An estimated 11% more households will pay more than half of their incomes in rent in 2025, according to a new report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable-housing organization.
The median sales price for new and existing houses and condominiums was $409,000, down 1.4 percent from a 7 1/2-year high of $415,000 in July but up 4.3 percent from $392,000 in August 2014, according to CoreLogic Inc. It was the 42nd straight month of annual price gains.
In votes whose broad margins belied the intense struggle that came before, lawmakers approved what remained of Senate Bill 350 after the bill was stripped of a proposal to require a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in motor vehicles by 2030.
Scant availability of skilled construction workers has hampered home construction at various times in the past few years of recovery. But the shortfall seems to have grown more acute of late, as new-home sales are up 21.2% so far this year from the same period last year and commercial construction has increased steadily.
L.A.’s Section 8 program — officially known as Housing Choice Vouchers, a name that’s never stuck — is so coveted that people get on lists that take years to get a voucher. There are 8,000 people on the wait list for Section 8 in the city of Los Angeles alone — and it’s been closed to new applicants for 15 years.
The increase was greater than the 4.5% year-over-year pop seen nationally and represents a slight pick-up from May’s reading, when prices rose 6.2% in the two counties, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index showed.
Only seven of 32 reporting counties in the state had home prices that are affordable to home buyers who earn the areas’ median household income, while homes in 25 counties were out of reach for the typical household, the C.A.R. study found.
The median Bay Area home price rose to within a hair of its all-time high last month, as affordability continues to decline across the region, dipping close to an all-time low in San Francisco, according to new reports on the housing market.
That mandate could then become a weapon for anti-development groups to sue builders under the California Environmental Quality Act, said Richard Lyon, the association’s senior vice president.
Senate Bill 32, which would extend and expand California’s pollution reduction targets into the year 2050, would likely create a mandate that all homes produce zero net energy, warned a report issued Monday by the California Building Industry Association.
Interaction between SB 32 and CEQA would likely, at a minimum, result in the immediate imposition of a Zero Net Energy (ZNE) standard on new construction in California. The initial effect would be a sharp reduction in new construction activity, which would persist until developers and contractors acquired a sufficient level of expertise and capacity to satisfy the stringent new ZNE requirements. Such a slowdown would have ripple effects throughout the entire economy, potentially reducing gross state product by $18 billion, and employment by 285,000 jobs.
Renting in Los Angeles and Orange counties is less affordable than any of the nation’s other top 35 metro areas, according to a Zillow analysis of rent affordability in the second quarter of 2015.
Californian cities continued their reign atop the list of most-expensive markets, with San Jose commanding a median sales price of $980,000.
During the 2010-14 period, for example, Los Angeles County’s population grew by nearly a quarter-million, but it added fewer than 40,000 housing units. During the same period, San Francisco, despite its geographic limitations, grew by nearly 50,000, but built fewer than 10,000 housing units.
In the Bay Area, planners now mandate that all growth in the next 25 years will take place on 4 percent of the land, essentially contrary to the largely suburban growth that has characterized the region. It’s hard to see how this approach will do anything but spike real estate prices even higher.