New York City squatters would be tracked and the properties they take over would be listed in an online database under a new City Council bill that would also criminalize freeloading in the Big Apple.
City Councilwoman Susan Zhuang introduced the bill Thursday, calling for a quarterly report on squatter properties by the NYPD and other city agencies.
“We cannot allow squatters to be above the law,” Zhuang said as she called for squatting to be classified as an illegal act.
A new bill would require NYPD and other relevant city agencies to issue a quarterly report about where people are squatting in the city.Paul Martinka
The quarterly report would be posted online with information including the addresses of known squatter houses and the number of days the property has been under squatter control. It would also include when the NYPD or city officials became aware of the squatters and any response to those complaints.
Last month federal agents removed squatters who were found with guns and drugs in the basement of a Bronx building.Matthew McDermott
“In my district, a union worker was forced to continue paying thousands of dollars for a mortgage for a home he and his hospitalized wife cannot live in,” Zhuang said. “The house had been burnt down four times by a squatter who also caused a lot of other issues in the neighborhood.”
“People are afraid to even take a vacation, and when they come back their home will be occupied by someone else,” Zhuang went on.
The new bill would change how the city responds to instances of squatting.Bumble Dee – stock.adobe.com
“When the squatting gets reported its classified as a landlord and tenant issue, which gets directly passed to housing court. There is insufficient data about squatting.”
Beijing is reportedly consulting with local government officials on proposals that would pave the way for state-owned enterprises to purchase empty homes from beleaguered developers en masse.
Bloomberg said the proposals are still in the early stages but represent a scaled-up version of similar programmes that have been piloted across the country.
The homes would be purchased at deep discounts and converted into affordable housing, the reports said.
Previous plans suggest the ruling Communist Party is prepared to commit the equivalent of $280bn (£222bn) a year for five years to buy distressed properties and offer them at subsidised rents to families. These properties would be blocked from being sold on the open market.
China’s most senior leaders announced last month they were studying ways to “digest” the existing stockpile of homes in a move that sent Chinese stocks up sharply.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also warned that Chinese growth will continue to slow to 4.1pc next year, well below the double-digit rates seen in the decade before the financial crisis. Growth is expected to slow to just above 3pc by the end of the decade.
Analysts have also sounded the alarm over China’s rising debt levels, which have climbed sharply in recent years. A report by the Institute of International Finance warned that global debt now stood at a record high of $315 trillion in the first three months of the year.
It said the increase was “primarily driven by emerging markets”, where debt surged to “an unprecedented high of over $105 trillion”. This is $55 trillion more than a decade ago, with China, India and Mexico seeing the biggest increases so far this year.
Despite aplunge in sentiment and soaring mortgage rates,analysts expected Starts and Permits to increase in April.
They were half right, but both missed bigly - as Starts rose 5.7% MoM (below the +7.6% exp), up from a downwardly revised 16.8% plunge in March; Permits dropped 3.0% MoM (well below the +0.9% exp), but better than the downwardly revised 5.0% drop in March.
Stalled inflation this year hasn’t derailed the Federal Reserve’s plans to eventually cut interest rates. That’s because it expects a slowdown in housing costs to eventually drag inflation close to its 2% target.
The problem: It has been waiting for that slowdown for 1½ years now, and it still hasn’t arrived. [actually at least two years but who’s counting?”
Market rents—rents on newly signed leases—surged three years ago, reflecting the unusual demand for more space unleashed by the pandemic, strong income growth and historically low inventories of homes for rent or purchase. Single-family home rents rose 14% in 2022, according to CoreLogic.
Because only a minority of leases turn over each year, changes in market rents are reflected in inflation with a lag. Accounting for that lag, Fed officials, Wall Street investors, and private-sector economists have expected housing inflation to slow since late 2022 based on what has already happened with market rents. [I have been harping about lease turnover for the same two years, and yes, I have been counting. It’s why expectation of soon to be falling rent have been dead wrong.]
Housing inflation has indeed slowed from a peak of 8.2% one year ago—but only to 5.6% in March, “a much slower pace than pretty much anybody anticipated,” said Jay Parsons, head of residential strategy at Madera Residential, a Texas-based apartment owner. [Anybody does not include me]
Housing “has not behaved the way we thought it would,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said in an interview last month. “I still think it will, but if it doesn’t, we’re going to have a hard time” bringing inflation back to 2%.
The ‘last lag’ or the last mile?
Many economists still think it’s only a matter of time before housing inflation reflects the slowdown in new leases that began two years ago. It might be taking longer than expected because more renters are renewing their leases instead of buying a home, deterred by high mortgage rates. That could lengthen the time it takes for lower rents from newly signed leases to show up in overall inflation.
“I still think that check is in the mail, but unfortunately, it’s taking longer for that check to arrive than I anticipated,” said David Wilcox, an economist at Bloomberg Economics and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “I just don’t see an alternative outcome other than those low lease rates eventually manifest themselves in the official price indexes.”
Higher car-insurance costs or hospital-service prices, for example, reflect big increases in auto prices and hospital wages two years ago, respectively, said Omair Sharif, founder of research firm Inflation Insights. “It’s the ‘last lag’ story, not the ‘last mile’ story,” he said.
“One of the surprises of the last six months, specific to multifamily, has been the reacceleration of demand,” Parsons said.
At Camden Property Trust, a Houston-based owner of 58,000 apartment homes, the share of tenants moving out to buy homes has fallen to 9%, the lowest in the company’s three-decade history and down from a traditional move-out rate of 15% to 18%.
“Most folks believed you would have had a massive falloff in rental growth throughout the Sunbelt,” said Ric Campo, chief executive of Camden. “But what’s happening is there’s been just a whole lot more demand than most people expected.”
More Demand Than Expected
What role did millions of illegal immigrants have on demand? Most of them have little money, but they have to stay somewhere.
Share of People Moving Drops to 9 Percent
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, moving rates for Americans declined from 12.8% in 2021 to 12.6% in 2022.
But what is it for 2024?
My guess has been 9 percent in a range of 8 to 11 percent or so. But we will not know that for two more years.
Moving Expectations
A New York Fed survey shows 1-year and 3-year look ahead moving expectations are at record lows.
Data download from the New York Fed, chart by Mish
Probability of Renters Buying a Home
Probability of Renters Buying a Home
Twenty-five percent of renters have essentially given up on the idea of ever owning a home.
Some people replied moving expectations have been falling anyway. Yes they have, but expectations fell from 20.8 percent in 2014 to 16.4 percent in 2022, a decline of 4.4 percent in eight years.
In the next 2 years, expectations fell another 3.0 percentage points. Might I suggest home prices are in play?
Bear in mind, these are expectations, looking ahead one year. How many actually moved? 8%? 9%? 10%?
Methodologies that overstate new vs existing leases understate inflation.
Rent Prices Rose for the Third Straight Month According to Apartment List
Rents were not falling as reported recently by Apartment List. Nor are Apt List estimates correct now. Let’s discuss what’s really happening and why Truflation is wrong as well.
Data courtesy of Apartment List, chart by Mish
Rising rent prices was the subject in one of my posts earlier today.
Truflation uses Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Apartment List and CoreLogic. It claims “Our methodology for calculating rental price changes incorporates both new rental agreements and rental renewals, which provides us with a balanced view of price changes over time.”
But Zillow, Redfin, and Apartment List all have a huge flaw. They only capture new leases when only about 9 percent of the people move each year.
Comment From John Burns
I asked John Burns, CEO of John Burns Research and Consulting, LLC “What do you make of reports that rents are falling or soon will?
He replied “Rents are falling in some of the markets below, and rising elsewhere.” The list where “some” but not all are falling includes Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh, Phoenix, Nashville, Charleston, Salt Lake, Jacksonville, Denver, and Dallas.
Lags Kick in When?
The price of rent has gone up at least 0.4 percent for 31 straight months. I finally sense we are approaching the end of these big jumps.
Not Leading Just Wrong
Lagging turned out to be more lagging that some thought.
Aptartment List had M/M Oct, Nov, and Dec of 2022 at -0.9%, -1.1%, and -0.9%.
This is not leading, it is just wrong. Averaging that data in, with equal weight, if that is what Truflation did, is also wrong.
Wrong About What?
By wrong, I mean wrong for purposes discussed here.
The average person looking for a new apartment does not care one hoot about seasonal adjustments.
For the actual purpose of the Apartment List website, helping renters find places and what to expect, reporting without seasonal adjustments makes sense.
However, it does not make much sense for Truflation to give anything but zero weight to Apartment List.
Britain’s rental crisis is being driven by record net migration as housing supply fails to keep pace with a growing population, according to new analysis.
The number of rental households formed by new immigrants has jumped from around 80,000 a year in the 2010s to over 200,000 in recent years, Capital Economics said in a note released Monday. The analysis is based on Office for National Statistics data that suggest 80% of new immigrants rent in the private sector.
Condo inventory for sale in South Florida has more than doubled since the first quarter of last year, to more than 18,000 units. While the sharp rise in Florida home insurance costs is driving some to sell, most of the units on the market are in buildings 30 years or older. Under the new law, buildings must pass milestone structural inspections no later than 30 years after they are built.
In Miami, about 38% of the housing stock is condos, the highest of any major metropolitan area in the U.S., according to Zillow. Of those buildings, nearly three-quarters are at least 30 years old. For those that have large repairs looming, many owners are scrambling to sell before Jan. 1 when building reserves must be fully funded to be in compliance with the law.
“I think this is just the beginning,” said Greg Main-Baillie, an executive managing director at real-estate firm Colliers, who oversees 40 condo renovation projects across the state.
Owners are struggling to find all-cash buyers because mortgage lenders are increasingly unwilling to take on the risk associated with these units. “It’s not the buyers that aren’t qualifying,” said Craig Studnicky, chief executive at ISG World. “It’s the buildings that aren’t qualifying.”
State law previously allowed condos to waive reserve funding year after year, leading many buildings, including the nearly 50-year-old Cricket Club, to keep next to nothing in their coffers. Now, about 40 units in the building of 220 are listed for sale but are seeing little interest.
“These units are practically being given away,” said Sari Papir, a retired real-estate agent who has lived in the Cricket Club with her partner Shaul Szlaifer since 2018. “Even if we found a buyer, what could we buy with the pennies we’d receive for our unit?”
Some are worried developers may already be purchasing condos in the building for a potential takeover, where a developer tries to gain control of a building to knock it down and build a newer, more luxurious one. These condo terminations are happening up and down the state’s coastline. While the rules can vary by building, if enough people vote to sell their units, the others have to follow along.
No Way to Escape the Assessment
Those who cannot sell and don’t have the special assessment, will be evicted and their units seized for whatever the Associations can get for them.
South Florida listings have doubled in the past year to over 18,000. Few of those units will sell, and those that do sell will be at a huge haircut.
The Journal noted the plight of Ivan Rodriguez who liquidated his 401K to buy a condo for $190,000. He then faced a $134,000 special assessment. Eventually he sold the unit for $110,000.
Got the Insurance Blues?
Auto insurance is up more than 20 percent from a year ago. In many places, private home insurance isn’t available at all. Consumers are steaming.
Car insurance is on an amazing run. For 13 straight months, insurance is up at least 1.0 percent. For 20 straight months car insurance is up at least 0.7 percent.
Home insurance, if you can get it at all from any private insurer, is also rising at a fast clip.
If you live in a flood zone, hurricane zone, or fire zone, insurance may be very difficult to get.
Proposition 103 Backfires, State Farm to Cancel 72,000 California Policies
Citing wildfire risk, State Farm will not renew policies on 30,000 homes and 42,000 business in California. Blame the state, not insurers.
