On Our Radar

MarketWatch, June 5, 2024, The No. 1 Issue For Young Americans This Election? Not Student Loans, Abortion Or Guns — It’s Housing. Younger people in the U.S. are so frustrated by the real-estate market that housing affordability has become the top issue influencing their vote in this November’s election, according to a new survey. Record-high […]

Bloomberg, June 5, 2024, Richest New Jersey Neighborhood Dealt Blow In Cheap-Housing Spat The wealthy township of Millburn, New Jersey, has lost a key battle in its fight to stop 75 affordable apartments from being built on the town dump. Home to Short Hills, the state’s richest ZIP code, Millburn had bet on convincing a court

Axios, June 3, 2024, Utah Sees Wide Homeownership Gap Between White And Black Households Utah’s homeownership rate is higher than the rest of the nation. Yes, but: About 74% of white non-Hispanics own and occupy their homes, compared to 27% of Black households and about 54% of Latino households, per a University of Utah Kem C.

The Baltimore Banner, June 4, 2024, The Baltimore Banner: A Worker-Owned Co-Op Is Giving Baltimore’s Vacant Homes — And People — A Second Chance There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for when a city contains more than 13,000 vacant homes and some 20,000 empty lots. Instead, Baltimore’s vast vacant housing landscape has ushered in waves of new

The New York Times, June 8, 2024, How An American Dream Of Housing Became A Reality In Sweden As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible. Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian

The American Prospect, June 7, 2024, Homeowners Want Housing Prices To Go Up Public anxiety about the cost of living is as much about high housing prices as anything else. The difficulty in finding an affordable place to live has spurred a host of policy pitches across the political spectrum. The activist groups Right to

The Baltimore Sun, June 11, 2024, Howard Officials Aim To Study Affordable Housing In The County County Executive Calvin Ball recently signed an executive order establishing a 13-member Affordable Housing Working Group that will recommend goals and criteria for an affordable and accessible housing program in the county. “The establishment of the Affordable Housing Working

The Guardian, May 22, 2024, Displaced By Climate Disasters, Ageing Americans Struggle To Find Housing From their hillside home above Barre, Vermont, Doug and Rhoda Mason thought they were safe. It was 11 July 2023, and record rains were flooding their small city. Then, just before 5am, a landslide crashed into the Masons’ house. The mud

North Carolina Health News, May 2, 2024, HCA Pruned Staff At Mission Hospital, Reaped Soaring Profits, Academic Study Finds Staff cuts have driven up patient-care profits at Mission Hospital in Asheville after HCA Healthcare acquired the facility, according to a draft report by Mark Hall, director of the health law and policy program at Wake Forest University. The report tracked the hospital’s

Planetizen, June 10, 2024, California Supreme Court Rules in Favor of People’s Park Housing A plan to build student housing in People’s Park near the University of California, Berkeley will move forward after the state’s Supreme Court ruled in the university’s favor in a suit trying to stop the development. The lawsuit claimed that the

North Carolina Health News, May 2, 2024, HCA Pruned Staff At Mission Hospital, Reaped Soaring Profits, Academic Study Finds Staff cuts have driven up patient-care profits at Mission Hospital in Asheville after HCA Healthcare acquired the facility, according to a draft report by Mark Hall, director of the health law and policy program at Wake Forest University. The report tracked the hospital’s

Reuters, May 22, 2024, US Home Sales Post Second Straight Monthly Drop; House Prices Accelerate WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – U.S. existing home sales unexpectedly fell in April as higher mortgage rates and house prices weighed on demand, dealing another setback to the housing market. Though the report from the National Association of Realtors on

The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2024, They Were Used to Five-Star Service At First Republic. Now They’re Just Regular Customers. First Republic Bank FRCB -33.33% decrease; red down pointing triangle had a knack for making customers feel special. Its new owner isn’t getting such rave reviews.  Over Memorial Day weekend, all First Republic customers were moved over

Housingwire, May 21, 2024, Zillow’s New AI Tool Aims To Promote Equality In Housing Zillow announced the release of an open-source tool, the Fair Housing Classifier, on Tuesday as part of the company’s efforts to “promote responsible and unbiased behavior in real estate conversations powered by large language model (LLM) technology.“ In a news release, Zillow explained that artificial intelligence (AI)

Next City, May 21, 2024, A Major New Step Toward Public Banking In Rochester Here at Next City, we’ve covered efforts to create city-owned banks in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the East Bay. We’ve also covered efforts to create state-owned banks in California, Massachusetts and New Mexico. Sometimes, as in the case of New York or California, state legislation has been