For Emmanus Stephen, an Uber driver from Asbury Park, New Jersey, earning enough to pay the bills means strategizing carefully about where he will work each day.
Local, short-distance rides near his home on the Jersey Shore are convenient for him, but they don’t pay well — “You drive all day and you can make $100,” says the father of six.
So to pay the bills, he’ll often drive the 45 miles to Newark Liberty International Airport, where he can shuttle travelers on longer distance, more lucrative trips. He works all night to beat the New Jersey traffic, then heads home at 4 a.m., dropping his children off at school before getting some shuteye.
With Uber preparing for an IPO, the issue of whether gig economy workers like Stephen can earn a living wage is likely to reemerge. For publicly traded companies, the issue of social impact is a growing issue.
Many gig economy workers are part-timers doing freelance work on the side, to supplement paychecks from full-time jobs. There are 15.8-million independent workers who are full-timers, according to The State of Independence in America 2018 report by MBO Partners, which studies the freelance economy.
One of the desirable traits of living in New Jersey is much of the state’s proximity to a major city, yet it can still be pricey to live on the outskirts of a major metropolitan region.
But according to new Realtor.com research, there are actually affordable suburbs with low crime rates and reasonable commutes in the Garden State “that you’d like to live in.”
The website identified Hillside in Union County and Gloucester City in Camden County as two of the most affordable suburbs in the country that are located outside of major U.S. cities.
While it may not have the same name value as popular suburbs like Montclair or West Orange, Hillside is located an hour from Midtown Manhattan and is considerably cheaper, with a median listing price of $272,000, according to Realtor.com
“That’s why more people are looking at Hillside, which lacks a quaint city center but still has an urban feel with street blocks lined with unique older homes,” the website says.
In South Jersey, Realtor.com notes that there is an abundance of affordable suburban options outside of Philadelphia, but found Gloucester City, where the median listing price is $86,700, as the most affordable option.
…
Realtor.com does make it clear that these two New Jersey towns are lacking some of the attributes many look for in a suburb outside a city. In Hillside, the school system is rated lower than other nearby suburban towns, while the Union County township also lacks fine dining options, according to the website.
And in Gloucester City, one of the reasons listing prices are so low is “due to the surplus of vacant homes or places that need some serious work.”
Perhaps the biggest problem afflicting America is its widening geographic divide between the winners and losers of the knowledge economy. A raft of studies has documented the growing divergence between places based on their ability to attract, retain, and cluster highly educated and skilled workers and to develop high-tech startup companies.
Talented and skilled Americans are the most likely to move by far. While the overall rate of mobility among Americans has declined over the past decade or so, still, between one-quarter and one-third of U.S. adults have moved within the previous five years, a higher rate of mobility than just about any other country on the globe. But behind this lies a tale of two migrations: the skilled and educated “mobile” on the one hand and the less educated “stuck” on the other.
One consequence of this is that states as different as Ohio and Hawaiihave been considering initiatives to stem brain drain and hold onto their own talent. In fact, such policies date back at least to the late 1990s. Back in 1999, when I lived in Pittsburgh, economic-development officials there came up with the idea of “Border Guard Bob,” a uniformed sentinel who would patrol the region’s borders to convince talented local grads to stay—an initiative that quickly became the butt of jokes and was scuttled.
Now, a new report from the Social Capital Project of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress takes a close look at the reality of brain drain across the 50 states. The report uses U.S. Census data from 1940 to 2017, and focuses on highly educated people in their post-college and post-graduate-school years—people between the ages of 31 and 40 who are either “movers” or “leavers,” heading off to different states, or “stayers” who continue to live in their home state.
…
The fourth map (above) shows the change in net brain drain since 1970. Among the states that experienced big increases in net brain drain were some in the Midwest and Plains (Iowa and the Dakotas), and particularly a swath of the Southern Sunbelt. Better performers, or states that decreased net brain drain, included New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, and Massachusetts. Ohio and Michigan did well on this measure, meaning they improved from being the states with the highest net brain drain back in 1970.
Bringing it all together, the best performers over the past three-quarters of a centuryare the states along the Boston–New York–D.C. corridor; on the West Coast; and Illinois, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Hawaii. States fared the worst, experiencing more brain drain, in parts of the Midwest, the Great Plains, New England, the Southeast, and especially the Deep South.
The geographic winners have only seen their advantages grow since 1970. This split geography of brain gain and brain drain poses huge implications not only for our economy, but also for American society and politics. “Brain drain has significant consequences—economic, yes, but also political and cultural,” the report notes. “By increasing social segregation, it limits opportunities for disparate groups to connect. And by siphoning a source of economic innovation from emptying communities, brain drain can also lead to crumbling institutions of civil society. As those natives who have more resources leave, those left behind may struggle to support churches, police athletic leagues, parent-teacher associations, and local businesses.”
There isn’t an exact science to know when to list your home in order to sell it in a timely and valuable manner, but research says the best time to put your home on the market in the New York region is on a Saturday in the second half of May.
According to annual Zillow research, when a homeowner lists their home in the back half of May, the home sells on average for $3,100 more than other times in the New York metro area, which bleeds into parts of New Jersey.
In the Philadelphia metro region, which includes parts of South Jersey, the peak time to put a home on the market may already have passed. In the second half of April, homes sell on average for $2,400 more than usual.
But not all real estate agents abide to Zillow’s research, as they try to zig while everyone else zags in order to sell their client’s home.
Michelle Pais, the broker for NJ Signature Realty, said because the market is typically flooded with homes as soon as the weather warms, she advises her clients to beat everyone to the madness by listing their home before the spring market ratchets up.
As the inventory on the market rises, the demand lessens, she said.
“We have a small window,” Pais said. … “The warmer we get, the more homes pop on the market.”
Gov. Phil Murphy signed a package of measures into law Monday that aim to prevent New Jersey from having the dubious distinction of leading the nation in foreclosures.
The bills, which passed the Legislature with bipartisan support, largely either help to keep people in their homes or attack the problem of vacant properties in neighborhoods by speeding up the sale of foreclosed properties or making the lender more accountable for following local zoning rules.
…
The governor also signed the following bills into law:
A664 – Makes permanent an existing program that aims to increase the number of people in mediation to pay off their debt rather than being forced out of their homes.
A4997 – Requires any person acting as a mortgage servicer to obtain a license from the Commissioner of Banking and Insurance for each main office and each branch office where business is conducted. That means anybody acting as a mortgage service provider who runs afoul of state rules will be barred from acting as a mortgage lender in the future.
A4999 – Proponents say they measure will help cities and towns fight so-called zombie foreclosures by forcing creditors to provide a contact person for foreclosed properties. They say it will give local officials somebody to contact about property maintenance and code violations.
A5001 – Cuts down the statute of limitations in residential mortgage foreclosures from 20 years to only six years from the date on which the debtor defaulted.
A5002 – Expands the pool of so-called common interest community associations to record liens for nonpayment. Currently, the law only allows condominium associations to file a lien to collect unpaid bills. The new law expands it to other shared communities.
S3413 – Attempts to ensure the timely sale of vacant properties by requiring foreclosure sales of vacant or abandoned properties be conducted within 60 days of a foreclosure judgment.
S3416 – Broadens the “New Jersey Residential Mortgage Lending Act,” which aims to protect homeowners, to apply to some out-of-state people and entities involved in residential mortgage lending in New Jersey.
S3464 – Expedites residential mortgage foreclosure proceedings by requiring the county sheriff to conduct a foreclosure sale within 120 days of the sheriff’s receipt of a writ of execution.
This northern New Jersey mansion dates to the roaring ’20s, but it’s certainly not roaring now.
The grand property — once one of the state’s most expensive properties — is back on the market asking just $9.99 million. That’s $29 million off its original $39 million asking price in 2013 — a reduction of almost 75%.
Located on 5-plus acres at 83 N. Woodland St. in Englewood, NJ, an affluent suburb of New York City, this 24,000-square-foot spread has struggled to find a buyer.
Not only has the home – called Gloria Crest and, in times past, the “White House of Englewood” – been discounted some five times (other prices over the years have included $24 million, $17 million and $12 million), it’s also been pulled from the market at least three times, Zillow shows.
In 2017, Gloria Crest nearly headed to a foreclosure auction over an unpaid $5 million mortgage. Owner Edward Turen — CEO of Control Equity Group, which through subsidiaries provides facility management and security services to commercial entities around the world — took out mortgages on the home for more than it was worth, The Post reported at the time.
Turen purchased Gloria Crest for $4.8 million in 2000, but its history dates back almost a century. It was built in 1926 for Stefan Poniatowski, a man who claimed to be a Polish count and an heir to the Eastern European country’s throne. Poniatowski was also a silk manufacturer, but he went bankrupt in the 1929 stock market crash. So he sold the mansion and its furnishings and moved to Manhattan, according to the Bergen Record.
The final stats are in from the IRS — and it looks like the average tax refund check isn’t all that different from last year.
The average refund check for the week ended April 19 was $2,725, according to the tax agency. That’s down 2% from a year ago.
In all, the federal government paid $260.9 billion in refunds to taxpayers, compared to $265.3 billion in 2018.
…
Under the new law, the standard deduction has been nearly doubled to $12,000 for single filers ($24,000 for joint) and a number of key itemized deductions have been curtailed. The personal exemption — once valued at $4,050 for each filer, spouse and dependent — has been suspended.
The new law also doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 per kid under 17.
Finally, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has trimmed down individual income tax rates across the board.Though the IRS data suggests that things aren’t all that different for individual taxpayers year over year, CPAs said that clients had plenty of surprises when they filed.
“Everyone wants to compare refunds from one year to the next, but that doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Debbie Freeman, CPA and director of financial planning at Peak Financial Advisors in Denver.
“They did generally see a benefit from tax reform, be it from the adjustment to their income tax brackets or from the larger child tax credit, ” she said.
“But they also saw less withheld in taxes, meaning they had more money in their paychecks, which created less of a refund,” Freeman said.
With the U.S housing bubble far in the rearview mirror, home prices in most places have passed their pre-recession peak. In other spots, though, it’s a different story.
…
“Some markets that experienced a huge run-up and then a big downturn are still waiting for a recovery,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. “For some people, the decline from the time they purchased was so severe that it’s taking a long time to recover.”
In Winchester, Virginia, for example, the median home price of $225,000 remains below its March 2006 peak of $270,900. In Naples, Florida, the median price of $337,100 is less than its July 2006 peak of $457,200.
Nationally, the median home price is $226,700, according to Zillow. That’s about 13% more than its 2007 peak of $200,500.
Prices have pushed far higher than their previous peaks in some metro areas. For example, in Midland, Texas, the current median of $261,100 is 75% above its May 2008 peak price of $149,300.
For markets where home prices have surpassed their previous peak and continue to rise, local dynamics could contribute to prices moving even higher.
“In places like Dallas and Nashville that are creating jobs faster than the national average and people are coming into those regions, there’s steady demand,” Yun said. “In those markets, I wouldn’t be concerned about buying at the top.
“Homebuyers might not see a sharp run-up in prices, but they’d probably see steady increases.”
And while housing inflation has cooled somewhat, affordability issues in some spots — such as New York City and San Francisco — are likely to persist as long as job growth remains and building new homes in already-crowded areas is a challenge.
Sales of previously-owned homes fell more sharply than expected in March as the usual housing headwinds stalked the market. The surge in February was the strongest in nearly four years, and the Realtor lobby group is attributing the March decline to a return to normalcy after that spike. Still, sales were 5.4% lower than a year ago.
The median price of a home sold in March was $259,400, a 3.8% increase versus a year ago. At the current pace of sales, it would take 3.9 months to exhaust available supply, still well below the long-time average of 6 months. Properties stayed on the market for an average of 36 days in March, down from 44 days in February but a bit longer than the 30 days averaged last year.
According to NAR’s measure of first-time buyers, they accounted for 33% of all transactions in March. But more recent comprehensive research – NAR’s is based on survey data – suggests first-time buyers currently make up about the same share of the market that they have for the past two decades.
Activity was mixed regionally, as always, but all regions saw a decline. In the Northeast, sales were down 2.9%, and in the South they fell 3.4%. In the West, which has suffered for several months, in large part because of the recent tax law changes, sales fell 6%. But the Midwest saw the biggest decline, of 7.9%.
As the housing market has continued its recovery, home prices have been climbing at a steady clip across the nation. And that means homeowners now have a nice stockpile of pent-up wealth in their homes.
In fact, as of the fourth quarter of last year, U.S. homeowners had a collective $5.7 trillion in tappable equity, according to Black Knight.
To break it down further, at the end of last year, homeowners amassed nearly $10,000 in equity in one year’s time, according to CoreLogic data.
But it seems fewer people are choosing to access this source of wealth.
Black Knight reported that just 1% of available equity tapped in the last quarter of 2018 –the lowest share since 2012.
That said, it is worth noting that cash-out refinances have seen some action in the last two years.
Freddie Macdata showed that the share of refinances that involved cash extraction climbed to 77% in the second quarter of 2018. But the amount of equity cashed out totaled $15.8 billion – well below the $75-$85 billion we saw in the years leading up to the crisis.
New Jersey’s employment rose modestly in March, increasing by 3,600 jobs to mark the fifth monthly increase in the last six months, according to preliminary estimates produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The state’s unemployment rate ticked higher by 0.1 percentage point in March to 4.1 percent.
All of the gains for the month occurred in the private sector of the state’s economy, which added 4,400 jobs. Public sector employment was lower by 800 jobs for the month, with all of the contraction occurring at the local government level.
“A growing workforce and more private sector jobs are both positives,” said Regina Egea, president of public policy think tank Garden State Initiative. “But the lack of consistent and substantial growth in either of those categories means that New Jersey is struggling to gain traction.”
Although the New Jersey labor force increased by 7,400 in March, it remains smaller than the average labor force size in 2006, before the last recession in 2008. While trending in the right direction, New Jersey will need to add tens of thousands of new individuals to the workforce in the next few months to catch up with the growth happening around us.
Of note, New Jersey’s financial activities and information sectors are still lagging behind the national trend. The financial activities sector was unchanged in March, but has lost 5,500 jobs year over year. The information sector reported a loss of 100 jobs last month, and a loss of 3,300 jobs year over year.
Wealthy Greenwich Home Sellers Give In to Market Realities
After four years on the market, and three price cuts, a stately Colonial-style home on Greenwich, Conn.’s tony Round Hill Road is being sold in a way that was once unthinkable in one of the country’s most affluent communities: It is getting auctioned off. Once asking $3.795 million, the four-bedroom property will be sold May 18 with Paramount Realty USA for a reserve price of just $1.8 million.
Seller Isaac Hakim, a real-estate investor, said it is time to move on. “We are ready to sell and I don’t want it to drag on,” he said. After raising their children there, he and his wife moved to Florida several years ago. While luxury home auctions are utilized in other parts of the country, they have rarely been seen in markets like Greenwich. Once a beacon for Wall Street’s top brass and still one of the richest towns in the U.S., Greenwich is facing a slew of issues.
Many wealthy New Yorkers are opting to live in the city, rather than in the suburbs. Some of the wealthiest, like Mr. Hakim, have decamped to Florida in search of more favorable tax rates. Banking executives who propped up the market with their yearly bonuses have also experienced cuts in compensation.
The seemingly never-ending slump is leading some sellers to accept less—sometimes a lot less. Owners who paid top dollar for their homes in the Fairfield County town in the mid- to late-2000s are routinely selling for less than they paid. Dramatic price cuts are the order of the day. There were 45 properties in Greenwich priced at more than $5 million that had their price reduced by 10% or more in the 12-month period between April, 2018, and March, 2019, according to Realtor.com. Realtor.com is owned by Move, Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp .
Attorney Frank J. Gilbride II said one of his clients recently sold his home for $11.18 million, after buying it for $14.7 million in 2007. “We’re finding that the larger back country homes have not been selling recently, because the new buyers don’t want to maintain 10 acres of grass,” Mr. Gilbride said. “A lot of sellers are taking hair cuts of $1 million or more just to move on.”
Some sellers have resorted to renting out their homes. Brian Amen, an agent at Houlihan Lawrence, said one of his clients tried to sell his roughly $3.65 million home for about a year and lowered the price, but recently decided to lease it out in hopes the market would improve in a year or two.
Several prominent owners have settled for significantly less. Earlier this month, music executive Tommy Mottola sold his Georgian-style estate for $14.875 million, or 25% off its original asking price. In December, hedge fund executive Ara D. Cohen, co-founder of Knighthead Capital Management, sold his sprawling 27-room property for $17.5 million—half of what he was seeking in 2015.
Long Island home prices kept rising as the spring selling season got underway last month, but the pace of sales slowed and inventory is on the rise.
In Suffolk County, homes sold for a median price of $372,875 in March, up 5.9 percent from a year earlier, the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island reported Thursday. Nassau County’s median home price increased by 3.4 percent annually, to $517,000.
The number of closed home sales fell year-over-year by 5.8 percent in Suffolk and 8.8 percent in Nassau, the listing service reported. However, in a sign that the market could get stronger in the coming months, the number of contract signings jumped by more than 10 percent in Suffolk and ticked up by 1.4 percent in Nassau, compared with the previous March.
Demand is strong for homes in the $400,000 to $600,000 price range, said Russ Bonanno, a real estate agent with Bon Anno Real Estate in Massapequa who handles home sales from western Nassau through Dix Hills and Commack in Suffolk.
In that price range, he said, “it’s a very competitive environment out there for buyers. There’s a lot of very serious and very qualified buyers out there.” A home listed for $549,000 in North Bellmore recently went under contract four days after it was listed, with 17 competing offers, he said.
A strong economy, low unemployment and affordable mortgage rates are driving buyers’ enthusiasm, Bonanno said. The average mortgage rate was 4.12 percent this week, 0.3 percentage points lower than a year ago, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday.
The market is less competitive for more expensive homes, Bonanno said: “As you go up in price, the buyer pool does shrink a bit.”
…
Asking prices hit a median $519,000 in Suffolk, 8 percent higher than the previous March, and $689,000 in Nassau, up 6 percent from a year earlier, listing service figures show.
The number of homes listed for sale grew year-over-year by 22 percent in Nassau and 7.2 percent in Suffolk, according to listing service figures. At the current pace of sales, it would take a little more than six months to sell all the homes listed for sale in Nassau and Suffolk. Brokers say a balanced market has a six- to eight-month supply of homes.
If you saw your taxes go up under the Republican tax law that limited your property tax break, you weren’t alone.
In fact, 411,809 New Jersey households saw their taxes rise, the fifth highest number of any state, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a progressive research group founded by John Podesta, who later chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Only California, New York, Texas and Florida saw a greater number of households paying more in taxes, according to the report, based on data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Far more New Jerseyans — 3.5 million — saw their taxes reduced. But Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow with the center, said a law that increased the federal deficit by $1.9 trillion over 10 years shouldn’t have raised anybody’s taxes. Nationally, 10 million Americans got a tax hike.
“What really rubs people the wrong way is there are 10 million people getting a tax increase when the very wealthy and corporate America are getting an enormous windfall,” Hanlon said. “If you were going to design a tax cut that would increase the deficit by almost $2 trillion, it’s easy to design a tax cut that would go to middle class people where no one comes out worse off.”
California, New York and New Jersey were among the states disproportionately affected by the legislation’s $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes. New Jersey and New York also send billions of dollars more to Washington than they receive in services.
If you’re an American taxpayer, you probably got a tax cut last year. And there’s a good chance you don’t believe it.
Ever since President Trump signed the Republican-sponsored tax bill in December 2017, independent analyses have consistently found that a large majority of Americans would owe less because of the law. Preliminary data based on tax filings has shown the same.
Yet as the first tax filing season under the new law wraps up on Monday, taxpayers are skeptical. A survey conducted in early April for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey found that just 40 percent of Americans believed they had received a tax cut under the law. Just 20 percent were certain they had done so. That’s consistent with previous polls finding that most Americans felt they hadn’t gotten a tax cut, and that a large minority thought their taxes had risen — though not even one in 10 households actually got a tax increase.
…
Experts are divided on whether the tax law was a good idea. But there is little disagreement on this core point: Most people got a tax cut.
The Tax Policy Center estimates that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.)
Other analyses reached similar conclusions. The Joint Committee on Taxation — Congress’s nonpartisan team of tax analysts — found that every income group would see a tax cut on average. So did the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank that was sharply critical of the law. In fact, that group went even further: In a December 2017 analysis, it found that every income group in every state would pay less on average under the law in 2019.
So far, tax season seems to be playing out more or less as the experts predicted. H&R Block, the tax-preparation giant, said last week that two-thirds of returning customers had paid less tax this year than last (excluding people who owed no tax in either year). Taxes were down, on average, in every state.
“The vast majority of people did get a tax cut,” said Nathan Rigney, an analyst at H&R Block’s Tax Institute. That’s been clear all along, he added, “just now we have real data to back that up.”
…
The tax savings were relatively small for many families, however. The middle fifth of earners got about a $780 tax cut last year on average, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Most Americans would probably welcome a $780 windfall. But in contrast to 2001, when President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department mailed rebate checks to taxpayers, last year’s tax cuts showed up mostly in the form of lower withholding from workers’ paychecks. A few extra dollars in a biweekly paycheck proved easy to miss. Moreover, as taxpayers filed their returns, many found they were due smaller refunds than in the past, which may have further skewed perceptions of the law.
