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 […]
California’s biggest electric utility wants the U.S. government to keep its current auto emission standards, which it says is critical to advance the adoption of electric cars. PG&E Corp. plans to invest $360 million to support electric car charging infrastructure and “we want a stable environment for our investors and customers,” Anna Brooks, senior manager […]
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® increased in September, following a large improvement in August. The Index now stands at 138.4 (1985=100), up from 134.7 in August. The Present Situation Index improved marginally from 172.8 to 173.1, while the Expectations Index surged from 109.3 last month to 115.3 this month. The monthly Consumer Confidence Survey®, […]
The economic outlook among chief executives of America’s largest companies cooled slightly in the third quarter, as confrontational U.S. trade policies weighed on planning for capital spending and hiring. The Business Roundtable CEO Economic Outlook Index, which measures company plans for capital investment, hiring and sales, declined to 109.3 from 111.1 in the second quarter. […]
U.S. Energy Information Administration releases its online analysis of 2017 energy-related carbon dioxide emissions today. It indicates U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels were 5,142 million metric tons carbon dioxide in 2017, a decrease of 0.9 percent from the 2016 level. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have declined in seven of the […]
Gasoline prices are climbing toward $4 a gallon in Southern California, boosted in large part by a rise in worldwide crude oil prices. The average pump price for regular gas in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area stood at $3.736 a gallon Thursday, up nearly 60 cents, or 19%, from a year earlier, according to the […]
California’s economy will continue to grow in the coming years but the pace is expected to slow alongside a slowing economy on the national level, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which was released on Sept. 26. Economic growth at the state and national level are expected to weaken in 2020, according to UCLA Anderson […]
The $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center opened Aug. 12 after years of delays and cost overruns. Six weeks later, the Salesforce Transit Center, as its now known, has been shut down after “crews today discovered a fissure in one of the steel beams in the ceiling,” according to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the public […]
San Francisco officials who took light rail Monday morning to kick off a citywide Transit Week event were held up when trains broke down on two Muni lines. What was supposed to be a celebration of mass transit became an indictment of the city’s unreliable light rail system. “This just shows how we need reinvestment […]
“The “birthplace of Silicon Valley” sits in Palo Alto’s 94301 ZIP Code — a wooden Craftsman one-car garage where 80 years ago the technology behemoth Hewlett-Packard was formed. Palo Alto has been seen as a technological vanguard ever since, a futurist playground brimming with programmers and engineers pioneering the next big breakthrough. But it’s not […]
The taste for tiny EVs has become a quirky subplot in China’s push to become a world leader in electric cars. Roughly 1.75 million micro-EVs were sold in China last year, more than twice the sales of regular EVs, of around 777,000, industry executives estimate. Most of the tiny ones were sold in a handful […]
For the first time in its history, the Bay Area has more than 4 million jobs, powered by a continuing economic boom in the nine-county region that in August produced the most robust month for hiring in more than two years, state labor reports revealed Friday. “It’s a great milestone for the Bay Area to […]
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 […]
The Sacramento Unified School District offers us another example of how expediency can backfire. Late last year, the district’s teachers were threatening to strike for higher pay, and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg intervened, mediating a new contract that averted the strike and gave teachers an 11 percent raise. Later, it emerged that the money for […]