News

Most critical, however, is the clear downshift in the standard of living in my adopted home region, greater Los Angeles. Once L.A. was full of high-wage jobs, many of them tied to aerospace and manufacturing, as well as high-end business services. Those industries have been eroding for well over a decade, replaced, in large part, by lower-wage positions in hospitality, retail and health. Now it is one of the poorest big cities in America, yet one with extraordinarily high costs, particularly for housing. The cost of living in LA is 46 percent above the national average, driving real wage from a respectable nominal average $59,000 to a dismal adjusted $40,400.

However, we did not find that the supply of housing was significantly affected by the incidence of short-term rentals in the City or County of Santa Barbara. This is because (1) compared to the total size of the housing stock, there are very few STRs in Santa Barbara City and County, and (2) very few of these homes are used as STRs full-time. . . Overall, we found that an STR ban across Santa Barbara County would increase the housing supply for local residents by only 0.1%.

Renters always get the same advice: Don’t spend more than 30% of your income on housing. That’s not just an anecdotal recommendation. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, households that spend more than 30% of their income on rent are “housing-cost burdened.” And the heavier that burden gets, the more difficult it is to afford food, utilities, and other necessary living expenses. But how feasible is the 30% rule?

Visa issued a statement Tuesday acknowledging “a variety” of job cuts, but offered no details on the size and scope. Several Visa employees and former employees tell the San Francisco Business Times that Visa recently cut 800 to 1,500 jobs, with the company’s former headquarters campus in Foster City especially hard hit.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) projects that between now and 2030 California will fall 1.1 million bachelor’s degrees short of workforce demand. Closing this gap will require substantial improvements in access to four-year colleges, transfer rates from community colleges, and completion rates among college students.

A recent thesis published by the Swedish Uppsala University Department of Earth Sciences department has raised the question of whether the rapid expansion of renewable energy technologies is inherently sustainable. According to PhD student Simon Davidsson, who wrote the thesis — Natural resources and sustainable energy — the key factor to ensuring renewable energy expansion remains sustainable is to take into account the materials used and the sustainability of industries involved. Specifically, even though solar and wind technologies produce renewable energy, the materials used in the construction of every solar panel and wind turbine are not necessarily sustainable in and of themselves, nor are the industries involved in their construction.

Fresh data seem to suggest the U.S. economy is revving up, with growth rising at its fastest pace in two years. Yet a deeper look at the numbers reveals that strength may be overstated. . . Capital Economics estimates that a full 0.9 percent of the GDP gain in the third quarter was driven by the one-off surge in soybean exports alone — a gain the research firm expects be reversed in the final three months of the year. . . Outside of exports and inventories, meanwhile, the news for the economy was less encouraging. Consumption disappointed, residential investment dropped 6.2 percent, and equipment investment fell 2.7 percent.

“That fact illustrates another unknown. Even if California can approach the new 2030 goal, no one knows whether the state’s economy can absorb its costs without suffering. . . the anti-carbon program really didn’t get cranked up until a few years ago, so its economic effects, positive or negative, are not yet known. The impacts of the 2030 reduction goal are a complete mystery. Reports by emission reduction advocates have claimed big increases in jobs and other economic activity from shifting to a low-carbon economy, but they have, in the main, been merely shifts rather than expansions, and some job claims are entirely bogus.”

Economists seeking to explain slowing productivity growth have pointed to a downturn in global innovation. Overlooked in that debate is how hard it is to innovate in services, which are lapping up a growing share of consumers’ budgets as goods prices fall. Technology has transformed many services—think of TurboTax, for instance—but has left many sectors like education relatively untouched.

Data released Friday showed that core inflation, which excludes food and energy, reached a two-year high of 1.7% in the third quarter, according to the Fed’s preferred measure. Other data found stirrings of wage acceleration.

In a new McKinsey Global Institute report, A tool kit to fix California’s housing gap: 3.5 million homes by 2025, we look specifically at the US state of California and offer remedies for fixing a chronic housing shortage. Our objective is to provide rigorous, fact-based analysis on a charged issue, and to present a practical blueprint for how cities, state authorities, the private sector, and citizens can work together to unlock housing supply and ensure housing access.

California’s path-breaking bid to end workplace pay disparities faces one of its widest gender wage gaps among the state’s own employees.

“Since the 2012 law applied mainly to newly hired employees, savings will trickle in slowly over many years. Pension contributions required from state and local governments will continue to increase — although they are estimated to be 1% to 5% less than they would have been without the changes. Total savings from the Public Employee Pension Reform Act of 2012 are estimated at $28 to $38 billion over 30 years for the state’s main pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, and $22.7 billion for the state’s teacher pension fund. The savings are a fraction of the two plans’ unfunded liability — the gap between the benefits owed to current and future retirees and the money set aside to pay for them. CalPERS’ unfunded liability is estimated at $93 billion. For the teachers’ fund, it is $76 billion.”

Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at an inflation- and seasonally adjusted 2.9% annual rate in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was stronger growth than the second quarter’s pace of 1.4%. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected growth at a 2.5% pace for the July-to-September period.

As an indicator of economic hardship, the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) improves on the official poverty measure by better accounting for regional differences in the cost of living as well as for the various resources (including non-cash benefits like food assistance) that families use to cover expenses.