From CBS News:
In ‘warfare against renters,’ homeowners fight affordable housing push
At a packed City Hall meeting, one resident after another stood before the City Council of the suburban Phoenix city of Surprise pleading with officials to block the construction of an apartment complex for seniors and lower-income renters — shouting, heckling and arguing about crime and traffic congestion.
In the crowd was Nate Pomeroy, a leader in the effort to block the apartment complex. He moved to Surprise in 2018 from Scottsdale after years in California to retire and expected it would be the last home he’d live in.
Now, he’s not sure he’ll stay. He worries the apartment complex will increase traffic and change the character of the area, which is made up of sprawling subdivisions of Spanish-style homes selling for $500,000 to $700,000.
The heated debate in Surprise, population 150,000, is being echoed in large and small communities across the country as local officials have pushed to increase the housing supply with small backyard bungalows to subsidized apartment complexes in response to surging rents and home prices since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s just going to turn this into a very high-density area. It’s going to really change the look and feel of where we are, and people aren’t happy about it,” Pomeroy said. “The City Council and city management have not listened effectively. They’re going to build and build and build, and it’s no longer going to be the last place I live.”
Vocal groups of homeowners say they are fearful of what the changes could mean for their communities. Increasingly, they are fighting back with lawsuits, referendums, appeals to state representatives and recall elections in a battle to stave off multifamily housing in their largely suburban neighborhoods.
“It’s the same buzzwords no matter where you are. Some are more veiled than others as far as whether they will flat-out say that renters are second-class citizens,” said Owen Metz, a senior vice president at Dominium, an affordable housing developer that is working on the proposed apartment complex in Surprise. “It’s not everywhere, but there seems to be this growing warfare against renters.”
Homeowners have long put up fights against new developments — the acronym NIMBY, or “not in my backyard,” has been in use for decades — but the battles have grown louder in recent years amid a wave of apartment construction stretching outside of city centers. The debates have also taken on new urgency as surging home prices drive out middle-class workers and lead to an uptick in homelessness, affordable housing advocates said.
Frist
WFH moves people out of high density areas
Submersibles blow up Kerch Bridge? Range on that cannot be too far.
“This morning (Sunday), an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack by seven unmanned aerial vehicles and two unmanned semi-submersible boats on facilities on the territory of the Crimean Peninsula near Sevastopol was foiled,” said the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).
Kerch Bridge hit again one way destroyed. It will take a while to repair it again, and well they could hit it again with Storm Shadow cruise missiles or other weapons. Ukrainian units could reach the Azov Sea in the coming weeks. From that area all traffic to Crimea would be cutoff and all areas near under potential artillery fire.
No more grain? Let’s see what Erdogan does he has pledged to keep the grain flowing with the Turkish Navy also a NATO member.
“MOSCOW, July 17 (Reuters) – Russia halted participation on Monday in the year-old U.N.-brokered deal which lets Ukraine export grain through the Black Sea, just hours after a blast knocked out Russia’s bridge to Crimea in what Moscow called a strike by Ukrainian sea drones.”
Russia said two civilians were killed and their daughter wounded in what Moscow cast as a terrorist attack on the road bridge, a major artery for Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
“Also some tough talk coming out of Russia about invading the Suwaki Gap, that could mean WWIII.”
Long a bunch of very cheap vol. Let the nukes fly. I’ll load up on Canuck Goose and ski away the nuclear winter.
Actually, would the ‘climate change’ heat waves now and nuclear winter effectively cancel each other out? Win-win.
That’s how it happens. Escalations are met with escalations. Vlad is up to something in belorus. The Russians are pretty cunning when it comes to intrigue. We don’t know or can’t say what their next move will be. But luckily we have the foreign policy experts Hunter and Joe running the show. They have our best interests at heart.
Throughout history most catastrophes were anticipated. There is one unfolding in front of our eyes. Too many people are captured by political dogma to say so. That’s madness over there.
Escalations? – Germans are now sending 4,000 troops to Lithuania permanently to watch the border there. That Russian Oblast Kaliningrad now has sanctions no transit of coal, metals, cement, wood, building materials and high-tech products by railway to or from Russia.
If they attempt to take the Suwaki Gap which is only 60 miles long it will be very very bad.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-station-4000-soldiers-permanently-lithuania/
On British news there was an Irish mercenary who has been fighting for 17 months and is now headed home. He has described what is currently happening. There are bodies piled up on both sides in the trenches with none being removed. No air support etc, they send in small platoons to clear the trenches with no armored support. The Ukrainians are trying to save what armor they have.
NY times ran a piece about it too they say they lost 20% of their armor, which means it’s probably higher.
Here is an interview with Eric Schmidt from Google. He reminds people the Russians have been dug in there for nearly 10 years now and says you have to cross the front line, tanks, mines, machine guns, drones, then hit the trenches and probably get killed on the way back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjInnRL-HUg
Exited some BAC and XLF that I put on during the SVB/FRB fiasco ahead of the rest of bank earnings this week.
Returns were too good (BAC +$4 plus on $24 cost basis, XLF need to calculate exact but a little better). Nearly 20% for two months on each.
Used shares plus put and call writes to juice returns…the calls limit my returns even if the stocks run from here so my risk/reward was inverted. Shares may well go higher, if they do I’m good with the gain I took. If not, I’ll apply three day rule and likely reload a similar trade if numbers justify. Still long MS, with about 12% downside protection.
Schmidt is a global elitist. He thinks he should decide the rules of intentional order and security. Whatever it takes to impose his vision then so be it. But they have clearly dropped the pretense of defending democracy.
This earnings season looks as if it will be truly horrible, which isn’t to say that investors won’t conclude it is a pleasant surprise.
As Heard on the Street’s Justin Lahart reports, second-quarter results looks as if they are going to be lousy. Analysts are looking for an S&P 500 earnings-per-share decline of about 8% from a year earlier, and for revenues to slip, too. Profit margins are getting compressed, and even as the overall economy grows — especially in unadjusted for inflation — public companies’ business seems to be just getting worse.
So even allowing for the fact that companies will likely, as is typical, beat estimates, things look crummy. But for investors, that could still count for something. They have known for a while that the second quarter would be bad, after all. Plus, in the wake of last week’s inflation report, there is a growing expectation that the Federal Reserve, after raising rates one last time next week, will end its tightening campaign. Not a bad backdrop for the stock market, at least for now.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 76 points, or 0.2%, on Monday, while the broader S&P 500 rose 0.4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.9%.
In time, investors might need to reckon with the fact that, if the Fed does in fact move to sidelines, it will be because the economy, and inflation, have cooled, which isn’t necessarily good news for companies sales and the prices they are able to charge. On Monday, a small, new pocket of outright deflation opened up: Ford Motor said it is slashing prices of its electric F-150 Lightning pickup by as much as 17%. Ford shares fell sharply.
Home owners have an extra $10 Trillion of equity in their homes, since the pandemic. So, homeowners really don’t have to stop spending. Because if money gets low they can just tap that equity. And they aren’t afraid to do so, because they know rates will come down in the future.
So, maybe the sky isn’t falling?
Nobody is “tapping equity” at these rates.
Average rate for a HELOC right now is 8.6%.