We're told the housing market won't stop atrophying until house hunters get hungry and gobble up this glut of unsold homes.

But what an indigestible table spread it has been: In the Tampa Bay market alone, the inventory of houses and condos for sale exceeds 35,000.

The good news from October is that our appetites look healthier. Home sales have risen modestly on the backs of banks that have been dumping foreclosure properties. The improvement is all the more impressive in light of September's financial meltdown.

But it matters greatly what sort of home buyer we are talking about. And there the story takes a turn for the worse.

Distressed properties — and by that we mean homes either repossessed by the bank or destined for that fate — make up about a third of Tampa area sales. Many purchasers are cash buyers. It suggests that bargain-hunting investors are scooping up a large percentage of these homes.

Remember them? Housing speculation, fueled by reckless mortgage lending, sunk us into the current foreclosure funk. You've got to worry that we're just trading one absentee owner for another.

To be sure, the economy benefits from this house cleaning: Banks get unproductive properties off their books. The new owners, assuming they're not paying cash, finance at today's lower mortgage rates instead of some adjustable-rate time bomb.

But at the neighborhood level, forgive us for not noticing any improvement. Where I live, joy that a foreclosure home had recently sold turned to grumbling when we realized the buyer was a speculator set on renting the place.

A sound home market is all about end users. These houses and condos stuck in the surplus bin need financially stable homesteaders to buy and maintain them. Until that happens, we'll keep choking on the glut.