We may be celebrating — if that’s the right word — the tenth year since the onset of the financial crisis and collapse of the real estate market. Yet before breaking out the Champagne, we should recognize that the hangover is not yet over, and that a new housing crisis could be right around the […]
A year after Mayor Sam Liccardo outlined a new housing plan, San Jose has made slow progress in reaching its ambitious goal of adding 10,000 affordable homes by 2022. How slow? Just 64 units had been completed by the end of the 2017-18 fiscal year this June, according to a new report from the city’s […]
The low-slung apartment buildings that line the streets of Houston, Fort Worth, and other Lone Star cities are some of the cheapest affordable housing projects to build anywhere. Two-story jobbers in Texas cost a whole lot less to build with housing tax credits than affordable mid-rises in California or New England. Where land prices are […]
GAO identified wide variation in development costs and several cost drivers for Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) projects completed in 2011–2015. Across 12 selected allocating agencies, median per-unit costs for new construction projects ranged from about $126,000 (Texas) to about $326,000 (California). Within individual allocating agencies, the variation in per-unit cost between the least and […]
ust a few cities are at the heart of the housing supply problem, most notably New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco, which I refer to as Closed Access cities. There are two very different housing markets within the United States: the Closed Access market, where new housing is highly constrained, rents rise […]
Here’s the story briefly: In 2012, Brown and the Legislature took $410 million that was supposed to assist victims of abusive mortgage lending and used it to help balance the state budget. Homeowner groups sued. Two courts ruled against the state and ordered it to replace $331 million. Just before the current Legislature adjourned Aug. […]
The Bay Area’s soaring housing costs are pushing poor people into neighborhoods where poverty and racial segregation are on the rise, a UC Berkeley study published Wednesday found. As a result, the region’s low-income families — particularly minority families — are increasingly cut off from relatives, their children may face worse health outcomes and parents’ […]
Owners of properties in use fewer than 50 days per year would be taxed as much as $6,000 per parcel annually, if two-thirds of voters approve the measure in November. Two weeks after the Oakland City Council voted 6-2 to place the tax on the ballot, officials in the neighboring city of Richmond greenlighted a […]
Cannella read a list of the projects, most of them professional sports venues, that have received such favored treatment recently, to wit: “A Rams stadium in LA that never materialized; Farmer’s Field in downtown LA that never materialized; the Golden1 Center for the Kings basketball team in Sacramento; a Chargers / Raiders football stadium in […]
U.S. construction companies are grappling with a widespread labor shortage that is exacerbating the cost of housing and other buildings, according to a new survey. Eighty percent of the 2,552 U.S. construction companies surveyed said they are having difficulty hiring construction workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America and Autodesk, an engineering software […]
One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from […]
Recently, California homebuilders delivered to the state Legislature a healthy dose of reality. At a special hearing of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Housing Affordability (the Committee), representatives of the California Building Industry Association (CBIA) illustrated why housing in the state is so expensive. In fact, CBIA may have made a case at the mid-August […]
While the next crop of luxury condo towers like 160 Folsom, which developer Tishman Speyer has branded as Mira, continue to rise in the fast-growing eastern end of South of Market, other approved housing projects across the city, like 2675 Folsom St., are stalled and on the market because of soaring construction costs and fees, […]
California’s energy regulators effectively cooked the books to justify their recent command that all homes built in the Golden State after 2020 be equipped with solar panels. Far from a boon to homeowners, the costs to builders and home buyers will likely far exceed the benefits to the state. The California Energy Commission, which approved […]
It’s been two years since voters passed a $9 billion bond to renovate and modernize the state’s public schools and community colleges, yet classrooms across California are still waiting for the vast majority of that money. Less than 20 percent of the $7 billion in the Proposition 51 bond for the state’s K-12 schools has […]