A report from the Coeur d’Alene Press. “Jennifer Smock, co-owner, managing broker with Windermere/Coeur d’Alene Real Estate, said the real estate climate currently is interesting. She said values are holding stable. On most days, they see an equal number of new listings entering the market as they do price reductions on homes already on the market. ‘This indicates a summer slowdown in preparation for the upcoming fall season,’ Smock wrote. In Shoshone County, the median single-family home price in July was $289,000, a 5.4% decrease. The number of homes sold was 89, down 1.1% from July 2023, while current active residential listings totaled 104 as of Aug. 5, a 34% increase from 78 listings a year ago. One recent study found that Idaho had the second-highest rate of population relocation of all U.S. states. Colorado ranked first with 5% of the population moving states in 2022.”
The Denver Post in Colorado. “With a 68% increase in available inventory from July of last year, the close-price-to-list-price ratio is the lowest it’s been since July 2020. Sellers with properties listed for more than $2 million face intense competition, with 16.5 months of inventory for attached homes and 7 months for detached homes. The median number of days on the market jumped by 50% over June to 15 days. ‘For buyers, this is great news,’ said Colleen Covell, a market trends committee member and realtor at Mile Hi Modern.”
Mansion Global on Colorado. “A mansion in an affluent Denver suburb asking nearly $17 million found a buyer nearly as soon as it hit the market, bucking the general sluggishness of the metro area’s high-end housing market. Current and former residents of the neighborhood include professional athletes Nikola Jokić of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, former NHL player and current executive Joe Sakic, and football greats John Elway, Peyton Manning, Mike Shanahan and Russell Wilson, whose $25 million closing price in April 2022 is still the most paid for a home in the Denver area, despite selling at a $3.5 million loss.”
NBC Miami in Florida. “A note taped to the bulletin board in the hallway of a Kendall condominium complex alerted residents that water will be shut off because payment has not been received. According to condo owner Hilda Conley, it wouldn’t be the first time. Conley and other owners pay their monthly dues to the association that is responsible for paying the water bill. According to a woman who identified herself over the phone as Yesenia Llombart, the CEO of YCL Property Management, the condo is at a point where it will need to have a special assessment to pay the bills. ‘They haven’t raised their dues in like 15 years, so now they’re behind everyone,’ Llombart said. ‘They make barely enough to pay their insurance on a monthly basis… They don’t have enough to pay [the water bill], and the water no longer wants to take installments.’ Conley said she feels ‘frustrated, disillusioned and generally just pissed off.’ She fears she could eventually lose her home.”
Fox 13 Tampa Bay in Florida. “It still took a boat for Pastor Andy Ard and his wife to reach their home in Sarasota County’s Laurel Meadows neighborhood. ‘This is economically devastating for us. We don’t have the money, or flood insurance. For me, I feel like that’s beyond our neighborhood responsibility. We are paying the price for whether it’s development or not enough drainage because of the development. I’m hoping and praying that they see this and they will investigate it and take responsibility for it,’ said Ard.”
Fox 4 Now in Florida. “When Cape Coral Community Correspondent Bella Line heard about one neighborhood that is still seeing flooding… days later… she went to go check out for herself. ‘This happens just about every time that we have a torrential downpour,’ said Pete Rosado, a resident on SW 12th Terrace. Homeowners say money is on their mind. ‘I have never had flood insurance. It’s never been required. Lucked out in that sense. It never goes up to the homes, but this is an anomaly here for it last this long,’ said Rosado. ‘My house is paid off, so I canceled my insurance because insurance is too high I can’t afford it. So I just kind of take my chances,’ said Hung Nguyen, a homeowner on SW 12th Terrace.”
The Houston Chronicle in Texas. “It’s not like we needed more stress after Hurricane Beryl, but Houston is a screaming example of how bad things happen in threes. During the 2021 winter storm, my then-insurance company offered me $80 after a pipe burst through a kitchen ceiling. I contested, and it took three years to settle. My insurance company is also pulling out of Harris County this month. When I called to inquire about the reason, I was told by a customer service rep that there had been too many claims in the area. Lloyd Gite, owner of the Gite Gallery, switched insurance companies for his gallery three weeks before Hurricane Beryl struck. He filed for property damages and still has not heard from the company. The insurance policy for his home, which was insured by the same company that carries my home insurance, also was not renewed. ‘You pay your premiums for 10 years, never have a claim, and then they drop you,’ Gite said. ‘How can they do this? It’s stressful to find another company to insure you when you live in Houston. You can be fed up with this, but what can you do?’”
“‘Companies are reducing their risk along the coasts, and they have been doing this for decades,’ said Rich Johnson, a spokesperson with the Insurance Council of Texas. ‘We’re not California, where companies are leaving the state.’”
The San Francisco Chronicle in California. “In a February poll commissioned by the Chronicle, just 6% of voters said the quality of life in the city was ‘excellent,’ while 33% found it ‘just adequate’ and 27% said it was ‘poor.’ A poll conducted in late July and early August found that the percentage of respondents who said the quality of life in the city is excellent nearly doubled to 11%. While 11% may still be considered abysmal — not exactly a tale of doom loops to hula hoops — some voters interviewed after the poll was published Thursday said they had become somewhat more optimistic.”
“Lower Nob Hill resident Julia Mason also participated in the Chronicle poll. She’s lived in the city off and on since 1990 and said street conditions deteriorated early in the pandemic and have not improved. She called Breed’s recent ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric ‘too little, too late.’ ‘Last night, I had to go outside at 9 o’clock at night — my car was parked on my block — and there’s a guy right in front of my building with crap spread all over the place and a big dog off leash headed straight for me,’ she said. ‘Today, there was a crazy guy across the street flailing his arms and yelling and screaming.’ She said living in San Francisco the past few years has made her more politically conservative. ‘The city has gone so far left in my opinion. I’m middle of the road,’ Mason said. ‘The giving of the tents, the giving of the foil, the giving of the drug paraphernalia. The city is giving, giving, giving, and nothing is asked for in return.’”
“Parker Day, a technology consultant who lives in Lower Polk, participated in the poll. Day said he doesn’t support Mayor London Breed’s intensified homeless encampment sweeps, saying that ‘just throwing people’s stuff in dumpsters and telling them to leave isn’t a long-term solution.’ He worries about ‘conservative political rhetoric’ rising in San Francisco. The city, he said, is ‘obviously too expensive, has too many vacant storefronts and a humanitarian crisis on the streets.’”
From LAist in California. “A homeless services provider for Los Angeles’ Inside Safe motel shelter program is under investigation on fraud allegations, after officials determined that it failed to provide nutritious meals to residents despite being paid a $110 per person daily fee to provide those and other services. The City Controller’s Office said in a July 26 news release that the unnamed provider’s on-site ‘food inventory consisted almost entirely of instant ramen noodles.’ ‘The small remaining portion of other food inventory consisted only of instant oatmeal, canned soup, canned corn, and canned refried beans,’ said the release from the office of City Controller Kenneth Mejia. ‘Taxpayer money goes heavily into homeless services in our city,’ Mejia said in the release, citing a current homelessness budget of nearly $1 billion. ‘Angelenos should be able to reasonably expect their investment to return decent meals for our unhoused neighbors — not instant ramen for almost every meal.’”
From CalMatters. “California put hundreds of millions of homelessness dollars at risk because of its ‘disorganized’ and ‘chaotic’ anti-fraud policies, according to a critical federal audit. The audit analyzed California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees the state’s homelessness programs. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the federal government poured $4 billion into its Emergency Solutions Grant program, which was intended to help people struggling with homelessness. California’s share of that pot was $319.5 million — a 2,505% increase from its typical annual allotment. With that huge influx of money also came an increased risk that bad actors would attempt to use those funds for nefarious purposes.”
“The newer federal audit seems to underscore a broader lack of accountability in the homelessness sector, said Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from Santa Clara County. ‘The biggest reason of all that it’s frustrating is these are public sector dollars, they’re tax payer dollars,’” Cortese said. ‘It’s disrespectful to the taxpayers to say, ‘Gee, we don’t really know what happened here to your money.’”
The Mendocino County Observer. “We know that in just the past six years, state government has spent about $24 billion aimed at trying to get a handle on California’s worst-in-the-nation homeless crisis. Amazingly, local governments and private charities have spent additional countless billions more. Despite those immense expenditures, the number of un-housed Californians has continued to increase to more than 181,000 in the latest federal census. California accounts for 28% of all people experiencing homelessness in the country, and 49% of all unsheltered people in the U.S. Shockingly, the State Auditor’s Office released a report in April that found it’s impossible to figure out if California’s largest homeless programs are working because there’s almost no relevant data to be found. The same was the case with city and county.”
“Of course, most folks familiar with the failed system here in Mendocino County know that one of the major failures is that providers of homeless services are not held accountable by local government officials. Here’s what one homeless/mental health advocate, Mazie Malone, of Ukiah, had to say, ‘Hi Jim, in regard to the [Supreme Court] ban on sleeping outside … people sleep outside of our shelter and across the street from it all the time, since that ruling a few weeks ago. I have not seen any arrests for camping out on the streets. Maybe they all have moved beyond the city limits? Dropping the ball on purpose? Or default because no one really gives a s***? Unbelievable the lack of oversight and accountability.’”
“So right off the bat Maizie demonstrates she has keen and spot-on insights into this problematical monstrosity. The people responsible for tackling the homeless crisis have truly dropped the ball and obviously don’t give a s***. Why should they and who are they? They’ve come to be called the Homeless-Mental Health Industrial Complex, an ever-growing collection of so-called Private-Public Partnerships that specialize in administering homeless programs across the nation and right here in this county. These outfits all share one unique characteristic: They continue to reap massive taxpayer monies even though they are held to little, if any, performance standards. Thus explaining runaway homelessness, especially here in California where it is officially and certifiably the worst by prodigious margins.”
The New York Post. “City Comptroller Brad Lander’s damning audit of the Adams administration’s contracts with DocGo suggests the city should recover over $11 million of nearly $14 million paid last year to the controversial migrant-services provider — but why did Lander wait so long to blare the news? City Hall’s emergency no-bid $432 million DocGo contract wound up spending millions for ‘shelter’ and services that went unused, and with authorizations that went undocumented. The outrages include charging the city $569,500 to rent out the Crowne Plaza JFK Hotel in Queens for 10 nights, though not a single room was used over that period; in all, taxpayers paid $1.7 million for nearly 10,000 vacant room-nights, earning DocGo $408,680 in commissions in just this two-month period. And roughly $800,000 in seemingly unauthorized expenses.”
“The Adams team notes that this was a response to an overwhelming and unprecedented influx of ‘asylum-seekers’ waved in by the Biden-Harris administration — with the city under legal obligation to provide shelter no matter how many showed up on its doorstep. And it says it cleaned up its act months ago, when Lander’s team first flagged these issues. Yet it still hasn’t explained why it’s working with DocGo (formally Rapid Reliable Testing NY LLC, since it started off doing entirely different work during COVID) on this stuff in the first place, nor why it’s running the contracts through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, rather than homeless agencies with long experience on these issues.”
“Above all, New York should step beyond politics to rethink the entire migrant-shelter concept: It’s not only burned billions, but created perverse incentives for even more people to illegally cross the border and come here. That’s a far larger scandal in its own right.”
Global News in Canada. “The leaders of Ontario’s largest cities are calling on the provincial government to appoint a cabinet minister to manage a provincewide response to a growing trend of homelessness and a number of encampments they say have reached crisis levels. Launching a new campaign at Queen’s Park on Thursday, Ontario’s Big City Mayors said local governments were at a breaking point trying to tackle homelessness, opioid addiction and a series of tent encampments that have appeared and stayed in the heart of the province’s towns and cities. ‘What is happening on our streets across this province is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis,’ said Marianne Meed Ward, Burlington mayor and chair of Ontario’s Big City Mayors. ‘There have been increases in funding — but it is not how we can solve this crisis — a little bit of money here and there and no municipality knows if they’re going to get it. More people will die on our streets, unnecessarily,’ she said. ‘People won’t feel safe going to our parks, they won’t feel safe going to our downtown business areas. Businesses will close.’”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “2522 Palmerston, West Vancouver, B.C. Asking price: $3,598,000 (September, 2023); $3,598,000, $3,198,000 (November, 2023); $3,450,000, $3,298,000, $3,150,000, $2,999,000 (May, 2024). Selling price: $2,675,000 (June 20). Days on the market: Nine months. The 2,734-square-foot house sits on a large lot nearly a quarter acre, with spectacular views of the ocean, on a hill in the popular Dundarave neighbourhood. The house, built in 1948, has dated renovations and needs work. Listing agent Michelle Vaughan says the market had changed ‘dramatically” soon after her clients listed their house in September. The property was also difficult to show because it was tenanted. They relisted several times, dropping the price according to comparables in the neighbourhood. Once re-listed at $2.999-million, they received a couple of offers and, after some deliberation, they finally accepted one of them. The deal completed July 8.”
“Ms. Vaughan said their timing was unfortunate, so her clients chose not to hold off any longer and sell for less than they’d hoped, but with a short closing period. ‘We lost the market and then we were chasing it down,’ Ms. Vaughan says. ‘It was one of those situations. When you see the market dropping, it’s scary. You had to get ahead of it, which is why they took this offer … they had other stuff they wanted to put money into. It worked for them.’”
From Z Network. “António Melo has lived all his seventy-one years in Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. But after the owner sold the building to a tourist accommodation company, they refused to renew his contract. His story has become common among the Portuguese capital’s 546,000 residents, who receive thirty to forty thousand tourists a day. Elderly residents have been forced out of neighborhoods they’ve spent their entire lives in. Compared to other major European cities, the rise in living costs has been relatively recent and rapid. Portuguese wages, however, are the lowest in Western Europe — and have lost all relation to these costs.”
“The predicament for homeseekers in Lisbon is nightmarish. But some residents are pushing back — and are mobilizing to force authorities into a referendum that could halt the displacement of housing by Airbnb and its ilk. City hall promoted Brand Lisbon until it topped several rankings — and became the European hotspot to visit if you were a right-thinking tourist, digital nomad, or start-upper. A boatload of celebrities also moved in. Local property owners and foreign investors took notice. ‘With the boom of Lisbon and the change in its self-perception,’ says Simone Tulumello of the University of Lisbon, ‘people clicked that: ‘Alright, now rent is about making lots of money.’”
“Maria — who has lived in the Chiado neighborhood for seventy-eight years — feels that her options using local businesses have dwindled. ‘I’m ashamed to go into those places because I don’t even know what to order,’ she says of the brunch cafés that have replaced old neighborhood shops. ‘Life is disappearing,’ Agustín Cocola-Gant, a geographer at the University of Lisbon, explains. ‘When I was interviewing short-term real estate investors, their message to locals was: ‘Move from the city center. This is a future opportunity for us, not a residential place anymore. Leave us alone and assume that you can’t live here.’”
From 9 News. “South Australian home builder Adelaide Designer Homes has entered liquidation, leaving 20 houses unfinished. The company’s collapse has left more than 80 creditors unsure if they will recoup their losses. ‘We wrote to homeowners yesterday and basically handed back the sites, telling them the company can’t continue,’ liquidator Anna Agostino told 9News. ‘With a name like Adelaide Designer Homes, you’d think that’s what you’re getting,’ an employee of Adelaide Designer Homes who wished to remain anonymous told 9News. The liquidator is now looking into whether it should have shut up shop sooner.”
“He says he’s one of those now left out of pocket. He claims the company had been under financial pressure for some time. ‘I should’ve jumped ship earlier,’ the employee said. ‘You kind of think maybe it will get better, or maybe we can work through this or maybe it’s a hiccup, but it’s not.’”