Who says you can't get anything for a buck these days?

And we're not talking about McDonald's Dollar Menu. Forget the flimsy cheeseburger. In St. Paul, Minn., a buck that will get you a house.

Believe it or not, though, in this brutal real estate market, even a dollar is proving to be a tough sell.

With 2,000 vacant houses in St. Paul, city officials are getting creative with ways to revitalize neighborhoods hammered by foreclosures. The city recently purchased 11 houses in Dayton Bluffs, one of St. Paul's most historic neighborhoods. The plan is to sell the properties, lie the one picture here, at big discounts in hopes of attracting people who want to make Dayton Bluffs a place to call home.

Home prices aren't the only thing that has plummeted recently. So, too, has the value of home improvement projects, according to Remodeling magazine.

Overall, homeowners can expect to see just 63.8 percent of their remodeling dollars added to the value of their home, according the the magazine's annual Remodeling Cost vs. Value Report. That's down a whopping 26 percent from the peak return of 86.7 percent in 2005. It's also the fourth consecutive year that the return on remodeling has dropped.

Residents in California are used to experiencing eroding real estate, although not quite as literally as the tenants of an apartment building overlooking the Pacific Ocean south of San Francisco.

Residents of the Pacifica building were ordered to evacuate on Thursday after a large chunk of land slid down the 50-foot cliff and into the ocean, threatening to take the building with it. Unusually high tides from a winter storm tore away at the base of the cliff, causing rain-soaked sections to collapse.

"If Mother Nature wants to take the place, then she's going to do it," four-month resident Kristy McClure, 37, told the San Mateo County Times.

Although America's major ski resorts aren't feeling the frigid bight of foreclosures like many residential areas, they are experiencing one familiar phenomenon: Buyers looking for black diamond property and bunny hill prices.

From the Colorado Rockies to the Vermont Green Mountains, ski resort bargain hunters are out in force looking for deals. Unfortunately for sellers, a glut of homes has meant a downward slope for prices.

If nothing else, for those that need to sell, the real estate freefall is an equal opportunity scourge, hitting the well-heeled as well as the entry-level homeowner.

"I never thought I would see the day of million-dollar price reductions," Colorado real estate agent Karen Barrocas told ABC News. "It's definitely a buyer's market and the supply is much larger than the demand."