California falls short again (in housing reform)

As a follow-up to a recent post, California's Senate Bill 50, which would "dramatically increase homebuilding," falls short for the third year in the row, “opposed by state senators who said the measure took too much power away from local governments and failed to sufficiently address low-income housing needs.”  In other words, Scott Wiener's bill fell victim to a toxic stew of regulatory capture by entrenched interests and idealists making good the enemy of great.

Trust but verify - Coronavirus edition

The latest epidemic coming out of China has many highlighting the deadly inefficiencies of top-down authoritarian regimes.  As Nicholas Kristof puts it in his recent piece, "Dictators often make poor decisions because they don’t get accurate information."

Into this breach of trust... "BlueDot Inc a Toronto startup whose AI-driven health monitoring platform analyzes billions of data points... alerted its clients to the (coronavirus) outbreak on Dec. 31, well ahead of notifications from the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention"

How housing became the world’s biggest asset class

The Economist has been on a tear with regards to housing, the latest being a recent history of this asset class.

Some eye-opening nuggets...

• "median American rent payment rose 61% in real terms between 1960 and 2016 while the median renter’s income grew by 5%"
• "In 1940-2000 mortgage credit as a share of gdp across the rich world more than doubled"
• "the rate of housing construction in the rich world is half what it was in the 1960s"

Rebuilding trust...

At a time when many are content with calling balls and strikes, Peter Kraus and Gregg Schoenberg are masters of delving into the second and subsequent order impacts of what transpires on the field of play, as evidenced by Peter's latest edition in his podcast series "Elephant in the Room" where the duo explore, among other things, trust and transparency in the financial markets, as well as fintech, ESG and asset management.

The Mandate of Heaven

The inimitable Charles Krauthammer, burdened by liberal enlightenment thinking, got China way wrong by inserting a phantom “People” element into “The Mandate of Heaven.” Three decades on, we may be about to see the sons of the Yellow Emperor contend with the very real “Heaven” of that term of art.

Trajan Langdon... math major

Peeling the onion on ATTOM's latest pronouncement on the affordability of buying vs. renting

While it’s nice that buying is more affordable than renting in 53% of US counties, a population-weighted view gives a dramatically different story.  Buying wins in 31% of counties with over populations of over 500k and only 16% in counties where populations cross the 1 million threshold.

Average US home seller profits hits another new high?

Average US home seller profits in 2019 hit record high...  A happy headline indeed, but also demonstration of the Rorschach test of real estate stats at the national level.

Home ownership tenure of sellers in Q4 2019 averaged 8.21 years, the highest since Q1 2000, roughly coinciding with the nearly 60% national home price index appreciation since Q1 2011, demonstrating the importance of good timing.

Moreover, the top 5 tenures were all counties in Connecticut (12.25 years+), a state where overall sale prices remain below the 2007 peak.

China's soft power projection...

China’s $270 billion in “diplomacy spending” since 2000 (source: Visual Capitalist)

Is home ownership really "The West's Biggest Economic Policy Mistake?"

“Far from shoring up capitalism, housing policies have made the system unsafe, inefficient and unfair.” The Economist makes the case that the West’s “obsession with home ownership” is its “biggest economic policy mistake,” undermining growth, fairness and public faith in capitalism.

Making California livable again

According to The Atlantic, "California Senate Bill 50, winding its way through the state legislature again this month, could generate tens of thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars of new investment, reshaping the geography of the biggest state and solving a large chunk of the cost-of-living crisis the Trump administration has assiduously avoided addressing by, essentially, forcing California communities to allow more construction."

 "Based on the housing-unit-to-population ratio in similarly wealthy and urban states, such as New York and New Jersey, California is short 2 million to 3.5 million housing units. (California has 358 homes per 1,000 people, whereas New York and New Jersey each have more than 400.) Right now, the state ranks 49th in units per capita, behind only Utah."