Simpson paid $11.5 million for the Cape Cod-style home, less than the nearly $12.389 million the Osbournes paid for the home in 2007. The house had been listed for $12.999 million starting in June 2011.

Despite the Osbournes’ reputation for oddity, the house was featured in Architectural Digest and is not all what one might expect from the former front man of the band Black Sabbath. The house appears light and airy, with plenty of windows and lots of white and pastels. The 11,000-square-foot home is on 2.25 acres and has expansive views of the city and the mountains.

There’s a spring thaw under way, and we don’t mean just melting snow.

For the first time since the real estate bust, lenders are beginning to loosen the purse strings and give mortgages to more borrowers with less than 20% down and who don’t have perfect credit.

The Federal Housing Administration has taken a bigger share of the mortgage market in the past five years, since it backs loans to borrowers with lower credit scores and allows down payments as low as 3.5%.