News

Cargo volume at the Port of Long Beach climbed 2.5 percent in November, compared to the same month last year, according to figures released Monday.

Traffic at the Port of Los Angeles increased 17 percent in November compared to the same month last year, according to figures released Monday.

The median sales price for all homes in the six-county region inched up 0.3% from October to $385,000, research firm DataQuick said Monday. While prices are 19.9% higher than last year, they have been roughly flat for five straight months.

Driven by the roaring economic engine of Silicon Valley, home prices in some Bay Area cities have neared or exceeded the record highs reached in last decade’s housing bubble. San Francisco, Palo Alto and other cities flush with cash from Google, Facebook and Apple blew past their prior peaks in recent months and set new records.

California’s population grew by roughly 332,000 people in the last fiscal year — its biggest increase in nearly a decade, according to new California Department of Finance estimates.

Driven largely by immigrants, California’s population registered its highest annual growth rate in nearly a decade, according to a new report analyzing the fiscal year that ended July 1.

The Bay Area is the only region in California where more people are moving in from elsewhere in the United States than moving out, another sign of the tech industry’s rebound and the creation of more jobs here, according to a state population report released Thursday.

The number of people filing new jobless claims across the country skyrocketed by 68,000 to 368,000, according to a weekly report from the U.S. Department of Labor. California saw numbers go in the opposite direction, with a huge drop in new claims.

Almost 56 percent of California renters paid more than 30 percent of their gross household income in rent in 2011, more than in any state except for Florida, according to a report issued Monday by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

In nominal dollars, households already recouped their lost wealth a year ago. But adjusting for inflation, Americans’ net worth is still about 0.5% shy of the peak in the third quarter of 2007, just before the recession hit.

The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations—the values of homes, stocks and other assets minus debts and other liabilities—rose 2.6%, or about $1.9 trillion, in the third quarter of 2013 to $77.3 trillion, the highest on record, according to the Federal Reserve.

The U.S. economy expanded significantly faster than initially estimated in the third quarter as businesses fattened their inventories, a factor that is likely to weigh on growth in the year’s final quarter.

The Dow Jones industrial average has closed above 16,000 for the first time, marking yet another milestone for a stock rally that has surprised even some of the most bullish on Wall Street.

Los Angeles County’s homeless population rose 15% from 2011 to 2013, to  57,737, a total second only to New York City. By contrast, the number of homeless Americans declined 6% since 2010, to 610,042, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

At the end of the third quarter, 13.2% of homeowners with a mortgage remained underwater in the L.A. metro region, a decline from 25.9% in the same period last year, according to real estate firm Zillow, which released the data Thursday.