In the News

By: Brian Honea

The Voters passed Measure JJJ, but when it comes to implementation, confusion abounds

By Julie Walmsley

TRD Special Report:For the second installation of TRD’s series on the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, we took a look at how it could affect Build Better L.A, an affordable housing measure voters passed in November. Stay tuned this week as we explore the implications of the NII in depth.

A new affordable housing ordinance that could eat into developers’ profit margins has the Los Angeles real estate community pacing in circles.

By Reut R. Cohen

“There’s a stereotype that Millennials are lazy,” said Layla Khan, 31, a marketing specialist. “At my age, my parents didn’t have student loans and neither had a job nearly as solid as mine, but they could afford to buy a house. That’s just not likely any more unless your parents can help you financially.”

Post-crisis housing market fundamentals have been on the side of what most analysts would consider strong for some time now, and housing prices are near or even past their pre-recession peaks in some markets.

With home prices nationwide having appreciated by 6.2 percent over-the-year in August and showing little signs of slowing, affordability is becoming a bigger problem, according to the CoreLogic Home Price Insights report for August 2016 released Tuesday.

Post-crisis housing market fundamentals have been on the side of what most analysts would consider strong for some time now, and housing prices are near or even past their pre-recession peaks in some markets.

With home prices nationwide having appreciated by 6.2 percent over-the-year in August and showing little signs of slowing, affordability is becoming a bigger problem, according to the CoreLogic Home Price Insights report for August 2016 released Tuesday.

The Federal Open Market Committee didn’t surprise anyone on Wednesday when it declined to raise the federal funds rate. Thus the cost of money for real estate deals and other purposes isn’t going up quite yet. But the decision wasn’t unanimous: Esther L. George, Loretta J. Mester, and Eric Rosengren (three of the 10 members) each wanted to raise the federal funds rate to 1/2 to 3/4 percent.

In 2008, in the wake of the Great Recession, President George W. Bush signed legislation into law creating the National Housing Trust Fund to provide block grants to states to increase and preserve the supply of housing that people can afford, especially rental housing. The fund first received modest allocations in 2016. While this is laudable, the amount is not sufficient to make even a dent in the unaffordability problem, whose magnitude is, based on our new analysis, even larger than previously thought.

Homeownership rate continues to decline as credit issues, student loans, and high prices lead more to rent.

The housing recovery that began in 2012 has lifted the overall market but left behind a broad swath of the middle class, threatening to create a generation of permanent renters and sowing economic anxiety and frustration for millions of Americans.

Latinos are great at saving money, but that's caused a surprising problem: they can't get mortgage loans.

One out of every 5 mortgage applications by Latinos are denied, which is twice the rate that non-Hispanics can't get a loan.

That's in part because lenders rely heavily on credit scores to make their decisions, and Latinos don't build up a good score when they avoid credit cards in favor of cash built up in their savings.

The already high apartment rents in San Diego are expected to continue to climb 10 percent over the next few years, according to a forecast report.

The average monthly rental payment in San Diego County should increase to $1,577 in 2018, up 10.9 percent from 2015, according to the USC Casden Multifamily Forecast. Los Angeles County average rent is expected to grow 8.3% in the same time period to $1,416 a month.