From HousingWire:
Is household formation set for a rebound
Despite ongoing concerns about the delay in household formation by younger buyers, demographically speaking things may be about to turn a corner.
The decline in the share of young adults living with their parents should provide a boost to household formation over the next few years, according to a client note from Capital Economics.
This is an upside risk to their forecasts for sales and housing demand and, perhaps, homebuilding, but it is unlikely to trigger a sharp rise in prices, the note says.
The subdued rate of household formation has been a drag on the housing recovery in recent years.
Most measures suggest that, since 2008, the number of new households forming each year has been unusually low – little more than half a million.
But in the latest Homeownership & Vacancy Survey, the Census Bureau estimated that household formation surged to 1.7 million in 2014, from 400,000 the previous year.
“Admittedly, the annual measures of household formation have always been volatile and it’s difficult to know how much weight to place on the latest reading,” says Ed Stansfield, chief property economist for Capital Economics. “But such a strong rebound could be a sign that housing demand is set to receive a significant boost in the coming years.”
From Zillow:
Confidence in U.S. Housing Market On The Rise, Especially Among Renters
American renters are growing more confident in the housing market, and more than 5 million are planning to buy a home this year, according to the Zillow® Housing Confidence Index (ZHCI)i.
More than 12 percent of current renters nationwide – roughly 5.2 million – said they plan to buy in the next yearii, an almost 25 percent jump from the same time last year, when 4.2 million renters said they had plans to buy within 12 months. The ZHCI, sponsored by Zillow and developed by Pulsenomics LLC, polls homeowners and renters about housing market conditions, expectations for the future and their attitudes toward homeownership in generaliii, across 20 of the large metro areas in the United States.
…
Among all renters surveyed nationwide, 59.7 percent said they think buying a home is the best long-term investment a person can make, compared to 56.9 percent at the same time last year. This improved long-term outlook was especially evident among younger renters. Among all 18- to 34-year-old renters, 66.2 percent said owning a home was the best long-term investment, compared to 61.4 percent last year.
The index is measured on a 100-point scale, with readings more than 50 indicating general confidence. Overall, housing market confidence is rising more quickly among renters than homeowners. Among only homeowners, headline confidence rose 3.7 points year-over-year, to 70.6 in January. Among renters only, overall confidence rose 4.4 points in the past year, to 62.4. Confidence among all owners and renters rose 3.6 points, to 67.4.
Water bill from yesterday–check for a running toilet. had one down my basement that added 15,000 gallons to my bill…
2
Similar story to my upstairs neighbor. I had heard it for weeks but could not pinpoint which unit it was coming from in my condo. Used a stethescope and determined it was her. She had no idea. So, I’m curious, didn’t it make noise?
While waiting for a house here we really wanted (deal went south), we rented for a few months (what a nightmare…for the scheming ‘bag holder’ about to be foreclosed upon ‘landlord’) . The previous tenants not only took all the light bulbs – including a unique one above the stove – (seems to be common occurrence in Warren County) but the toilet bowl, too! Oh, yeah, the shower head as well.
Sump pump didn’t work, either (house was/is RIGHT ON a river). Try scuba diving without a wetsuit in ICE cold water…no, don’t. Couple of fingers are still cold from it
Our water bill for the time spent there was negative. Whew.
LOL!!!
Painter says he included Monica Lewinsky’s dress in Bill Clinton portrait
Q: Who did you find was the hardest to capture?
Clinton was hard. I’ll tell you why. The reality is he’s probably the most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.
If you look at the left-hand side of it there’s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.
And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait Gallery. They’re putting a lot of pressure on them. [Reached by phone Thursday, a spokeswoman from the National Portrait Gallery denied that.]
http://articles.philly.com/2015-03-02/news/59647174_1_nelson-shanks-national-portrait-gallery-painting
I’m biting the tips of my fingers re: THEM (no, not typing about the BAW movie with giant ants from the 50s…).
Illary/Hitlary is more like Chiller theatre (remember that hand..whoa.).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux3laLkueZk
More on another collapse long predicted here
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/college-presidents-worry-their-schools-won-t-survive
[8] It’s inevitable. Even as parents tend to lose their financial sanity completely as their kids get close to finishing HS, they can only ignore for so long the influx of college grads coming back to their neighborhoods to twitter away their mid 20’s at Mom and Dad’s house, maybe emerging for 20 hours a week to go to their part time job at Starbucks.
For the people on here that thought I was bsing about the 800,000 survivor pool story, here is your proof. Story is in ledger today, comes out on nj.com tomorrow. I will post the story tomorrow. Proof that I don’t make up stories like some of you think.
“John Bovery, a Parlin, N.J., resident, started a survivor football pool with 57 friends from his Wall Street firm that grew into an $800,000 pot for the winner in its final season. (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)”
http://photos.nj.com/njcom_photos/2015/03/politi_the_john_bovery_story_1.html
Pretty good video:
http://www.businessinsider.com/student-debt-crisis-worse-than-mortgages-2014-11
Coming soon…The Apple Paperclip
Following the release of the Apple Watch will be the Apple Paperclip. Featuring a high-definition display that will show number of papers clipped and time-stamp of last clip, torsion and elasticity properties, current time, date, room temperature and humidity levels. Optional services include: news, sports scores and stock prices. Will also display text and email messages provided user is within 500 centimeters and wearing an Apple Watch and carrying an Iphone.
Anticipated MSRP $175.00
Gold version $2500.00
Problem with College parents is giving their kids the independent experience.Room and board is what going to kill you not the tuition. I had both my kids finish college at Rutgers living at home ang driving to school. I Paid their tuition with the extra 13th month extra pay we have every year. They are 4 years apart, that gave me extra. They worked for their books and spending money. At $13,000 a year tuition $52,000, I had a ROI of 150 percent on the first year of work on my Accountant. He started $80,000 at MS. My 2nd 100 percent ROI on first year at Loreal. I am lucky they both got jobs at a Fortune 100 Companies. Thanks RU
What foresight Rutgers showed by paying Snooki 32K for a lecture.
…although I guess paying Snooki 32K for a lecture pales in comparison to Columbia inviting Ahmadinejad to spew anti-Semitism for a day, with their stamp of approval.
Worst of all, the self-loathing Jewish kids all over the country who are part of the Israel divestiture movement.
That formula used to work out at 200% ROI *with* room and board when I went to RU, ’77-’81. $2600/year including dorm and meal plan, books were about $100/semester. I think the colleges are extracting way too much revenue these days for room and board. As you must know, RU even has tiered pricing on dorms, depending on what amenity level and calendar choices you choose.
Problem with College parents is giving their kids the independent experience.Room and board is what going to kill you not the tuition. I had both my kids finish college at Rutgers living at home ang driving to school. I Paid their tuition with the extra 13th month extra pay we have every year. They are 4 years apart, that gave me extra. They worked for their books and spending money. At $13,000 a year tuition $52,000, I had a ROI of 150 percent on the first year of work on my Accountant. He started $80,000 at MS. My 2nd 100 percent ROI on first year at Loreal. I am lucky they both got jobs at a Fortune 100 Companies. Thanks RU
yome – I negligently followed your lead. Both of our first year ROI calculations are wrong. Mine is really 100% and you need to subtract 100% from your numbers, and that’s assuming the cars, maintenance, and fuel were free for your kids.
Expat
Ok I got 150% and 100% ROI respectively on second year and more as the years go by. lol
If you can read this article all the way through without laughing…….
Excerpt…..
After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record.
Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack, according to the Willamette (Oregon) Week.
White teachers are taught to check their “unconscious racial bias” when dealing with black students who act out. They’re told to open their eyes to “white privilege” and white cultural “dominance,” and have more empathy for black kids who may be lashing out in frustration. They are trained to identify “root causes” of black anger, such as America’s legacy of racism.
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How liberal discipline policies are making schools less safe
New York public-school students caught stealing, doing drugs or even attacking someone can avoid suspension under new “progressive” discipline rules adopted this month.
Most likely, they will be sent to a talking circle instead, where they can discuss their feelings.
Convinced traditional discipline is racist because blacks are suspended at higher rates than whites, New York City’s Department of Education has in all but the most serious and dangerous offenses replaced out-of-school suspensions with a touchy-feely alternative punishment called “restorative justice,” which isn’t really punishment at all. It’s therapy.
“Every reasonable effort must be made to correct student behavior through…restorative practices,” advises the city’s new 32-page discipline code.
Except everywhere it’s been tried, this softer approach has backfired.
Yes, other large urban school districts are reporting fewer suspensions since adopting the non-punitive approach. But that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer infractions.
In fact, many districts are seeing more classroom disruptions and violence — a national trend that ought to set off warning bells for New York school officials.
What’s more, the movement — which is driven by new race-based anti-discipline guidelines issued by the Obama administration — is creating friction between teachers unions and the liberal mayors they otherwise support.
Politicians can praise the new system, but it’s teachers who must deal with the disruptive and sometimes violent results.
‘You have to have consequences’
Last month, for instance, the Chicago Teachers Union complained the city’s revised student-discipline code has left teachers struggling to control unruly kids.
“It’s just basically been a totally lawless few months,” one teacher told the Chicago Tribune.
In June, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the district, as part of a “Suspension and Expulsion Reduction Plan,” was “moving away from a zero-tolerance policy and promoting restorative practices.”
Students who bully classmates can no longer be removed from classrooms except for the worst offenses, and only then with the consent of a district supervisor.
Just as Mayor de Blasio promised last month in announcing New York’s revised discipline policy, Emanuel assured skeptics the more “holistic” approach — which he says addresses the “root causes” of bad behavior — would still provide “a safe learning environment.”
But so far this school year, the Tribune reports students have suffered little consequence for infractions as serious as groping a teacher and bringing hollow-point bullets to class.
“You have to have consequences,” Chicago fifth-grade teacher John Engels told the paper. “If you knew the cops weren’t going to enforce the speed limit…you’d go 100 miles an hour.”
In Syracuse, meanwhile, teachers complain student behavior has worsened since the school district collapsed discipline structures in favor of restorative justice practices. They say teens are more apt to fight, mouth off to teachers and roam the halls under the more lenient policy. They’re even seeing increasingly violent behavior among elementary school children.
While the approach may be “laudable,” Syracuse Teachers Association President Kevin Ahern said in a recent letter to the Syracuse Post-Standard, it has created a “systemic inability to administer and enforce consistent consequences for violent and highly disruptive student behaviors” that “put students and staff at risk and make quality instruction impossible.”
‘Kids control the classroom’
Los Angeles Unified School District is seeing a similar spike in campus offenses after its school superintendent followed federal orders to reduce suspensions of African-Americans. Even threats against teachers are ignored, as administrators’ hands are tied by the new policy.
“I was terrified and bullied by a fourth-grade student,” a teacher at a Los Angeles Unified School District school recently noted on the Los Angeles Times website. “The black student told me to ‘Back off, b—h.’ I told him to go to the office and he said, ‘No, b—h, and no one can make me.’ ”
Complained another LAUSD teacher: “We now have a ‘restorative justice’ counselor, but we still have the same problems. Kids aren’t even suspended for fights or drugs.”
In neighboring Orange County, teachers are dealing with increasingly violent and disrespectful student behavior since schools there also switched to the restorative strategy.
Recently mandated “positive interventions” have only exacerbated discipline problems in the largely minority Santa Ana public school district, where middle-school kids now regularly smoke pot in bathrooms — some even in class — and attack staff — spitting on teachers, pelting them with eggs, even threatening to stab them, according to the
Orange County Register.
According to a recent teachers union survey, 65 percent of Santa Ana educators said the softer discipline system is not working. Dozens of teachers have filed hostile-work-environment complaints.
Defiance toward teachers is on the rise in Philadelphia public schools, as well, where talking circles have replaced suspensions.
A former Philly middle-school teacher complains minority students act out and then dare teachers to kick them out of class, knowing full well their hands are now tied.
“I’m going to torture you,” Allen Zollman says one student told him. “I’m doing this because I can’t be removed.”
Knowing there won’t be consequences, bullies control the classroom and disrupt lessons for all kids who want to learn.
“The less we are willing or able to respond, the more they will control the classroom, the hallways and the school,” Zollman added in testimony before the US Commission on Civil Rights.
Blaming the teachers
The administration welcomes this “Lord of the Flies” scenario.
Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University.
“It’s sort of a counterintuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”
Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.
At Lincoln High School, for example, students reported frequent campus fighting. In just one recent month, there were several arrests, including one involving a butcher knife, according to local TV news reports. School officials confirm at least 16 batteries in just the first few months of the school year.
Violence is still a problem in Oakland schools after officials there substituted such restorative counseling for suspensions on similar orders from Obama educrats.
“There have been serious threats against teachers,” Oakland High School science teacher Nancy Caruso told the Christian Science Monitor, and yet the students weren’t expelled. She notes a student who set another student’s hair on fire received a “restorative” talk in lieu of suspension.
Yet the administration is holding up Oakland’s new discipline program as a national model. Little wonder: Teacher training for the program, led by Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, includes sessions titled, “Race and Restorative Justice” and “African-Centered Restorative Justice Approaches.”
After spending millions on restorative justice and “courageous conversations about race” training, Portland public schools have seen their students only grow more violent.
After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record.
Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack, according to the Willamette (Oregon) Week.
A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behavior of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified.
Defining discipline down
During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programs, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behavior of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.
One prominent consulting group is Pacific Educational Group. San Francisco-based PEG has collected millions of dollars from dozens of major school districts across the country holding teacher workshops designed to “achieve racial justice in our schools.”
Among PEG’s workshops: “De-centering Whiteness in School Discipline” and “White Supremacy, White Privilege and Racial Oppression: Getting In On Courageous Conversation.”
Here’s the course description of a 2013 restorative justice-related workshop, according to a PEG brochure: “Institutions are infested with token people of color and racist white people who uphold White Supremacy, causing a survivor mentality among those who encounter daily micro-invalidations, -aggressions, and -assaults in hostile environments. Though a historical overview, learn about the oppressive system known as the American Education System, a school system that was never designed for children of color.”
At least two top Obama education officials have received PEG awards at national PEG conferences.
White teachers are taught to check their “unconscious racial bias” when dealing with black students who act out. They’re told to open their eyes to “white privilege” and white cultural “dominance,” and have more empathy for black kids who may be lashing out in frustration. They are trained to identify “root causes” of black anger, such as America’s legacy of racism.
Teachers are told to respect black “culture,” which is described as more “emotional” and “physical,” and to give disruptive students a pass when they curse and threaten them, because “African-American boys are demonstrative” and that’s just how they “engage in learning,” according to the Monitor. Talk about racism!
Instead of being kicked out of school or suffering other serious punishment, even repeat offenders can negotiate the consequences for their bad behavior, which usually involve paper-writing and “dialogue sessions.”
Teachers are trained to make sure black kids “feel respected,” and to listen to their complaints without judgment or criticism. Misbehaving kids are handed a “talking stick” and encouraged to emote about the issues underlying their anger. More often than not, they are treated as victims, even if they start fights or threaten teachers.
No longer can teachers in these programs deal swiftly with a disruptive child by removing him from class. Conflicts take days, even weeks to resolve as schools coordinate talking circles around the schedules of teachers, principals, counselors, parents and even campus police — all of whom must take time out and meet to deal ever-so-delicately with a single problem student.
And that doesn’t include the in-class circles also required under the restorative approach. Teachers are trained never to snap at a mouthy student interrupting a lesson but rather to gather students in a circle to share their feelings about the problem.
Even if such pow-wows diffuse conflicts, they take an inordinate amount of time away from academic instruction. They also give troublemakers incentive to continue causing trouble.
“RJ (restorative justice) can encourage misbehavior by lavishing attention on students for committing infractions,” warns Paul Bruno, who participated in talking circles while teaching middle school in Oakland and South Central Los Angeles. In fact, he added in a Scholastic.com blog, “the circles may unwittingly allow already assertive students to leverage their social dominance even further inside the classroom.”
Restorative justice activists argue the program combats bias that contributes to disproportionate discipline, suspensions, drop-outs and the “school-to-prison pipeline.” But all too often, it merely provides rowdy students an excuse for continued bad behavior.
New York public schools may get their suspension numbers “right” under the new racially correct discipline standards. But their enrollment numbers will likely suffer in the process, as more students — and teachers — transfer to safer private or charter schools. In a misguided effort to be “fair” to a few, politicians are hurting the education of the many.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and the “The Great American Bank Robbery.”
From above…….this could be used for comedy stand-up……
Here’s the course description of a 2013 restorative justice-related workshop, according to a PEG brochure: “Institutions are infested with token people of color and racist white people who uphold White Supremacy, causing a survivor mentality among those who encounter daily micro-invalidations, -aggressions, and -assaults in hostile environments. Though a historical overview, learn about the oppressive system known as the American Education System, a school system that was never designed for children of color.”