Free Republic

In the recently released May 2015 Golden State Poll, just 14 percent of Californian adults living in the Bay Area, Central Valley, and Southern California think one of the three state-level affordable housing policies tested would do the most to reduce the cost of purchasing a home. It is clear that while Californians do recognize the breadth of the affordability problem - 69 percent describe their area's housing market as expensive for the house you get - they necessarily don't feel the need to pressure their state leaders to do much. This, unfortunately, means Sacramento is unlikely to take the...

More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities. That's the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007. Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department.

During debates and speeches, politicians often bring up the financial burden that’s placed on the middle class. We talk about the middle class as though they are this singular entity, who used to thrive until they underwent persecution by the evil 1%. But, realistically speaking, the middle class and the 99% are not really synonymous. So, who are the middle class? In its discussion of historical middle class societies, The Economist reports, “Their members are neither rich nor poor but somewhere in-between…’Middle-class’ describes an income category but also a set of attitudes…An essential characteristic is the possession of a reasonable...

It's really hard for a middle class family to buy a house along the California coast.Real estate research and marketplace site Zillow routinely calculates an index of housing affordability. First, they use a proprietary statistical model to estimate housing values in a metropolitan area. Then, they calculate the monthly mortgage payment for a median price house in each metro area. Finally, they calculate the percentage of the median monthly income for each metro area needed to pay that mortgage payment.For example, Zillow's estimate for the median home price in Abilene, TX during the first quarter of 2014 was $98,600. After...

There are four structural drivers behind the soaring costs of the middle class lifestyle. Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated?Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend: 1. Baumol's Cost Disease2. Systemic headwinds to the current version of capitalism3. Dominance of global corporate capital4. Financialization The key take-away here is that the first two causes are structural and cannot be changed by passing a law or funding another state bureaucracy. Though many believe they can tax global corporate capital to...

Unlike the average Beltway insider, a report by Interest.com claims the majority of medium-income American households in 24 of 25 cities studied cannot afford the average new-car price of $32,086. AOL Autos reports the study focused on each city’s median income in relation to the new-car price average as pegged by Kelley Blue Book. Said price was broken down to monthly payments of $633 per month for 48 months with 20 percent down while interest, insurance and principal exceeded no more than 10 percent of the household’s gross income. The only city out of 25 to pull off the feat?...

October 26, 2011Housing Affordability: U.S. Is the Envy Of the Developed WorldBy Edward Pinto Affordable markets are those where the median house price is less than or equal to three times median income. The United States as a whole is affordable with an average score of 3.0. As the nearby chart indicates, this places the U.S. at the head of the affordability class among seven ranked countries, with the other six ranging from moderately unaffordable to severely unaffordable.Significantly, half of the 211 housing markets in the U.S. are ranked as affordable, with another 35% ranked as moderately unaffordable. For the...

Few icons of the American way of life have suffered more in recent years than homeownership. Since the bursting of the housing bubble, there has been a steady drumbeat from the factories of futurist punditry that the notion of owning a home will, and, more importantly, should become out of reach for most Americans. Before jumping on this bandwagon, perhaps we would do well to understand the role that homeownership and the diffusion of property plays in a democracy. From Madison and Jefferson through Lincoln’s Homestead Act, the most enduring and radical notion of American political economy has been the...

Free to Choose? by: Deborah Lambert, August 25, 2008 In these days of rapidly escalating college tuition costs, the very mention of an institution like Berea College can make the heads of pricey schools a bit defensive. After all, Berea, located in Kentucky, educates only low-income students, and stands apart from almost every college by offering free tuition, according to the New York Times. “It’s difficult to find a college that balances thrift and altruism as deftly as Berea,” noted Anthony Paletta in a recent posting on mindingthecampus.com. While high-profile Ivies with their megabucks endowments attract the super-rich and offer...

With rents in many cities skyrocketing, men and women marrying later and a divorce rate for first-time marriages that hovers at about 45%, it's no wonder more American couples are deciding to shack up. There were an estimated 6,017,462 unmarried-partner households in the U.S. in 2006, according to the Census' latest research. This number includes 779,867 same-sex households. When the Census began measuring unmarried partners in 1996, there were only 2,858,000 opposite-sex couples. Though you likely know at least one cohabiting pair, unlike their married and single peers, unmarried couples are not an easy group to quantify. They cannot check...

In 2002, the median price of a single-family home in Los Angeles was $270,000 and the median homeowner's income was $65,000. With a $50,000 down payment, the annual cost of that house (taxes, insurance and payment on a 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage) would add up to about 33% of the median household's income -- just under the 35% mark that the Federal Housing Administration calls the upper limit of "affordable." By 2006, the cost of that same house doubled, to $540,000 -- pushed by unbridled speculation fueled by unparalleled access to mortgage capital. But median income rose a paltry 15%....

This cycle doesn't look like it is going to end well, he says. His reasoning is deceptively simple: "There's a limit to what people can afford." When the coastal areas of the state were reporting home prices that seemed unrealistically high in the late 1990s, Levy was among those who thought prices throughout the state, on average, could go even higher. The centerpiece of his theory at the time was that prices remained below or in line with the national average in places such as Sacramento, Riverside and Fresno. "People would say, 'It's a long commute but I can get...

Indianapolis led all U.S. cities in housing affordability during the third quarter, according to a survey released Monday by Wells Fargo and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). It was the fifth straight quarter that Indianapolis was the most affordable major housing market in the United States. Nationally, according to NAHB President David Pressly, 40.4 percent of all new and existing homes sold during the third quarter were affordable to families earning the median U.S. income of $59,600. That means more than half the nation had too little income to buy a median priced home. The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing...

A new report by the California Building Industry Association paints a far gloomier picture than others when it comes to housing affordability in the state. According to the CBIA, 20 of the nation's 21 least-affordable metropolitan areas are in California, and all of them have less than 10 percent affordability. The Housing Opportunity Index, sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Frago Bank, calculates the percentage of homes sold in an area during a three-month period that were affordable to a family earning the median income in the region. With these criteria, greater Los Angeles - including...

Online learning will continue to grow for several reasons. The first reason is because of the advent of high-speed Internet. Anybody with a home PC can now take a course online. If you have a laptop, you can take your course online and take it with you to the coffice (coffee house/office). That is where I am writing this. PCs and Macs are also becoming more affordable. For the price of one credit hour at some schools, a student can now buy a good desktop Dell or Gateway PC. There is no more driving to school, finding a parking place,...

<p>SACRAMENTO (AP) - A new U.S. Census report on California's fastest-growing cities and towns draws a portrait of a vast inland migration as residents relentlessly search for a cheaper place to call home.</p> <p>Whether to suburban Sacramento's Lincoln in the north or the Inland Empire's Beaumont and Murrieta in the south, thousands, statistics show, have taken eastbound highways to the hills and valleys of Central California.</p>