On Saturday night, Mission Local attended “Our Mission: No Evictions!” — a fundraiser for Mission icons Rene Yañez and Yolanda Lopez, who are being evicted from the home they have lived in for 35 years.
Sarah McClure loves the colorful writing, and opportunity to connect to larger issues, that Arts & Culture reporting allows—she reads the Times’ Art Beat often. Here, she’s experiencing art on the street that the LA native is accustomed to seeing whiz-by from car windows. She is a Master's degree candidate at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she is specializing in multimedia, Spanish-language reporting and Latin America.
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Of course some say the medium should not be dictated by the poor. Tough capitalist love and all of that. There’s a point there. But there also may be a point that just before the end Bobby Kennedy’s eyes opened wider because of Cesar Chavez. Further Oscar Romero paid the ultimate price because his eyes saw the high chalice truth involving the distribution of wealth at the end and he got shut up for it.
If you had to make a choice, whose side are you on? Oh yeah, and then there was Tommy Douglas in Canada. What a mistake that we aren’t Bush, Milton Friedman hyper-capitalist clones … of the rich, by the rich and for the rich: See Stiglitz’s piece in the New Yorker … .
The Ellis Act is a good way for landlords to turn their property into back into single family homes or into TICs which makes it more affordable for people to own, have a home. It is all legal & above board. You would think after renting 2 flats at $450/month for 30+ years, the 4 tenants would have long ago saved enough to buy a piece of property.
Slow day at the realty office?
Also, is it true that it’s always a good time to buy?
So, Two Beers, if someone here argues for more balance in looking at the landlord-tenant equation, they are obviously a shill for the real estate business?
To a neutral observer, that kind of response can appear as if you cannot really refute the points made.
Actually, going back decades, housing tracks inflation.
You know it’s a bubble when the charts look like hockey sticks, because parabolic trajectories are unsustainable. Housing began to look like a hockey stick in the mid-90s.Do you think it’s just a coincidence hat, after decades of steady but measured growth, we are now in a boom and bust stage in which each cycle is shorter and more severe than the previous one?
And when the bust comes, the rich get bailed out for their bad investments on the public dime.
I dunno, two beers, that sounds to me like so much socialist claptrap that those who cannot successfully navigate the markets routinely rationalize with.
Detroit went bankrupt because it has a dated economy and a huge base of liabilities because of inflated public sector worker benefits. While rich places like SF can afford insane healthcare and pension benefits, the moribund economies of second-rate economies cannot.
So expect more municipal bankruptcies and, if you want a hint, take a look at short the municipal bonds of dinosaur conurbations like Detroit. Oakland is a decent possibility for BK as well, if SF’s wall of money ever stops going there.
The carnage in Detroit is the result of specific neo-liberal economic and trade policies.n The middle and lower-working classes took the brunt of the hit.
The current and ever-escalating boom and bust cycle in the Bay Area is attributable to similar policies. And the middle and lower working classes have taken the brunt of the hit.
What would be sane and sensible would be a normal market in which housing tracks the historic rate of inflation; such an economy is overwhelmingly more immune from the the crashes that follow all booms.
You like and obviously have benefited from the gold-rush, boom and bust, get-rich-quick-and-crash economy. That type of economy benefits a very small number, at the expense of the politically-disenfranchised 99%, who wind up paying, via a decrease in their standard of living, for bail out the sociopathic boom-and-bust 1%.
Healthy economies are not zero sum games. This one is. The creation of wealth now only comes at the cost of destroying the lives and livelihoods of those not connected to the Wall St succubus.
RE inflation for the last 30 years has led to returns will in excess of inflation. That is significantly attributable to the long-term decline in US interest rates.
Twenty years ago, a mortgage might cost you 12% or even 15%. now you pay 3% or 4%. Obviously that is going to drive valuations and smart investors take that into account.
Globalization is also a factor. Homes in Lubbock, TX only sell to local. Homes in SF are marketed globally, at least at the high end.
You cannot turn back the clock. But hey, maybe we will now have a 30 year bear market in RE. Sounds like you hope so, although I do not think you will like it if it happens. Take a trip to Detroit if you want to know what that looks like.
Slow day at the realty office, John?
This is beginning to resemble the previous bubble: when condolofts were flying off the shelf, new-house salesmen and used-house salesmen were making too much money to clog up the blogs, but when things began to slow down, they hit the blogs telling everyone it was a great time to buy, buy now or be priced out forever, etc.
There appears to be a small segment of the community who view every period of success, prosperity and rising asset valuations as a “bubble”. In other words, you assume that if something goes up, it must go down.
There are of course short-term cycles in markets, but there are also secular trends. And for the real estate and equity markets, you can see compounded returns of around 10% per year going back for decades, ON AVERAGE and allowing for those down years.
Now, you cannot blame those who work in RE for talking up their book. That happens in every business. But I’d argue that the reasons for the current revaluation is supported by the fundamentals – rapidly rising incomes for a rapidly increasing number of knowledge workers. And a perennial desire by those with emans to relocate here.
And you can only reasonably ask the RE industry to provide housing services to those who are in a position to pay for them. It’s the government’s job to provide homes for those who cannot, subject to voter approval.
PS: I am not a realtor. Couldn’t afford the pay cut 😉
Why don’t we just not reply to John and the other haters (or aliases). We can communicate among ourselves and completely ignore them. We/they know who they are. Rather than block them or engage them, let ’em spew.
Because nobody should ever have to hear an opinion that they disagree with?
This is getting silly.
We can all demonstrate compassion for anyone who is forced to do something they do not wish to do.
But the idea that a property owner can never evict a tenant from his property is a ridiculous premise.
The sub-text here is the Ellis Act. But we should not forget that the Ellis Act was nothing more than a reaction to tenant protections being taken too far.
Did we learn nothing from that?
No, sir, the Ellis Act was a way to get around rent control. Its abuse by landlords is what has been taken too far.
Wrong, Russo, property owners who invoke Ellis Act evictions do so in full compliance with State law, make relocation payments, give long notice periods and often offer additional payments that are not required to help the transition.
You cannot reasonably expect a property owner to permanently yield possession of their home to others, and in this case the tenancy lasted several decades.
Enough is enough, and justice was done here.