It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “‘After every flood, we lose a few neighbors’ said Trina Winter. Those losses mean changes for her community in Tampa’s Sunset Park neighborhood. ‘Everybody is scrambling, in fact, to try to get their homes sold, because there is going to be so much competition,’ Winter said. Home values remain diminished in parts of the metro area, the Times found. The average Sanibel home used to be valued at over $1.2 million, for example. But as of last month, it’s now about $304,000 lower. In St. Petersburg’s Shore Acres neighborhood, which has continuously been ravaged by flooding, short sales on storm-damaged homes are already popping up after Hurricane Helene. One home at 2135 Montana Ave. NE, which was purchased two years ago for $660,000, is now being listed for $399,000. ‘CASH OFFERS ONLY!’ reads the listing.”
“Ryan Harper and his wife decided to sell their Santa Clarita, Calif., mansion last year after the insurance premium on it nearly tripled. The Harpers listed the six-bedroom Spanish-style home, which had been labeled fire-prone by the state, at $1.25 million. Months went by with little interest. For the handful of potential buyers who did emerge, insurance costs would often come up as a concern. The couple dropped the price by $75,000, then took it off the market. ‘To sell a home in California right now seems almost impossible,’ Harper said. ‘The insurance market is crazy.’”
“Sandra Beckett and her husband sold their historic home in West Palm Beach, Fla., this summer, less than two years after they bought it, in part because of insurance costs. The Becketts could find only one insurance company that would work with them. This year, the premium on that policy was set to go up by hundreds of dollars to more than $8,000. ‘It was scary to be honest,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I will ever own another home in Florida.’”
“Kayla Ward was drinking coffee on her porch Friday afternoon when she noticed water from the nearby Nolichucky River rising fast. After nearly a year in the house in the Appalachian Mountains, Ward never thought to worry about flooding. But she and her husband had to race to escape after Helene swept through Jonesborough, Tennessee. Ward, like many other homeowners hit by last week’s storm, did not have flood insurance, and she said her insurance company denied her husband’s claim. It was a surprise to Ward, 61, who used to work as an insurance claims specialist for a full-service insurance agency in the neighboring town of Johnson City. ‘We’re finding out everybody in our area is the same way. Nobody’s being covered,’ she told USA TODAY. And ‘we lost everything. Everything.’”
“In dozens of counties in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina that were flooded by Helene, less than 1 percent of households have flood insurance through the federal program that sells almost all of the nation’s flood policies. ‘People never thought they would have a problem with flooding,’ said Jimmy Isaacs, fire chief of Boone, North Carolina, a mountainous town in Watauga County, where less than 2.5 percent of households are insured. ‘It’s going to be a difficult recovery.’ A similar dynamic emerged in 2017, Donald Hornstein, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said, after Hurricane Harvey caused massive flooding in the Houston area and resulted in about $125 billion in total damage. Whether or not a household had flood insurance determined whether they could ‘stay in their homes and keep their family’s largest financial asset, or not,’ he said. Many homeowners without flood insurance were ‘set back to square one financially,’ Hornstein added, a dynamic he expects will play out with uninsured households trying to recover from Helene.”
“The signs of exodus are everywhere along Little Caillou Road as it winds for miles past bait shops and sugar cane fields, following the curves of the bayou. Empty homes with remnant strips of blue roof tarp fluttering in the wind, ivy climbing the siding. Shuttered banks and storefronts. A razed school that’s now a vacant lot. Hurricane Ida devastated this stretch, but the bayou communities have bounced back before. Now, there’s another force hollowing them out. ‘It’s not going to be hurricanes that run people out of here,’ Dirk Guidry said. ‘It’s going to be the insurance rates.’ Guidry, 68, a former shrimper and Terrebonne Parish council member, owns Pizza Express, one of Chauvin’s few remaining businesses. What he sees now is nothing like he has ever experienced. It’s costing him almost $20,000 just to insure his home and business. For friends and neighbors, the insurance burden is overwhelming.”
“Anchored Tiny Homes, the fast-growing Fair Oaks family firm that once set sights on a national expansion, before fending off claims that it scammed its clients of millions of dollars, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The firm owes more than $12.8 million to more than 870 creditors, the Sept. 30 filing in Sacramento federal court shows. With the Chapter 7 filing, the home builder plans to liquidate assets to pay off the debts. At least two lawsuits have been filed in Sacramento Superior Court against the company along with complaints to the Contractors State License Board. ‘There are people in that group who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for absolutely nothing,’ Jan Truelock of Roseville, who recounted her troubles with Anchored Tiny Homes in a Bee interview earlier this year. ‘And they probably will never see that money.’”
“The assessed value of Center City office buildings fell by over $1 billion in recent years, the Office of Property Assessments (OPA) reported to City Council this week. That spells trouble for the City of Philadelphia’s tax revenue. The assessed value fell from $9.82 billion in tax year 2023 to $8.78 billion in tax year 2025, OPA stated, amid persistent office vacancies and recent transactions that have seen buildings selling for far below their previously assessed value. ‘Over the past couple of years, I’ve been to Denver, I’ve been to Oakland, and I would say that our downtown is faring much better than other cities I’ve seen,’ Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said. ‘Those cities felt very empty to me, even a few years out of the pandemic.’”
“The Toronto housing market was deluged with homes for sale in September as sellers decided to list their properties after months of no action. ‘We went from next to no listings to a flood of listings,’ said Joshua Jean-Baptiste, real estate broker with Sage Real Estate. ‘Every seller who had a house they wanted to sell was waiting for September and everyone had the same thought at the same time,’ he said. In Vancouver, the home price index was $1,179,700 last month, according to Greater Vancouver Realtors. That was 1.4 per cent lower than in August and 1.8 per cent below September, 2023. The realtors group said on its website that the recent reductions in borrowing costs are having a limited effect in spurring demand so far and that the drop in prices was a result of sales not keeping pace with the number of homes coming on the market.”
“When Heather Hayes began working at the Orangeville Food Bank in 2015, she says it supported around 300 people a month. Now, she says, the food bank is supporting nearly 1,400 people a month. It’s an issue provincewide, with Feed Ontario reporting last month that a million people living in Ontario turned to food banks over a 12-month period starting in the spring of 2023. In Toronto, Daily Bread food bank is sounding the alarm about what it’s calling ‘crisis-level’ food insecurity. Food insecurity is no longer an issue impacting only people who are low income, Hayes said. ‘Sixty families came in last month and they actually owned their own house — That’s a stat we would not have tracked before,’ she said.”
“Home prices across regional NSW are being slashed by as much as one-third of the price they were originally listed for. Affordability is at an all time low for both homebuyers and mortgage holders, yet many rural and coastal retreats are seeing owners drop prices in attempts to entice buyers. Leading the charge is a property at 660 Kerrs Creek Road, Kerrs Creek where the asking price has plummeted by 33.1 per cent. But Kerrs Creek isn’t the only place feeling the squeeze. In the quiet coastal town of Rosedale, a property at 21 Roseby Drive has seen its price slashed by 28.1 per cent. Once listed at $695,000, it’s now asking just $500,000, a discount of almost $200,000.”
“In Werris Creek a home at 1758 Werris Creek Road has seen its price tumble from $690,000 to $495,000, reflecting a 28.3 per cent discount, according to a SQM Research report on the state’s most discounted homes. Similarly, a well kept Williamtown cottage has dropped by 23.1 per cent, now listed at $300,000 compared to its initial $390,000 listing price in January. The discounts continue in Wootton, where the price for a home at 562 Newmans Rd has dropped by a quarter. The listing states ‘motivated sellers, priced to sell,’ and has dropped from $1.8 million to $1.35 million, a saving of $450,000.”
“Beijing faces a lot of economic challenges these days. So it is that no sooner had the government last week unveiled its biggest attempt in years to shore up flagging growth than new calls emerged for more, more, more. What economist and investors, many of them foreign, want now is fiscal stimulus—debt-fueled government spending to boost aggregate demand in the Keynesian mold—to accompany the credit stimulus Beijing has tried to implement of late. The Communist Party may even deliver. Not that it’ll mean much for the economy.”
“China’s problem is that although Beijing has been dismantling the country’s old property-driven economic model for four years, it has yet to devise a viable long-term replacement. The political controls on the economy that created this situation aren’t going away under Xi Jinping and will thwart the Keynesians’ longed-for virtuous circle. Any new money funneled into consumption will land in a business ecosystem facing the same financial-political inhibitions on productive investment as before. A paradox: If China were capable of benefiting from a new spending stimulus, the economy wouldn’t need one.”