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Sandy Forced Poor to Leave Illegal Units | Waccabuc NY Homes
Superstorm Sandy has placed a spotlight on tens of thousands of basement apartments, attics and other informal living spaces which are forms of affordable housing that are often illegal but also vital in New York City.
Advocates for the poor said thousands of people were dislodged from such apartments after the 2012 storm, and many are still homeless, as their landlords have difficulty finding resources to fix illegal residences. Such units often rented for less than nearby legal units and were home to people with low incomes.
It is hard to come by hard numbers of illegal apartments in the coastal areas slammed by Sandy, neighborhoods such as Midland Beach in Staten Island and Rockaway Park in Queens. City officials say 63,000 residential units were damaged during Sandy, and advocates estimate that under counts thousands of illegal apartments.
“It’s true that a lot of the units were maybe illegal, almost definitely substandard,” said Judith Goldiner, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society. “I’m not going to tell you they were great housing, but on the other hand they were affordable housing to a lot of low-income people.”
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Not all basement apartments are illegal. They can be legally rented in some cases if they are more than half above ground, have seven-foot or higher ceilings and comply with a host of other city regulations. Housing advocates are pushing to legalize basement apartments that meet safety standards, and Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has said he supports bringing them into the regulated housing system. Safety concerns have slowed such efforts.
Unregulated apartments posed special problems for homeowners trying to make repairs after Sandy. Many were unable to get government funding to repair illegal basement units, or their units now sit below the floodplain and can’t be rebuilt.
Others were afraid of seeking help and getting fined when their undeclared apartments were discovered. The Department of Buildings has issued about 30,000 violations for illegal apartments since 2009, including more than 4,400 in 2012.
Some homeowners relied on the rental income to help pay their mortgages, putting them in danger of foreclosure. Of 31,700 pre-foreclosure notices filed in the city between November 2012 and November 2013 nearly 8% were in Sandy-hit areas, according to the Center for New York City Neighborhoods.
Before Sandy, Gloria Harris, a 49-year-old Health and Hospitals Corp. employee, lived on the second floor of her two-story Rockaway Peninsula home and rented the main floor for $1,100 a month. When she asked for disaster recovery money, she said the Federal Emergency Management Agency called her house a one-family home and wouldn’t pay for repairs to the second floor. She has stopped making mortgage payments but said she can’t afford to lose the house.
“Even if I sell the house and I go to rent, with the money I make I can’t afford rent in Brooklyn, or even in Queens,” said Ms. Harris, who bought her home in June 2011.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303799404579282352875335252#utm_source=Rebuilding%20NY%20Alert&utm_medium=alert-html&utm_campaign=Newsletters
Home Prices Rise 0.5 as For-Sale Supply Shrinks | Waccabuc Real Estate
Evander Holyfield’s Foreclosed, 109-Room Palace | Waccabuc NY Real Estate
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Selling a home for $7.5 million usually calls for champagne — but not if you’re Evander Holyfield and you owe nearly twice that much on the property. The former heavyweight champ sold his palatial Fayette County estate with 109 rooms last year in a public auction to a bank, which his attorney softly described as “technically part of a foreclosure.” The famed 54,000 square-foot mansion sits on 235 acres, has a bowling alley and theater and costs more than $1 million annually to maintain, Holyfield once told the AJC. On his website, Holyfield boasts of making more than $230 million in the boxing ring, but child support cases in Georgia, Texas and California — in additional to the general drying up of boxing royalties — took a heavy toll. · Holyfield sells Fayette mansion for $7.5 million [AJC] · When Selling Your House for $7.5 Mil Actually Sucks [TMZ]
Housing starts jump to near 6-year high in good sign for economy | Waccabuc NY Homes
U.S. builders broke ground on homes at the fastest pace in more than five years, strong evidence that the housing recovery is accelerating despite higher mortgage rates.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday that developers began construction on houses and apartments in November at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.09 million. That’s 23 percent more than October’s pace of 889,000 and the fastest since February 2008, just a few months after the recession began.
Construction of single-family homes jumped 21 percent to an annual pace of 727,000, also the highest in more than five years. Apartment construction soared 26 percent to a 354,000 annual pace.
Permits for future building slipped 3 percent to just over 1 million, down from 1.04 million in October. The drop reflected a decline in apartments, which can be volatile. Permits for single-family homes rose.
“Evidently, builders in the field are genuinely confident about the outlook for sales of new single-family houses, despite the rise in mortgage rates,” said Pierre Ellis, an economist at Decision Economics.
The housing market has been improving steadily since early last year, but construction had leveled off this summer after first reaching a 1 million annual pace in March. Last month’s surge comes as mortgage rates remain about a percentage point higher than they were in the spring. That suggests home building will boost economic growth in the final three months of the year.
Branstad, MidAmerican officials plan major wind energy announcement | Waccabuc Real Estate
Officials at MidAmerican Energy Co. and the state of Iowa are set to make a major announcement regarding a new wind energy development.
Gov. Terry Branstad is expected to discuss the project at his morning news conference Monday and release further details with company officials at a 1 p.m. news conference to be held at the Siemens Energy wind blade factory near Fort Madison.
In August MidAmerican Energy received approval from the Iowa Utilities Board for a $1.9 billion project to install hundreds of wind turbines by the end of 2015.
More than 448 turbines are to be installed in Grundy, Madison, Marshall, O’Brien, and Webster counties.
MidAmerican, Iowa’s largest energy company began building wind turbines in 2004, and it currently has more than 1,200 wind turbines in Iowa.
Matt Damon knocks a million bucks off his Miami mansion for sale | Waccabuc Homes
Nation’s home recovery may be on shaky ground | Waccabuc Real Estate
Concerns are rising that the nation’s year-long revival in residential housing might be facing an uncertain future. The latest publication to tackle the issue was none other than the venerable Economist, which had this to say:
What effect will this slowdown will have on builders? Previous busts have taught them to control the inventory of new properties coming to the market. If they react abruptly to falling sales by building less, the housing market may be “on the verge of a significant correction”, argues Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics. Although residential construction is only 3% of GDP, in each of the past five quarters it has contributed around a quarter of America’s economic growth.
Source: The Economist
If prospective buyers can’t picture living in a particular home, they’ll walk away | Waccabuc Real Estate
While showing homes to a young couple with two small children I discovered a house can look too perfect. Since I just met the buyers as they had arrived in town, I didn’t have much time to schedule appointments and make my showing schedule. Some of the sellers had only a couple hours’ notice to prepare for the showings. Even with the short notice, these sellers have extremely neat homes. There was not one child’s toy left out, or book, dish, wrinkled pillow or toothbrush out of place.
The buyers kept commenting about how neat these homes were and even questioned if these occupied homes had real people living there. The houses looked too perfect. I know for a fact that one of the homes was professionally staged because the listing agent always requires her sellers to stage their homes. Some of the other houses may or may not have been professionally staged.
Staging — when done right — can help a home sell. I have seen some wonderful staging jobs. But a couple of these homes lacked that warm, lived-in feeling. This turned off the young couple with the two small children. I saw them squirm and cross their arms. They made generic statements about how this is nice and that looks pretty, but not buying-sign comments.
We saw some vacant homes and some new construction, too. Seeing these homes empty did not seem to bother the buyers, as they could see the real potential the homes offered — a clean palette, so to speak.
I showed another home that was occupied where the sellers left it neat but with a lived-in feeling. You could feel it the moment you stepped in the door. The buyers responded very favorably and started seeing themselves living there. They wanted to linger and ask questions. Yes, there were some personal family photos around, toys in the corner, things on the kitchen counter. The beds were made and the house was clean, but it felt lived in by a happy family.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/next/when-marketing-to-families-a-staged-listing-should-evoke-lived-in-feeling/#sthash.IdbSlOrt.dpuf
A Bubble in Rising Texas Markets? | Waccabuc Real Estate
Trulia, the national real-estate data-crunching outfit, has been maintaining a “bubble watch” since May, 2013, tracking local markets where home prices are rising fast enough that the dollar signs threaten to outrun the “market fundamentals.” This week, Trulia’s bubble watch list puts four Texas metropolitan areas in its top ten, including the coastal markets of Houston and San Antonio.
Trulia chief economist, Jed Kolko, reports on the organization’s data in Forbes: “At the metro level, home prices are above their fundamental value in 17 of the 100 largest metros. Most of these overvalued metros are only slightly so: Of the 17 overvalued metros, just two–Orange County and Los Angeles–look at least 10% overvalued. (Austin rounds up to 10% but is actually slightly below.) Several California metros also stand out for having both overvalued prices AND sharp price increases, including Orange County, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Riverside-San Bernardino.” (For the full story, see “Trulia: Home Prices Are Simmering, Not Bubbling.”)
The Houston market, according to the Trulia report, is presently overvalued by 6% after rising 13.9% in the past year. San Antonio, the report says, is overvalued by 4% after rising by 11.1%.
Those numbers don’t qualify those cities for bubble status, even by Trulia’s reckoning—somewhat arbitrarily, Trulia reserves the “bubble” label for areas where it considers the prices to be more than 10% above what Trulia believes justified by underlying demand and production. But even so, Texans are taking exception to the inclusion of three Texas cities on the top ten list. Market watcher Steve Cook notes the controversy on his Real Estate Economy Watch blog (for Cook’s full post, see “Smile when you say ‘bubble,’ mister“).
“Dr. James Gaines, an economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, responded that concerns about a price bubble in Texas’ housing markets are overblown,” writes Cook. “He said some of the recent increases are just making up for several years in the recession when Texas home prices were declining or flat.”
http://www.jlconline.com/home-prices/a-bubble-in-rising-texas-markets-.aspx