Vote for Christie – Get a Tunnel

Posted on July 25, 2015 by grim

From the NYT:

Chris Christie Claims He Will Pursue the Trans-Hudson Tunnel Project as President

Several days of severe delays for rail commuters trying to cross the Hudson River this week has been a painful reminder of the deteriorating state of the tunnels that carry the trains and brought renewed attention to a decision made years ago to halt a project that might have helped improve the situation.

In a radio interview that will be broadcast this weekend, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made clear his reasoning for blocking the construction of a new tunnel and other infrastructure in 2010 that was intended to increase passenger service capacity between his state and Manhattan. He said it was a regional project that would have left New Jersey taxpayers to bear the brunt of its cost.

The governor, a Republican candidate for president, added that if he were to make it to the White House, he would push for an equitable solution.

“If I am president of the United States, I call a meeting between the president, my secretary of transportation, the governor of New York and the governor of New Jersey and say, ‘Listen, if we are all in this even Steven, if we are all going to put in an equal share, then let’s go build these tunnels under the Hudson River,’ ” Mr. Christie said in an interview with the radio talk show host Larry Kudlow, which will be broadcast on Saturday on WABC-AM.

“Then, everyone has an incentive to have the project run right, to run efficiently because everybody is on the hook,” Mr. Christie added.

The governor’s comments — and his hypothetical phrasing — has attracted the attention of his critics, who say his statements emphasize how little he has done to help improve transportation.

“This is not a hypothetical issue, this is a real issue, and he could be doing something about it,” said Martin Robins, the founding director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, who was the director of the tunnel project during the mid-1990s. “The question is, what has he done, what will he do in the next 18 months as the governor of New Jersey?”

Posted in Economics, New Jersey Real Estate, NYC, Politics | 51 Comments

Canary?

Posted on July 24, 2015 by grim

From Bloomberg:

Hamptons Home Prices Fall as More Sellers List Properties

The real estate market in New York’s Hamptons has cooled from a frenzied pace, with the median sale price in the beachfront towns falling to the lowest in a year and a half.

In the three months through June, Hamptons homes sold for a median of $849,000, down 6.5 percent from the second quarter of 2014, according to a report Thursday by brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate and appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. Completed deals in the area, the favored summer retreat of Wall Street financiers, tumbled 16 percent to 590.

More owners are putting their homes on the market after a surge in demand pushed prices to a seven-year high in 2014. Listings at the end of June totaled 1,694, up 2.9 percent from a year earlier and higher than the six-year quarterly average of 1,571, the firms said. With increased choices in most price ranges, shoppers were able to take their time on deals.

“The intensity has slowed a bit,” said Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based Miller Samuel and a Bloomberg View contributor. “Any time you have a pronounced period of growth, which we had in 2014, that pulls in more inventory because sellers say, ‘Hey it’s time to sell.’”

At the current pace of transactions, it would take 8.6 months to sell all the homes on the market, up from 7.1 months at the end of June 2014, the firms said.

Posted in Housing Bubble, Housing Recovery, Shore Real Estate | 93 Comments

Home sales at highest level since 2007

Posted on July 23, 2015 by grim

From Reuters:

U.S. home sales approach eight-and-a-half-year high, prices surge

U.S. home resales rose in June to their highest level in nearly 8-1/2 years, a sign of pent-up demand that should buoy the housing market recovery and likely keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise interest rates later this year.

The National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday existing home sales increased 3.2 percent to an annual rate of 5.49 million units, the highest level since February 2007.

“The economy really has the wind at its back now,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York.

Home resales this year are on track to record their biggest gain in eight years, the NAR said.

Economists had forecast sales rising to an annual rate of 5.40 million units last month. Sales were up 9.6 percent from a year ago.

June’s solid home sales report came on the heels of last week’s strong housing starts and building permits data. A tightening labor market is starting to push up wages, helping to boost demand for housing, especially among young adults.

But a tight supply of properties for sale remains a constraint. The string of strong housing reports indicate the economy continues to be on firmer footing despite a drop in retail sales and a slowdown in job growth last month.
…
“Strong home resale numbers throughout the spring and into summer are welcome news to those who feared the housing market was a weak point in the overall economy,” said Bill Banfield, vice president at Quicken Loans in Detroit.

“As housing numbers trend more positive, the Fed will become increasingly comfortable in beginning to raise rates.”
…
At June’s sales pace, it would take 5.0 months to clear houses from the market, down from 5.1 months in May. A six-month supply is viewed as a healthy balance between supply and demand.

With supply well below what it was during the housing bubble in 2006, the median price for a previously owned home increased 6.5 percent from a year ago to a record $236,400.

While some buyers may be forced out of the market by higher prices, homeowners are seeing their equity rise. That could lead to more houses being put up for sale. Realtors and economists say insufficient equity has contributed to the tight housing inventories.

Posted in Housing Recovery, National Real Estate | 103 Comments

Time to clean house? Vote all incumbents out.

Posted on July 22, 2015 by grim

From the APP:

Where does New Jersey’s job market rank?

Just when you thought it was safe to come out.

New Jersey’s job market, which showed signs of life early this year, slumped in June, leaving the Garden State 36th in job growth nationwide, according to statistics released during the past week.

“I have a feeling this is that pattern of three steps forward, one step back,” said James W. Hughes, an economist and dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “It’s not a smooth, even pattern of job growth.”
…
New Jersey’s rocky path to recovery has grabbed national attention thanks to Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential bid. But there are stronger forces at work.

Perhaps the biggest? New Jersey’s suburban landscape – with isolated corporate campuses, sprawling housing developments, and long, gas-guzzling commutes – was a strength in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it has fallen out of favor in the new economy, Hughes said.

The giant millennial generation, now in its 20s and 30s, is quickly replacing the baby boom generation in the workplace. It is technically savvy. It prizes teamwork. It doesn’t mind mass transit. It can work any time of the day. And employers are following them, Hughes said.

The shift has prompted New Jersey business groups and entrepreneurs to call on the state to adapt – whether to fix the crumbling transportation network or finds ways employers can partner with high schools and colleges to convince talented students to stay in New Jersey.

“The paradigm shift is, let’s forget about the blame game,” Tom Bracken, president of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, said during a recent interview. “Let’s forget about having 15 hearings on the (depleted) transportation trust fund; what else do you need to know? Let’s talk about hearings and meetings where we have solutions and identify the real problems that we need to address, and find ways to start working on those problems.”

Posted in Demographics, Economics, New Development, New Jersey Real Estate | 169 Comments

Everyone wants out?

Posted on July 21, 2015 by grim

From the Star Ledger:

14 percent of N.J. businesses thinking of moving out of state

The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce’s biannual Baker Tilly Spring Economic Outlook Survey brings grim news for the state’s lagging employment prospects: Fourteen percent of those surveyed said they were currently considering moving their businesses out of New Jersey.

Ten of the 14 business leaders considering relocating their businesses blamed high taxes or high cost of living as their reason. Just four cited opportunities elsewhere.

“It is no surprise that high taxes are at the top of the list,” said Tom Bracken, president and CEO of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

“New Jersey-based corporations pay a 9.4 percent tax rate, one of the highest in the country. Despite that, some in the state Legislature last month proposed increasing the corporate tax rate again to 10.75 percent. We fought hard against it and thankfully Gov. Christie vetoed it.”
…
There was also some good news in the Baker Tilly survey, which consults 100 Garden State business owners, CEOs and senior executives. More than four out of 10 respondents (42 percent) said they expect the state’s economy to improve over the next 12 months, while only 16 percent said they expect it to worsen. This is an improved outlook from survey results a year ago, when only 35 percent of respondents said they expected the economy to improve, while 26 percent said they expected it would worsen.

And large majority of respondents — 82 percent — said they expect their companies will either maintain or increase their staffing levels over the next 12 months. Some 77 percent of the respondents said they expect their companies’ revenue to stay even or increase.

Posted in Economics, Employment, New Jersey Real Estate | 150 Comments

In-depth look into NJ’s foreclosure situation

Posted on July 19, 2015 by grim

From the Record:

Fuller impact of home foreclosure debacle hits N.J.

The number of New Jersey home repossessions by lenders has soared in the past two years and is on track to increase again in 2015, in sharp divergence to the national trend.

Completed foreclosures, where banks and mortgage companies have taken the homes, climbed 34 percent in the state last year, to about 5,780, after an 11 percent surge in 2013, according to The Record’s analysis of RealtyTrac data. By contrast, on the national level, completed foreclosures fell by double digits in each of the past three years.

In the first three months of this year, Bergen County was on pace to nearly double last year’s total of sheriff’s auction sales with 201 properties sold.

A CoreLogic report released Tuesday showed that in May 4.9 percent of mortgaged homes in New Jersey were completed foreclosures, the top rate in the country. The percentage of homes where the mortgages are seriously delinquent also was the highest at 8.4 percent.

The statistics indicate the foreclosure debacle, which has eased in other states following the housing meltdown that began in 2007, may only now be peaking in New Jersey, where foreclosures had been crawling through the system.

The reasons for the slow processing include a state judiciary that has tried harder than other states to hold banks accountable for illegal and improper paperwork. Also, New Jersey’s non-profit housing groups, which have support in the state Legislature, have worked to help keep homeowners in their homes. It has taken debt collectors about two years and 10 months on average from the time an initial notice is delivered until the property is repossessed, according to real estate information company RealtyTrac. Only Hawaii’s process is longer.

Now repossessions are moving faster. According to housing activists and lawyers who defend homeowners faced with foreclosure, the acceleration has coincided with a pickup in the real estate market. Although bankers deny it, homeowner advocates say that uptick seems to have made banks more eager to complete foreclosures, cash out and recover what they can from their losses.

“There have been secondary-market buyers coming in as a reaction to the housing market starting to rebound a bit,” said Adam Deutsch, a lawyer with Denbeaux & Denbeaux in Westwood, which has defended hundreds of New Jersey homeowners in contested foreclosures.
…
New Jersey has throughout the foreclosure debacle had a lower home-repossession rate than most states when measured as a percentage of the total number of homes. Last year, for example, the state ranked 30th, with about one in 350 homes going all the way through the repossession process, according to an analysis of RealtyTrac data. Nationwide, the rate in 2014 was about one in 225 homes.

Bankers tend to blame the courts, lawmakers and housing activists for the state’s inability to clean up its foreclosure mess in a timely fashion. They say homeowner assistance programs have delayed the inevitable.

“This [surge in repossessions] represents the ones that should have been completed years ago,” said Michael Affuso, director of government relations for the New Jersey Bankers Association.
…
Homeowners facing foreclosure often stay in their homes without making any mortgage payments for years as the process drags on, partly because lenders refuse to accept partial payments once a loan is in default.

But it’s not a free ride for the homeowner. Missed interest payments and late fees, as well as arrears in taxes and insurance, typically are added to what is owed.

Bankers are reluctant to speak on the record about their foreclosure practices. “It is a politically sensitive and customer-sensitive issue,” one industry veteran said. But regulatory filings by publicly traded lenders offer some insight into the effect the surge in homeowner defaults has had on these companies.
…
Homes in foreclosure continue to be a drag on New Jersey’s housing recovery, and the sooner they are sold to buyers who want to live in them, or to investors who want to resell them or rent them, the better, said the New Jersey Bankers Association’s Affuso.

“This is a nightmare for a bank,” Affuso said. “They’ve already written the loans down and they want to get rid of them.”
…
Even so, there were nearly 49,000 new foreclosure complaints filed statewide last year, the most since 2010, according to data from the Office of Foreclosure. The counties with the highest numbers last year were Essex, Camden, Ocean, Middlesex and Bergen, in that order.

“It’s a difficult situation,” Affuso said. “We are closer to the next recession than we are from the last recession and there are still about 85,000 properties in foreclosure, and probably 40 percent are older than 2013.”

Posted in Foreclosures, New Jersey Real Estate, Risky Lending | 119 Comments

Hammers start swinging again

Posted on July 18, 2015 by grim

From Bloomberg:

Housing Starts in U.S. Surge to Second-Highest Level Since 2007

New-home construction in the U.S. climbed in June to the second-highest level since November 2007 as builders stepped up work on apartment projects.

Housing starts rose 9.8 percent to a 1.17 million annualized rate from a revised 1.07 million in May that was stronger than previously estimated, figures from the Commerce Department showed Friday in Washington. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was a 1.11 million rate. Ground-breaking on multifamily dwellings jumped 29.4 percent.

Building permits for single and multifamily properties, a gauge of future construction, climbed to an almost eight-year high, the report showed. Steady job gains, low mortgage rates and a gradual easing of lending standards are propelling sales, indicating housing will become a bigger source of strength for the economy.

“They’re pretty positive numbers,” said Lewis Alexander, chief economist at Nomura Securities International Inc. in New York. “You’ve got decent employment growth that’s been particularly good for young people, you’ve got relatively low interest rates, somewhat easing of credit standard — all of those things are helping.”

Estimates for housing starts in the Bloomberg survey of 76 economists ranged from 1.03 million to 1.23 million. The May figure was revised up from 1.04 million.

The gain in starts of multifamily homes followed a 16.9 percent decrease the previous month and a 37.5 percent April surge. Data on these projects, which have led housing starts in recent years, can be volatile.
…
Applications to begin work on single-family projects rose to 687,000 in June, the most since January 2008. Permits for construction of apartments and other multifamily dwellings rose 15.3 percent after a 20 percent jump the previous month.

Posted in Housing Recovery, National Real Estate, New Development | 26 Comments

NJ loses jobs, unemployment rate tumbles to 6.1%

Posted on July 17, 2015 by grim

From the Star Ledger:

N.J. sheds 7,400 jobs in June as construction industry shrinks

New Jersey lost more than 7,000 jobs in June with the biggest employment loss posted in the construction industry, according to new labor data released on Thursday.

The state’s unemployment rate, which is measured by a different survey, fell last month to 6.1 percent, its lowest level since October 2008. That’s down from 6.5 percent in May but still above the national rate of 5.3 percent.

A total of 7,400 jobs were lost in June, the data shows, including 5,700 private sector positions.

The construction industry took the biggest hit last month, with a job loss of 4,600, according to the federal data released by the state labor department. Education and health services lost 3,000 jobs in June and 2,700 jobs were eliminated in professional and business services.

The sectors that saw job growth in June include leisure and hospitality, which added 2,000 jobs. The information sector also added 1,900 jobs and manufacturing added 1,600 jobs.

June’s job losses follow a month where the state gained roughly 10,000 jobs. New Jersey has now added 41,600 jobs in total since last June.

Posted in Economics, Employment, New Jersey Real Estate | 55 Comments

Shocking: Expectations between the dumb and the blind don’t align

Posted on July 16, 2015 by grim

From HousingWire:

Chasm developing between homeowner, appraiser opinions

Appraiser home value opinions fell further below homeowner estimates in June, marking the fifth consecutive month of this trend at the national level, according to Quicken Loans.

Appraiser opinions of home values were 1.4% lower than homeowner estimates, according to Quicken Loans’ monthly national Home Price Perception Index.

Quicken Loans’ national Home Value Index (HVI) reported a slight increase of 0.74% in June, with home values increasing in all regions of the country except for the South, which posted a decline of 0.09%. National home values are up 4.38% from the year prior.

June marks the fifth consecutive month appraisers have estimated home values below homeowner estimates. During this five-month period, the gap between homeowner and appraiser estimates has increased each month, with an average 1.4% difference in June.

“Over the last five months we’ve seen homeowners continually value their homes higher than appraisers,” said Bob Walters, Quicken Loans chief economist. “While each local market has a different story to tell, a large part of this perception gap is likely due to the normalization of home prices. After about a year of home values trending upward, it takes some time for many homeowners to realize home values are stabilizing in their neighborhoods.”
…
“Home prices seem to be a bit frozen for the time being – validating that we are in a market that is well into the stabilization cycle,” said Walters. “The real test for home price solidity will be when inventory increases to a level of equilibrium between supply and demand.”

Posted in Housing Recovery, National Real Estate | 116 Comments

Lonely at the top

Posted on July 15, 2015 by grim

From the Star Ledger:

N.J. has largest share of homes in foreclosure, report shows

A greater share of homes in New Jersey are facing foreclosure than anywhere else in the country, according to a report released Tuesday morning.

The report from the Irvine, Calif.-based firm CoreLogic shows 4.9 percent of mortgaged homes in New Jersey were in the foreclosure process in May, which is nearly quadruple the national rate of 1.3 percent. In May 2014, 5.8 percent of mortgaged homes in New Jersey were in foreclosure, compared to 1.7 percent of homes nationwide.

New Jersey has been dealing with a backlog of foreclosures, which are slowly winding their way through the state’s judicial process.

New York (3.7 percent), Florida (2.9 percent), Hawaii (2.5 percent) and the District of Columbia (2.4 percent) also have among the highest foreclosure rates in the nation, according the CoreLogic report.

Roughly 9,200 foreclosures were completed in New Jersey over the last year, according to the report, up from more than 6,300 completed foreclosure in the year ending in May 2014. That’s counter to the national trend. The number of completed foreclosures declined between those time frames 595,000 to roughly 528,000.

Posted in Foreclosures, Housing Recovery, New Jersey Real Estate | 140 Comments

Philly – Hottest SFH Market in 10 Years

Posted on July 14, 2015 by grim

From the Inquirer:

Phila. single-family home prices, sales volume soar in 2Q, data show

In the spring, Philadelphia’s single-family housing market had its best quarter in a decade, with prices and sales volume surging throughout the city.

The average house value “soared” by 7.3 percent in 2015’s second quarter compared with the first three months of the year, said Kevin Gillen, chief economist of Meyers Research and senior research fellow at Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation.

Based on single-family home sales data between April 1 and June 30 from the city Recorder of Deeds, Gillen said, the quarterly price rise was the largest since second quarter 2005, at the height of the real estate boom.

“With this increase, average Philadelphia house prices are up 5.4 percent from where they were a year ago, and 14.4 percent since their bottom in the first quarter of 2012,” said Gillen, who tracks the real estate market throughout the Philadelphia area. (His analysis of second-quarter sales in the region will be available in two to three weeks.)

Spring 2015’s median price of $138,600 was up 18 percent from $117,500 in the previous quarter, and 20 percent higher than the $115,000 median of second-quarter 2014, Gillen said. (The report did not include sales of condos, which he defines as multifamily housing.)

Every city neighborhood saw an increase in price – the first time that has occurred since second quarter 2013, he noted.

“It is the hottest market I’ve seen in more than 10 years,” said Carol McCann, an agent with Re/Max Millennium in Fox Chase.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, Housing Recovery, National Real Estate | 112 Comments

First sign of cracks in the mega-landlord model

Posted on July 13, 2015 by grim

From Bloomberg:

Blackstone Selling 1,300 Atlanta Houses in Strategy Shift

Blackstone Group LP’s Invitation Homes, after spending more than $9 billion in a U.S. property-buying spree, is starting to sell some houses as it shifts focus from rapid expansion to fine-tuning its holdings.

The housing landlord has agreed to sell about 1,300 Atlanta-area residences that don’t fit its strategy, which targets communities with higher rents and quality schools, according to Chief Executive Officer John Bartling. The transaction would be the biggest bulk sale for the 3-year-old company, the largest U.S. owner of single-family homes.

“It’s that stage in our lives where we’re now in a position of looking at dispositions as an active part of portfolio balance,” Bartling said in an interview. “You should expect us to sell 5 percent of our portfolio every year.”

Blackstone led private equity firms, hedge funds and other large investors in buying thousands of houses after the real estate crash, creating a new asset class of single-family rentals. With the market recovering, landlords are seeking ways to increase profitability by raising rents and making operations more efficient. For Invitation Homes, paring its portfolio may also help it in preparation for a potential initial public offering, which Blackstone has said it could be ready for in the next two years.
…
Most of the Atlanta houses in the sale are worth less than the average Blackstone-owned home. Lower-value properties tend to have higher vacancy, turnover and capital spending rates, according to Brian Grow, managing director in the credit-ratings unit of Morningstar Inc.

“The lower-value properties are much higher touch,” Grow said. “If you own a huge portfolio nationwide and you want consistency on how you manage the properties and you don’t want as high touch, I think the higher-value properties can be beneficial.”

Posted in Economics, National Real Estate | 88 Comments

Seems that everyone is taking shots at Jersey lately…

Posted on July 11, 2015 by grim

From Realtor.com (yes, realtor.com):

More Bad News for New Jersey? Or Is It Good News for the Middle Class?

If we can’t blame New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the traffic jams, maybe he can’t take the hit for this news either: While home prices are spiking in the rest of the country, in the home state of Tony Soprano, they’re still more than 20% below the 2006 peak, according to a report from CoreLogic.

No, it’s not that people are stuck in traffic and can’t get to the open houses, or that too many goodfellas are getting whacked. It’s that the number of foreclosed properties is high (8.12% according to the Mortgage Bankers Association).

Is it just that those “Joisey” folk live waaaaay beyond their means (Hello, Teresa Giudice!)? Not entirely. It’s a kind of stagnation.

“People are both unwilling to list their homes and are unwilling to buy, in many cases, because they fear that their prices will be undercut when these distressed mortgages finally go to market,” said economic researcher Patrick O’Keefe of CohnReznick in Roseland. New Jersey’s population growth is also to blame. It’s half the national average, which in turn keeps the demand to buy a home down.

To be fair to the Garden State (so called, the joke goes, because “Oil, Petroleum, Nuclear, Landfill, and Toxic Waste State” didn’t fit on a license plate), home prices are rising (3% from the year before—about a $150,000 average sales price at last count).

And that’s actually good news, at least for home buyers: Perhaps New Jersey, despite its record high income taxes, can maintain its place as the everyman’s state, and can be one of the last refuges for the middle class in the New York City area.

Posted in Economics, Housing Recovery, New Jersey Real Estate | 47 Comments

Brooklyn hits record highs

Posted on July 10, 2015 by grim

From Crains NY:

Brooklyn housing boom pushes sale prices and rentals to new highs

Rents and home prices reached record levels in Brooklyn during the second quarter of 2015, according to a market report released Thursday.

The average sale price for a Brooklyn home reached a record $788,529 during the second quarter, according to a report by Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The price inched above the previous high-water mark the same time last year by $5,233. Historically low inventory, a lack of new product being built and tight credit conditions contributed to the increase.

As a consequence, many people who would have purchased a home continued to rent, especially in popular Brooklyn neighborhoods. That pushed median rent in the northwestern portion of Brooklyn, which runs from Greenpoint and Williamsburg down through Park Slope, to an all-time high of $2,964 a month.

“Whether you’re renting or buying, you’re looking at higher housing costs,” said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Miller Samuel, the firm that prepared Douglas Elliman’s report. “As a general rule, this is not necessarily a good thing for a city that is creating jobs, because the people who fill them might not be able to afford to live here.”

Granted, Brooklyn did record a 35% increase in the supply of for-sale homes compared with the same period last year, according to a report from the Corcoran Group. But those apartments came on the market after three quarters of declining inventory, and were being snapped up at a historically high pace, only sitting on the market for an average 71 days.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, the median rent rose 2.1% to $3,369 a month in the second quarter, according to the Douglas Elliman report. And just last week, a flurry of market reports noted that the average sale price there also reached an all-time high.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, Housing Recovery, NYC | 109 Comments

HUD to tell you who you are permitted to live next to

Posted on July 9, 2015 by grim

From HousingWire:

HUD’s social engineering is coming to your neighborhood

Look out American neighborhoods, you’re about to get engineered good and hard.

Why? Because market pricing is now considered discrimination.

In fact, any neighborhood that doesn’t meet with the approval of a demographic spreadsheet model in the bowels of some government bureaucrat’s office is considered discrimination.
…
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a final rule today for the “affirmatively furthering fair housing program” but the debate is far from being final.

Under the program, the federal government will collect large sums of personal data on the makeup of neighborhoods throughout the country searching for evidence of “disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets” — even though there is no evidence of actual discrimination. And, in fact, such discrimination has been illegal since 1968.

Those communities that don’t fit the demographic models — let’s be frank here, they’re quotas — of “What Should Be” will have to be re-engineered by the smarter minds that are federal government bureaucrats. (What do you know about your own neighborhood? They know better.)

Those communities that don’t measure up to the spreadsheets will be targeted for correction, using billions in grants, as well as government blackmail (think how highway funds are used to bully states) to change their zoning, so that neighborhoods full of successful, prosperous people who worked to build their homes and their peaceful communities will be forced to welcome neighbors who haven’t worked for it, and who don’t value it.

Welcome to Fair Housing 2015, where market pricing is discrimination.
…
According to the Obama administration’s own wording, “housing choices continue to be constrained through housing discrimination, the operation of housing markets, [and] investment choices by holders of capital.”

There it is. Right there. Sounds like Piketty or Marx, but it’s the White House.

Not in black and white, but in green — as in the color of money and the color of envy.

This is social engineering at its worst, and a violation of basic local zoning and (trigger warning) freedom of association.

Also, consider that they want to eliminate neighborhoods that they say have a demographic imbalance. Well, by that logic, we’d never have any Little Italy’s, Chinatowns, or any other ethnic enclaves that celebrate cultures. Gone is the revival by middle and upper-class black people in places like Harlem in New York and Oak Cliff in my own Dallas. No more Koreatown, no more Little Mexico. So much for celebrating diversity.
…
With any luck, the next administration, Democrat or Republican, will reject this class-warfare attack on “discrimination by the holders of capital.” But democracy isn’t exactly the best bulwark for preserving freedom and free markets.

As H.L. Mencken said, and from which I borrowed for my lede, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Well, here it comes again. You’re about to be bureaucratically and culturally enriched.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, New Jersey Real Estate, Politics | 132 Comments