Archive for category: Housing

With their savings running out, many Americans are being forced to use credit cards to pay for bills they can’t afford — even their rent. Housing experts and economists say this is a blinking-red warning light that without more relief from Congress, the economy is headed for even more serious trouble.

There’s been as much as a 70% percent increase from last year in people paying rent on a credit card, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

“If you’re putting your rent payments on to a credit card, that shows you’re really at risk of eviction,” says Shamus Roller, executive director of the nonprofit National Housing Law Project.

The post More People In The US Are Paying Rent On Credit Cards appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Bryce Covert

Across the country, tenants are finding that the eviction moratorium is riddled with loopholes and ineffectively enforced.

The post Despite the CDC’s Eviction Ban, Thousands of Tenants Are Losing Their Homes appeared first on The Nation.

People stand in line at a food distribution event ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on November 20, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.

Back in May, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the HEROES Act. It was aimed at delivering trillions of dollars of additional federal funds to support health care systems, unemployment benefits, housing assistance, nutritional programs, as well as money to keep cities and states, public transit systems, schools, and other vital infrastructure functioning. Since then, the House has passed several updated versions of the Act.

And yet, with Trump and the Senate GOP hostile to federal programs that they misleadingly claim will benefit only “blue states and cities,” the HEROES Act has languished. Through the late spring and summer, the GOP apparently hoped the pandemic would simply vanish, and the tens of millions of unemployed people would all be able to return to work. Opposing expanded unemployment systems, senators such as Lindsey Graham argued that support-oriented measures would sabotage the labor market by providing people with disincentives to re-enter the workforce. Once it became clear that the pandemic wouldn’t simply vanish of its own accord, the GOP pivoted, and, embracing much smaller financial stimulus packages, reframed its opposition to the HEROES Act as fiscal responsibility in the face of a Democratic legislative effort to use the pandemic as an excuse to fund all of the party’s favorite programs. Thus, legislative stalemate.

As a result, in the last weeks of 2020, absent quick congressional action and with the pandemic raging worse than ever, millions of Americans are staring into an economic abyss. Somewhere in the region of 12 million people — millions of them gig workers who don’t qualify, in normal times, for unemployment; and millions more who are now considered to be long-term unemployed and who, again, in normal times would have maxed out their unemployment benefits — will lose their financial lifelines next month.

Unpack the economic morass, however, and the predicament of low-income Americans is far worse than just a congressional inability to extend COVID-era unemployment benefits. The last nine months have peeled back the veneer on a society so vastly unequal — both as compared to earlier moments in U.S. history and as compared to every other advanced industrial democracy on Earth today — that it no longer has either the ability or the will to do right by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Three billionaires now possess the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, somewhere in the region of 13 million households that rent their homes are at risk of eviction once eviction moratoriums end over the coming months. If this tsunami of evictions does occur, it will be on an even larger scale than the housing displacement that followed the 2008 financial collapse, and will add to a homelessness crisis in America of a magnitude no other developed country comes close to experiencing.

Of course, it’s not only on the housing front that low-income Americans are at risk.

Over the past four years, despite low unemployment numbers prior to the pandemic, many of the health insurance coverage advances that occurred after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 were rolled back by a relentless Trump administration campaign to sabotage the ACA. In 2016, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates, 26.7 million Americans were uninsured. By the end of 2019, that number had grown to 29.2 million. This was still far lower than the 46.8 million uninsured at the time of the ACA’s passage, but the warning signs are clearly there: There has been a recent acceleration in the number of uninsured. In fact, several think tanks and health care advocacy groups have estimated that the longer the pandemic lasts, the more American families will lose their health insurance. The estimates range from a low of nearly three million workers losing insurance as they lose their jobs to a high of 8.5 million people ending up uninsured.

Making this health situation even more precarious, groups monitoring hunger and food insecurity in the U.S. have reported extreme spikes in the numbers of Americans who struggle to put enough food on the table. Earlier this year, that number was thought to be about 37 million. Today, it is 54 million, or one in six Americans. Seventeen million of these are children. Food banks around the country are reporting unprecedented demand.

But the crisis goes far beyond these statistics. Precarious access to housing, medical care and food is magnified by structural crises in the environments that poor Americans live in.

From one city to the next, absent a congressionally funded rescue package, public transit systems — which are disproportionately relied on by poor people and people of color — are collapsing in on themselves. In New York City, the MTA is proposing unprecedented cuts, which will likely lead to nearly 10,000 fewer transit employees and a 40 percent reduction in services. In San Francisco, many bus routes have been permanently canceled. In Los Angeles, which invested billions of dollars in a new subway system over the last decade, train and bus routes are being slashed around the city.

And from one state to the next, because of the lack of new dollars flowing in from Congress, legislators are pushing stark cut-to-the-bone budgets for K-12 schools and for public higher education institutions. After-school programs and special education programs are being stripped down to bare essentials. Again, disproportionately, these impact lower-income residents who are most reliant on state services, and least able to seek out alternatives once those services start to fail. Educational inequality has been worsened by the fact that insufficient support has been provided for lower-income students to engage in remote learning; low-income children have the least access to computers, to internet access, and to space in which to study remotely.

These crises ought not to be viewed separately from each other. They are overlapping disasters, made far worse by congressional dysfunction, with consequences that, cumulatively, will prove devastating to many tens of millions of Americans over the coming years.

In the United States, delinquent credit lines as a share of both total consumer, auto loan, and credit card debt steadily grew over the last two and half years. Over the same period, residential-mortgage delinquencies rapidly declined, essentially returning to their pre-2007 levels. These divergent trends point to the relative financial security of upper-income and the increasing fragility of lower-income households prior to the pandemic. How are working families in America getting by in the midst of a capitalist crisis unlike any other?

Source

A report from Bloomberg. “U.S. household debt rose slightly in the third quarter, reaching the highest level ever. Total debt increased 0.6% to $14.35 trillion from $14.27 trillion in the second quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a report. The gain was led by a surge in new mortgage loans, mostly refinancings, which reached $1.05 trillion, the second highest in data going back to 2003 and rivaling the historic refinance boom 17 years ago.”

“Borrowers who postponed their monthly mortgage payments offer a glimpse into the impact the looming cliff could have. Americans who took advantage of programs that allowed them to skip mortgage and auto bills tended to have much lower credit scores and higher delinquency rates than those who didn’t, the New York Fed data show. Lenders reported these borrowers as current on their bills, temporarily boosting their credit scores and possibly masking underlying distress, according to the New York Fed.”

From USA Today. “Competition in the housing market has cooled slightly since the summer. The typical home currently gets four or five offers, compared with eight or nine in September, according to Redfin. Don’t get greedy – ‘An overpriced home is still going to sit on the market,’ Jason Gell, president of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, says.”

The Los Angeles Times in California. “The Southern California median home price rose sharply in October compared with a year earlier. October’s median price of $605,000 was down slightly from a record $610,000 in September. Economists say the large median price increases in recent months show values are rising but caution that values are rising less than the median indicates. Because the median is the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less, it also reflects a change in the types of homes sold.”

“So one thing that has made the median price rise so much in recent months is that members of higher-income households have been less likely to have lost their jobs in the pandemic, leading a greater share of home sales to be in the luxury segment now than at the same time last year.”

From Bisnow New York. “The world’s largest brokerage is shuttering one of its New York Tri-State area suburban locations and downsizing its staff next year. CBRE is permanently closing its Westchester office at 70 West Red Oak Lane in White Plains and laying off 35 of its employees in February, according to a worker adjustment and retraining notification filed with the New York State Department of Labor. CBRE cited economic reasons for the closure.”

“In New York City, investment sales in the first half of this year were down 50% year-over-year and office availability is at its highest point in 16 years. CBRE’s total profit for the third quarter was $184M, down 28.2% from $257M during the third quarter last year, according to the financial results it released for the quarter. The company anticipates sales and leasing volume will be down between 30% and 40% overall for the year.”

“CBRE has already made cuts to its staff to save on expenses since the pandemic hit. The brokerage was also making cuts before the pandemic began to ravage the U.S.. In February, it laid off 40 engineers in the New York City office. Before layoffs, the company cut pay for senior staff members, GlobeSt. reported in May.”

The New York Times. “Real estate developers are seeking opportunities to buy student housing from strapped universities and convert them into apartments for white-collar workers. Thirty percent of American universities, both public and private, are running deficits, according to Moody’s Investors Service, and the pandemic has only added to financial pressures. ‘It is absolutely a perfect storm,’ said Michael Jerbich, president of B. Riley Real Estate Solutions. ‘The only thing they can do is turn to real estate or other hard assets.’”

“The shift has been playing out for years as universities face shrinking enrollments and ballooning debts, but as the pandemic worsens, college real estate will increasingly be redeveloped or sold, experts say.”

From Capital Hill Seattle in Washington. “One quarter of the first batch of units in the new Capitol Hill Station mixed-use development have been leased, as of early this month, according to the complex’s general manager. Coronavirus has shaken the local housing market, with rents down 14% since March, according to data from ApartmentList. The median one-bedroom apartment rents for just under $1,500 and two-bedrooms for $1,849. Rents have been going down for months and they were down 4.2% between September and October.”

“Seattle is obviously not alone in seeing rents plummet, with New York City down over 15% and San Francisco down a staggering 21.7% since March, according to ApartmentList. Meanwhile, local apartment buildings are also giving more concessions to renters, such as a month of free rent. Over 70% of large Seattle-area buildings constructed since 2017 are giving such deals to leasers, according to The Seattle Times. For example, the Capitol Hill Station developers are advertising two months of free rent on some units to prospective tenants.”

“14th Ave’s REO Flats, for example, is touting two rent-free months, a waived deposit and application fee, and $500 off move-in costs. The Capitol Hill Station development is offering a similar deal on ‘select’ units.”

The Nevada Current. “Henderson began regulating STVRs last year. This year through August the city imposed and collected $6,100 in fines on properties where owners or renters violated the rules, according to spokeswoman Kathleen Richards. Attorney Alex Velto of Hutchison Steffen confirmed he’s consulted with the group about possible legal action regarding property rights. ‘All of my clients are paying over market value for these homes,’ Lowman told the City Council in September, imploring members not to place distance and other restrictions on STVRs.”

“‘It’s good for sellers,’ Lowman told the Current, adding investors ‘are willing to pay above market value (by a good $10,000+) knowing they will make it back easily in the first month they rent it. STR(s) can bring in a lot of money if you run them correctly and have them set up right. With the distance rule, this will stop happening and values will not keep going up.’”

From Now Toronto in Canada. “A one-bedroom apartment in the old City of Toronto cost $1,922 on average in October, according to Rentals.ca’s National Rent Report. That’s a 2.3 per cent drop month-over-month, and 17.3 per cent drop, year-over-year. Dragging rental listing prices down is the oversupply, particularly in the city. There’s an oversupply of investment unit rentals due to new builds coming into the market. Owners of former Airbnb units are looking for long-term rent with the lack of tourism. And then there’s an exodus from the downtown core since so many people are working from home and looking for more space.”

“‘People are starting to say, ‘I don’t need to be in the concrete jungle,’ says Re/Max Hallmark Realty broker Meray Mansour.”

From Reuters on Canada. “Eager to move his young family into a house with a backyard amid the pandemic, Dale-Paul Jordan listed his Toronto condo for sale last month and prepared to start bidding on detached homes. But the condo didn’t sell or get a single viewing. And when another seller in the building slashed their asking price, Jordan and his wife pulled the unit off the market and decided to delay their dream until spring at least. ‘One of the things we’re handcuffed to is selling our condo to help with the downpayment,’ Jordan said.”

“The couple are among a growing cohort of would-be buyers in Canada keen to move up the property ladder, but are trapped by a flood of condos in the Toronto and Vancouver markets. The situation is only expected to worsen with a near-record number of new condos under construction. As more people find themselves in the Jordans’ position, there will be fewer buyers for detached homes, real estate experts said, and that could have a trickle-down effect on the red-hot detached home market.”

“The cracks appearing in the condo market may well become the fault-line in Canada’s housing market. Some agents say they have had clients on the brink of reneging on detached home offers, because of worries they won’t be able to sell their condo. ‘We came very close a few times but we got the deal done,’ said Thomas Mirkovich, a Toronto-based broker. ‘I had to have a lot of ‘come to Jesus’ moment conversations.’”

“Add in other pressures – Canada’s still-high unemployment rate, a sharp drop in immigration, and the winding down of mortgage deferral programs and emergency pandemic benefits – and conditions could be ripe for a reckoning. ‘Now people can’t sell their condos downtown. Nobody wants to buy a condo,’ Hilliard MacBeth, a portfolio manager and author of ‘When the Bubble Bursts,’ said in an interview. ‘The government support means the real start of the recession has just been delayed.’”

The Daily Mail on the UK. “Big city rents are dropping by up to 45 per cent as swathes of tenants no longer have to live near their workplaces. A Zoopla repor said average rents in London are now 5.2 per cent lower than they were a year ago – while those in Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh are also dropping. Some of the more drastic cuts include a two-bedroom flat in central London’s Baker Street which is down from £4,312 a month in May to £2,600 last month, while rent on a four bedroom flat around Bloomsbury dropped from £3,476 in June to £2,210, the Times reports.”

“Postcode W9, which covers parts of Maida Vale and Paddington, has seen the second biggest rent price drop (20 per cent), followed by SW1 (17 per cent), which covers Westminster, Belgravia and Pimlico. Matt Hutchinson, director at SpareRoom, noted: ‘Once again, London dominates the headlines in terms of falling rents, and it’s generally the most expensive neighbourhoods that are worst affected. ‘What we’re seeing might just be a temporary shift in the rental market, or it may be the start of the UK’s rental map being redrawn permanently.’”

From Dublin People in Ireland. “Dublin Central Labour Party Senator Marie Sherlock said she believes a ‘dangerous precedent’ is being set by Dublin City Council in approving applications to allow student accommodation developments to take bookings from tourists during term-time. Cabra-Glasnevin Councillor Declan Meenagh said: ‘At a time when tourism is on its knees and the supply of tourist accommodation is already over-saturated, we have to ask whether anyone’s interests are really being served by this application.’”

From Cyprus Property News. “Luxury real estate may see a dramatic downturn next year, as the Cyprus Investment Program is no longer available to foreign investors, plus the pandemic has made market conditions even worse. A bad taste left by Al Jazeera videos pushed the retreat by foreign buyers further and may send prices spiralling to 2013 era levels. Foreign buyers – who have helped fuel the push in premium homes and high-rise building apartments (mainly in Limassol and Paphos) – are on the wane.”

“According to DANOS International Property Consultants and Valuers, the volume of foreign purchases will see a sharp drop in 2021. The reasons include limits on taking cash out of foreign countries, anti-corruption laws taking effect, market saturation, rising property prices, the lack of citizenship incentive and concern about the stability of the EU economy, market and political situation.”

“The Limassol real estate market should slow significantly as sale volumes across the town are expected to fall by at least 25%. The average price for a high-rise tower apartment is expected to fall in the last quarter of this year and continue falling in 2021, as well. If you look around Limassol at all these, 15-28 storey modern towers with starting prices at €6,000 per square metre for a luxury apartment, people living in Limassol, are not buying them.”

“Also, because of the pandemic – economic uncertainty, we are seeing people in Cyprus, selling their property to save money or simply to pay back their bank debts. It is serious – people can’t rely on their business for enough income.”

The post Final Straw: Eviction Defense, Community Resiliency, and Getting Free appeared first on It’s Going Down.

Long-running anarchist radio and podcast show The Final Straw speaks with two members of HEDS-Up!, an eviction defense group based in Durham, NC. This week I got the chance to sit down with Olive and Yousef of the Durham NC based eviction defense group HEDS-Up! HEDS-Up! stands for Housing Eviction Defense Solidarity and is a… Read Full Article

Sisters Meztli Escudero, 8, left, and Victoria Escudero, 10, stand in the window of a vacant house they and their families occupied on Saturday morning. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Months of protests led by homeless residents over the lack of affordable housing in Philadelphia have led the city and the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) to agree to cede 50 vacant homes to a public land trust. The land trust will be managed by Philadelphia Housing Action, which is a nonprofit formed by homeless encampment organizers. The agreement is largely “unprecedented” and marks the first time a transfer of power and property ownership rights of this scope—from the city and PHA to protesters occupying an encampment—has taken place in the United States.

The new land trust designates 50 “properties for use as low-income housing, defined as $25,000 and below, and they would be controlled [and managed] by local committees,” PhillyVoice reports.

Philadelphia is dotted with empty, abandoned houses that have sat vacant for years, and in some cases decades, explains protest organizer Nadera Hood. Meanwhile, at least 5,700 Philadelphia residents are homeless. Many of the city’s homeless residents are working families with children who find themselves unable to afford the city’s increasing rents, Hood says. The city and PHA have been breaking up homeless encampments that have been called “untenable” by Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and other leaders in the city. However, for many residents, the encampments offer the only living space that feels safe, as overcrowded shelters have led to COVID outbreaks and deaths of homeless residents living in shelters.

The breakthrough agreement could become a template to curb the U.S. housing crisis.

Talking about the agreement to cede homes to the public land trust, Mike Dunn, deputy communications director for the City of Philadelphia, says, “The agreement was the result of a lot of long discussions since June with the protest camp leaders about the need for affordable housing for the lowest-income Philadelphians, a concern that the mayor has long shared.”

Dunn notes that while many of the logistical details surrounding the transition of the land trust properties are still being worked out, camp leaders, the city and PHA are working together to identify vacant houses that are in the public inventory, “to convey to the community land trust, which they will rehabilitate to make habitable. The land trust will identify its own resources [to carry out] these repairs.”

Dunn says the protest camp residents’ cause is “right and proper, and their needs are valid.”

“We hope this agreement could serve as a model for the many U.S. cities whose residents struggle to find affordable housing,” he says.

Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homeless Law Center in Washington, D.C., which has held consultations with encampment organizers, explains the significance of this agreement in a Philadelphia Inquirer article by Alfred Lubrano and Oona Goodin-Smith. “We haven’t seen a protest encampment like this one that’s led to this kind of result,” Tars says in the article. “I’m going to tell advocates and other city mayors about how this is a different way, a better way, to deal with people experiencing homelessness.”

The Demand for Housing

The protest effort in Philadelphia led by homeless residents successfully transformed itself into a nonprofit organization and a public land trust, and won an unparalleled housing agreement with the city that puts ownership and management into the hands of encampment residents.

Across the United States, there has been an increase in people experiencing homelessness due to the COVID pandemic, and homeless residents have been among the most heavily impacted by the virus. Philadelphia is no exception, and crowding in shelters, often following encampment evictions, has led to a spread of the virus among homeless residents. In May, after the PHA broke up and evicted an encampment outside of the Convention Center, a man who had been evicted from the encampment died from COVID after catching it in a shelter where there was an outbreak of the disease that infected more than three dozen people.

Hood, a leading organizer for the group Occupy PHA, says the death of the resident in the shelter prompted action among homeless residents and existing activist groups in the city.

“The encampment was evicted just as the COVID shelter-in-place orders came,” Hood says. “People were moved to the shelter, and there was an outbreak, someone from the encampment died, and that was part of what organized and rallied people.”

In March, moms with children, and some other houseless residents, occupied and began living in several vacant Philadelphia homes, inspired, in part, by similar occupations in Los Angeles, Oakland and elsewhere during the coronavirus outbreak.

“All of the people who moved in and have been living in these vacated homes are working people, they’re people with families, who can’t afford rent in the city,” Hood says.

Hood says the racial uprising across the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 catalyzed the various existing homelessness activist camps to join forces and inspired enthusiasm among encampment residents who were previously intimidated or fearful of taking action.

“All of our groups had been doing a lot of work around land disposition, gentrification and property rights and ownership in the city,” Hood says. “Occupy PHA, which is my group, was fighting the housing authority’s role in gentrifying neighborhoods and over-policing; Black and Brown Workers Cooperative was fighting against councilmanic prerogative (which basically gives council members full authority over what can and can’t be [done] in a neighborhood, and is mostly used for them to build relationships with developers),” Hood says. “[Black and Brown Workers Cooperative] also focused on land reclamation efforts. For example, they built a little mini-shelter out of corrugated plastic for a homeless person who slept on church steps; they reopened and took over a park that was gated up by new people who moved into the neighborhood. And then the Workers Revolutionary Collective was doing various kinds of outreach with the homeless population.”

Following the encampment evictions in January, the groups began to meet and collaborate more frequently. Ultimately, they decided to organize themselves into a collective called the Philadelphia Housing Action to protest the city’s handling of housing allocation, and pressure the city and PHA to rethink their response to the housing crisis. This led to the parkway protest—an encampment was set up at Benjamin Franklin Parkway to protest and draw attention to the issues of homelessness and the housing crisis in Philadelphia. This eventually prompted the recent deal with the city, after months of occupation by hundreds of homeless residents, and organized protest actions.

Hood notes that the agreement between protesters and the city does not skip over existing housing waiting lists by giving homes to people from the encampment protests. The homes under consideration that will become part of the public land trust are properties that would have been allocated to private buyers.

“The houses that we were putting people in and demanding that [PHA] give us would not have housed a family on the waiting list; they would have been sold to a developer and been a part of the process of gentrifying our neighborhood,” Hood says.

Hood notes that across the country, there are resistance movements forming around housing and land allocation, and says it’s up to every person to advocate for affordable housing options.

“It’s really everybody’s duty,” Hood says. “People need to preserve affordable housing and low-income housing. We have to try to find innovative uses for the land. We have to acquire land and homes and build things that are more community-based and not reliant on the administration, or on government funding or [other such] things. I would like to see a national coalition form, to demand [allocation of] land from the government, to be able to preserve affordability, and the culture and values of the neighborhoods.”

April M. Short
Independent Media Institute

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post Ceding Vacant Houses to Homeless Protesters appeared first on LA Progressive.

US Banks Face a Massive Commercial Real Estate Crisis Looming on the Horizon

Financial incumbents may face a harsh reality soon, as a commercial real estate crisis has threatened the profits from America’s largest banks. A number of reports show that banks with a large amount of commercial real estate in their portfolios may see a significant fallout in the next few months.

Just recently PWC’s real estate practice published a report called “The 2021 Emerging Trends,” which shows city ranks have changed a great deal since the coronavirus outbreak. For instance, for a number of years, the city of Seattle was a top ten city for real-estate investment but after Covid-19, it dropped to No. 34 in terms of ratings with other American cities.

One of the biggest issues major cities like Seattle, Boston, New York, L.A., Atlanta, and many more cities face, is the mounting commercial real estate (CRE) losses looming on the horizon.

For instance, on November 11, 2020, columnist David J. Lynch published an article about how the current CRE market should frighten financial institutions like banks. The editorial explains how the Manhattan-based Signature Bank’s third-quarter earnings had shown “60 percent of its portfolio tied up in commercial real estate.”

Lynch further explains that lending funds to businesses like hotels, landlords, and local shops used to be something banks could count on but in cities like New York, these places are now a “ghost town.”

Signature Bank is suffering badly from the fallout, as Lynch further states:

The bank’s bad-loan write-offs, though still modest, are creeping higher. Despite years of steady profits, investors have punished the stock, which even after a recent rebound has lost 27 percent of its value this year.

Basically, commercial real estate or CRE is a type of property that is leveraged exclusively for business purposes. An extremely large portion of the world’s CRE is leased to those who generate an income but due to Covid-19 and the government’s response to the virus, some people leasing CRE cannot generate income.

The CRE crisis looming in the United States is happening in nearly every state of the nation. On November 16, 2020, Jdsupra published a report that covers Delaware and the horrible effects the response to Covid-19 has had on commercial real estate tenants and landlords.

“The real estate industry in Delaware experienced dramatic changes over the past eight months resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic— Without a regular income stream, many commercial tenants cannot meet their monthly rent obligations,” Jdsupra contributor John Newcomer, Jr writes. “Facing diminished monthly rental income, some landlords are left with a cash shortfall that affects their ability to make mortgage payments to their banks.”

Meanwhile, the Federal eviction ban enacted by the CDC will be lifted at the end of the year and skeptics think it could trigger a wake of delinquencies. Local authorities from hard-hit CRE markets like New York and California are trying to curb the fallout by adding further regulations.

For instance, California will continue to limit annual property tax increases for CRE markets. Moreover, analysts say no matter who is in office come January, no U.S. President will be able to affect returns on CRE. According to a recently published report from Cushman & Wakefield, real-estate downturns are guided by intense recessions no matter which political party is in charge of the United States.

“Rather than elections,” stressed the Cushman & Wakefield report, “the real estate cycle, the economy, interest rates, COVID-19, geopolitical events, and long-term growth drivers (like demographics and technological change) are the areas to focus on in determining leasing fundamentals and property values.”

Meanwhile, besides CRE and residential real estate, the investment assets gold and bitcoin have seen different price changes in recent days. For instance, after the Moderna vaccine announcement on Monday, spot gold prices dropped 0.40% and one ounce of fine gold is trading for $1,888 per unit. Gold also staggered in value when Pfizer announced a vaccine for Covid-19 as well, but crypto-asset markets have done the exact opposite.

For instance, after the Moderna vaccine announcement, bitcoin (BTC) touched a high of $16,850 on the exchange Bitstamp rising 5.6%. Ethereum prices jumped 3.39% on Monday touching a high of $464 during Monday’s afternoon trading sessions. The entire crypto market economy is still nearing a half of a trillion dollars at $464 billion which is up 2.6% on Monday.

What do you think about the looming commercial real estate crisis in the U.S.? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

The post US Banks Face a Massive Commercial Real Estate Crisis Looming on the Horizon appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Rent debt could top $70 billion by the end of the year if Republicans keep blocking additional coronavirus relief

The post Rent Strikes 4: Eviction Defense appeared first on It’s Going Down.

Rebel Steps speaks with members of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network about rent strikes and eviction defense. As landlords continue to threaten tenants with evictions, newly formed tenants unions and associations as well as community organizations and neighbors will have to move quickly to try and assist vulnerable tenants, both now and in the coming… Read Full Article

Archive for category: Housing

The Demand for Housing

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