For most Americans, access to decent, affordable rental housing remains cruelly beyond reach. Only in 22 counties in the United States is a one-bedroom home affordable to someone working 40 hours per week at federal minimum wage. That’s from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) report, which outlines the mismatch between wages and rent […]
Out of Reach documents the gap between renters’ wages and the cost of rental housing. The report’s Housing Wage is the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn to afford a modest rental home without spending more than 30% of his or her income on housing costs. It is based on HUD’s Fair Market Rent […]
“A poll released Sunday by a local advocacy group showed that 46 percent of Bay Area residents surveyed said they want to move out of the area within the next few years. That number is up from 34 percent in 2016 and 40 percent last year in the same poll. The survey was a joint […]
The good news for home builders and house hunters is that lumber prices have sold off since hitting an all-time high in mid May. The bad news: wood prices are still up 67% over the past year, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of each new house. The historic run-up in lumber prices–attributable to […]
“Fully automated home framing is coming to the Central Valley, which could mean big savings for home buyers and builders in the future. The new Ripon-based business Entekra specializes in off-site wood framing for home construction. The company opened its offices and pilot manufacturing plant in the Central Valley city in early 2017 and has […]
Silicon Valley will continue to boom for the foreseeable future, helping to spur a strong economy throughout the Bay Area, but the region’s surge will exacerbate housing and traffic woes locally, economic and political experts warned Thursday. Those rosy and forbidding assessments emerged during a San Jose State University economic summit, whose headline speakers insisted […]
But the new solar rule has generated a less sunny outlook from others. Besides generating complaints about raising the cost of new homes in an already expensive housing market in California, the mandate has been criticized by some energy wonks who say the rule does not make economic sense and does nothing to reduce the […]
The California Energy Commission, more or less on the fly, has decreed that beginning in 2020 all new single-family homes and low-rise multi-family residential projects must be built with rooftop solar panels. Although they would add perhaps $10,000 to the cost of a new home, the commission insists that solar arrays would pay for themselves […]
Franzini is joined in this quest by a curious cast of fellow travelers who are committed to raising the political profile of the American housing dilemma. As home prices creep up everywhere from established tech hubs to traditionally inexpensive cities like Boise and Nashville—and as homelessness reaches epidemic proportions on the West Coast—a number of […]
Plenty of workers still move West each year for a new job in California. But the state’s high cost of housing may be deterring many other job seekers from moving into the state. Business leaders up and down the state say California’s expensive housing makes it challenging to recruit new workers — and to keep […]
The agency that regulates California’s largest power companies is moving positions from San Francisco to Sacramento because it can’t find new employees who can afford to live in the Bay Area.
A push to expand rent control in California is sending a chill through the state’s apartment industry, prompting more investors to sell properties or hold off on buying.
One rents a spare bedroom in her client’s Berkeley home, paying $200 a month as she waits for word on her application for low-income housing. Another drives from Stockton to the East Bay four times a week because rental prices in her native Oakland became out of reach. A third commutes to Berkeley from Tracy, […]
You’ll need to earn at least $333,270 a year to qualify to buy a median-priced home in San Francisco — but not all of California is that costly: An income of $35,400 is enough in Lassen County. A California Association of Realtors housing report on the first quarter of 2018 lists median home prices, estimated […]
The median list price for a house in California is almost $700,000, the highest in the nation aside from Washington D.C. and Hawaii. This compares to a median list price of $328,000 for the United States as a whole. Prices have been surging in many areas of the state in recent years, and housing costs […]