A report from the Detroit Free Press in Michigan. “A million dollars doesn’t buy what it used to in metro Detroit. Long gone are those immediate post-Great Recession days when a $1 million might still buy a mini mansion in some highly desirable suburb. John Apap, president of The Apap Realty Group in Birmingham, said the jump in sales prices has been considerable, and noted how he is about to list a two-story, five-bedroom house in downtown Birmingham for $3.7 million that last sold in 2020 for $2.2 million. ‘Just in two or three years, the prices have almost doubled on some of these properties,’ he said. ‘The norm has definitely changed — there’s no question. And I’m a little bit surprised at how fast it’s gone up.’”
The Arizona Republic. “Here’s good news for metro Phoenix homebuyers: the Valley’s median home price is dropping and so are interest rates. The Valley’s median home price is expected to fall to $435,000 in July, based on pending sales. That compares to $450,000 in June, according to the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service. ‘We are in a balanced market,’ said Tina Tamboer, senior housing analyst with The Cromford Report. ‘Supply is still down, and fewer listings are coming onto the market.’ She said the good news for buyers, besides lower interest rates, is 52% of metro Phoenix home sellers paid concessions during the past month. That’s the highest percentage in recent history.”
WESH Orlando. “Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation held a meeting on Thursday to discuss raising citizens’ property insurance rates. Citizen’s policyholder, Mike Mckee, said he’s one of the roughly 220,000 homeowners dropped by citizens across the state, meaning an even deeper rate hike for him. ‘They have continually increased the rates,’ he said. ‘In January of this year, I got notified that in one year, so January of 2025, that they would dump me for a company that I had never heard of and the rates after the dump going to this new company would go up 40%… this is going to be unsustainable.’”
Fox 7 Austin. “If you’re looking for an apartment here in Central Texas, you may be pleasantly surprised to see that rent prices have actually gone down. Austin realtor Olivia Vale with Roots Residential Group joins FOX 7 Austin’s John Krinjak to discuss in this FOX 7 Focus. VALE: Yeah. So, on average, we’re seeing about a 10% decrease from last year. And keep in mind that over the pandemic, both rents and home prices skyrocketed. And that’s because of supply and demand and, of course, a number of economic factors. Right now we’re getting relief. And we’re at the lighter side of that bubble, which is great news. A lot of it is supply and demand. We don’t have the tens of thousands of people moving here, ready to rent kind of anything that they see online before even seeing in person. So, you know, there’s a lot more available. And that goes for when you’re buying a home, too. There’s a lot of availability right now.”
“KRINJAK: And so we talked a lot about renting, but if you’re looking to buy a home or a condo, are you seeing similar patterns with the real estate market as we are with rent prices? Are those prices coming down too? VALE: Marginally. So definitely from the highs in 2022, we’ve come down a little bit. If you are a buyer right now, we’re seeing 30% more homes inventory wise than we were last year. So the world is your oyster. If you’re a buyer in Austin, you should be able to negotiate. You should be able to get, maybe points on your mortgage paid by the seller. You have a lot of leverage.”
The Houston Chronicle. “A 19-story student housing building serving Texas A&M students in Houston could be sold Tuesday at a foreclosure auction after a developer defaulted on $135 million worth of loans tied to the Texas Medical Center property. The auction could result in the sale of the Life Tower student housing and an adjacent parking garage, both owned by Houston-based developer MediStar, according to Harris County filings. MediStar fell delinquent on loans of $76.5 million and $59.3 million it took out in 2021 with an afflaite of CIM Group, according to the foreclosure filings. The properties were scheduled to be auctioned twice in 2023 but were pulled, according to Foreclosure Information and Listing Service.”
The Los Angeles Times in California. “A week into what Mayor London Breed has called a ‘very aggressive’ effort to clear homeless encampments across San Francisco, a key question looms: Where will the people living in those tents go? An estimated 8,300 people are living homeless in San Francisco, about half of them sleeping in parks and on sidewalks in makeshift shelters. Despite a years-long effort to move people into temporary shelter or permanent housing, tent encampments remain a glaring problem, often accompanied by trash, theft and open drug use. The city has had a similar program in effect for years, but it lost traction during the pandemic. Under the new directive, workers are to press the relocation option before offering any other city services, including housing and shelter. According to the city’s 2024 annual point-in-time homeless survey, about 40% of people living on the streets said they were not from San Francisco. Jeff Cretan, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the relocation offers and threat of criminal penalties are just a starting point as the city figures out what strategies will work.”
Northampton Chronicle on California. “Stan Robertson, CEO of Northampton homelessness support charity Project 16:15, is currently on a 10-day volunteering stint in Los Angeles, visiting ‘Tent City’ in Skid Row and also San Diego. Stan’s trip is part of a sponsored initiative aimed at learning from outreach teams and sharing best practices for addressing homelessness. He described his time in Skid Row as ‘an emotional experience’ and ‘a real eye opener.’ He said: ‘Skid Row is an arena of poverty, addiction, and broken humanity, the likes of which I have never seen. The encampments are constantly growing.’ Stan noted the severe lack of affordable housing in the area. He said: ‘There really isn’t any affordable housing here. It’s really expensive.’”
The Chicago Tribune in Illinois. “Jordan Parra said he didn’t walk across seven countries to be kicked out of his tent in a park in Chicago. The 27-year-old from Caracas, Venezuela, had been staying on Chicago Housing Authority land adjacent to the Near West District (12th) police station with his partner for months. They opted to sleep outside after feeling unsafe in three different city-run shelters, he said. Then in late June, he said, police officers came into the park with a bulldozer and cleared everyone out. ‘What we’ve found here is worse than in Venezuela, because we came here with hope for a better life and had to deal with the disappointment of not even getting close,’ he said.”
“When a major homeless encampment by the Dan Ryan Expressway was cleared on July 17, Maura McCauley, managing deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, told the Tribune it was fast-tracked in time for the Democratic National Convention in late August. Johnson later denied his administration’s earlier statements attributing the action to the DNC, scheduled for Aug. 19-22. The city has received close to 46,000 migrants on buses in about two years, sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in an attempt to challenge liberal cities’ welcoming messages.”
“Luis Linares, a 24-year-old from the Yaracuy state in Venezuela, also sleeps in the cluster of tents on CHA property. He said that whenever he gets work, he wires money home to his family in Venezuela, who need it more than he does. He said he doesn’t feel safe in the shelter, so prefers to sleep in a tent. He can’t afford rent for an apartment. The men at the encampment said they use the McDonald’s bathroom nearby to shower. At night, they sit on folding chairs in a circle. They say they’re tired. ‘We want to leave here,’ Linares said. “We’re trying to make enough money to save up.’”
The Toronto Sun. “Canada is now suffering through its worst economy in 40 years. The cause is largely the Trudeau government’s obsession with woke causes and virtue signalling over economic policy and fiscal management. Canada did spend more per capita on pandemic handouts than any other Western country and ran up more public debt. The hangover from that is still being felt in the form of higher taxes, higher interest rates and higher inflation. The Trudeau Liberals took a bad situation (the pandemic) and made it much worse and longer lasting. Their carbon tax and war on the energy sector have driven up prices, driven down investment and suppressed both economic growth and new employment.”
“And our per capita income is actually declining (one of the few developed countries with that problem) because the Trudeau government has opened our borders wide and invited in a flood of newcomers. Canada is welcoming 1.2 or 1.3 million immigrants, refugees and foreign students a year, up nearly triple since the Liberals came to power in 2015. However, as a nation, we are only building enough housing for just under 400,000 a year and creating jobs for (maybe) 500,000 a year.”
“Groceries cost nearly 40% more than when the Liberals came to office, as does fuel. And taxes now consume over 40% of ordinary Canadians’ incomes. Wow, for a government that positioned itself as the champion of the middle class in 2015, the Trudeau government certainly has been hard on middle-income Canadians. Meanwhile, Canadian incomes have gone up 100%, but housing prices have jumped by 300%. Much of the housing increase in Canada has happened during the nine years of Liberal rule and much of it is the result of the Trudeau government’s open-door immigration policies, overwhelming the housing market.”
From Politico. “From California to Krakow, young voters who are losing faith in democracy have been spurred in part by a surprising cause: high rents and rising property prices. The scarcity of affordable housing has triggered protests across European cities, from London to Lisbon, and on both coasts of the United States, where home prices have surged 54 percent since 2019. In California recently, hundreds of people, mostly renters, marched on the state capitol to decry the scarcity of reasonably priced rentals. And across North America and Europe, the shortage is pushing voters, particularly younger ones, toward populist leaders who promise to address the problem by targeting an issue already key to their platforms — though not necessarily the main one driving the problem — increased immigration.”
“In Britain, where migration has been generally rising since the 1990s and reached record levels in 2022, only falling back marginally last year, Nigel Farage, the country’s populist agent provocateur and leader of Reform UK, has determinedly linked the two issues. ‘Immigration is the real reason for the housing crisis,’ he argued in late June, claiming the country would have to ‘build a new house every two minutes’ to accommodate the influx of people. And in the Netherlands, populist firebrand Geert Wilders won last year’s election with a campaign that included promises to tackle the country’s acute affordable housing shortage.”
“Wilders’ Freedom Party claimed that the Netherlands’ backlog in house-building ‘simply cannot match the open-border policy and the huge population growth’ and that Dutch people ‘have to spend more and more time on the [social housing] waiting list, and are strongly discriminated against.’ In Canada, incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also facing housing headwinds. His bleak reelection prospects, after nine years in power, have been battered by the issue, with young voters abandoning him in droves. High prices were already shutting out new buyers before the pandemic, but since then they’ve soared even more.”
“Trudeau once enjoyed a massive advantage among younger voters. He scooped up 45 percent of them in 2015 on his way to a landslide win. A mid-June survey from Abacus Data pegged his party’s support with the country’s youngest voters, aged 18 to 29, at just 20 percent. Ben Rabidoux, a housing commentator, said the damage among people’s perceptions of the problem was done. ‘I really strongly believe that a lot of the simmering anger that we have is directly or indirectly related to these just incredibly misguided immigration policies,’ he adds.”
“But as populists push a simple link between housing and migration, many of the young are hearing the message loud and clear. Recent polling suggests Gen Z and millennials are becoming more anti-immigration than older generations in some parts of Europe. In recent national elections in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and France, young people voted in unprecedented numbers for nationalist and Euro-skeptic parties. In Huizen, a town of modest homes housing a population of 40,000 just half an hour from Amsterdam, local authorities set up 30 temporary housing units for Ukrainian refugees in December on a field in a residential area, despite protests by locals, who complain that it could bring down the value of their homes.”
“‘When you look at the asylum policy, there are refugees who get a home within six months, and then young people who wait for years and save up to buy a home. How bizarre is that?’ Angeline, a 37-year-old mother of two who works in the health sector, told POLITICO. ‘Everything is being arranged too well for outsiders but when you look at some Dutch people,’ her husband Niels added, they are in debt, ‘live on the streets and nothing is being done for them.’”
From News.com.au. “When former Fox News host Tucker Carlson addressed the Australian Freedom Conference in Melbourne in early July, he grabbed one of the live wires of Australian politics and society with both hands – the impact of high levels of migration on housing prices. Carlson pointed to migration as the ‘one reason’ housing prices were high and that it was a simple issue of supply and demand. From 2006 onwards, migration began to play a significantly more vital role in supporting housing price growth. According to an analysis by AMP chief economist Shane Oliver: ‘Up until 2005, the housing market was in rough balance. It then went into a massive shortfall of about 250,000 dwellings by 2014, as underlying demand surged with booming immigration.’”
“No one factor is directly responsible for all the issues we currently face as a nation with affordable housing. From the popularisation of property investing through various TV programs such as The Block to the multiple rounds of intervention by policymakers to support the housing market over the decades, there is a laundry list of political, social, psychological and economic changes that have led us to this point.”
ABC News in Australia. “Jonathan Egudo has spent 10 years trying to get the Tomazos Group, which built the Darwin CBD Kube seven-storey building in 2014, to fix the leak in the roof which floods his top floor apartment every wet season. ‘Four different times over four years they went up on the roof and said they had resolved the issue and hadn’t, and then it kept flooding again every time,’ he said. Mr Egudo pays rent on another property to live in, plus the $700,000 mortgage on the Kube apartment he bought off the plan, which he now can’t sell or let. ‘Basically they said that the air quality in there was such poor quality that it was uninhabitable,’ Mr Egudo said. ‘They have taken over two and a half years to complete their investigation, and then somehow they found that there was nothing that they could actually do.’”
“Mr Egudo has now launched expensive Supreme Court action against the builder to try to get compensation. ‘It’s something that’s always hanging over my head, I don’t have any financial certainty,” he said.