Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Living with Nightmare Neighbors

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photo by dsb nola

US News & World Report quoted me in How to Avoid and Live With Neighbor Nightmares. It opens,

When Mike Scanlin and his wife moved into an expensive ground-floor condominium within a four-story building in a posh part of Los Angeles 18 months ago,the real estate agent assured him that there were no noise nuisances, like loud dogs or kids.

It did seem that way at first, but as Scanlin discovered, “There is a 9-year-old boy’s bedroom directly above our bedroom. He is, like most 9-year-olds, hyperactive.”

Especially in the morning, and the evening, Scanlin says, when the boy “runs, jumps, screams and makes tons of noise.”

Scanlin has talked to the boy’s mother to no avail. An entrepreneur who works from home, Scanlin also sent building managers complaint letters, who in turn, sent letters to the mom.

“Nothing has worked. It’s getting worse,” Scanlin says. “Sometimes the kid gets up at 3 a.m. and rearranges the furniture in his room, with wood scraping on wood, directly above our bed.”

Scanlin and his wife are moving out next month. They aren’t willing to wait around until the kid grows up or hopefully grows out of his behavior.

They say you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends and neighbors. Easier said than done, when it comes to housing. It isn’t easy to move, and for some homeowners, financially speaking, once you do plant your roots, you may not be in any position to go elsewhere. That’s why, if you’re buying a home, it’s critical to have some sense of who’s living next door – or above you. Neighbors are important for renters to consider, too, especially if you’re locking yourself in with a lease.

So before you buy or rent, ask yourself the following questions. Because if the answers aren’t promising, you may like the solutions at your disposal even less.

*     *     *

What to do if there are problems. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do, realistically, which is why it’s so important to try and assess the neighbor situation before moving in. When you do have a dispute, “these are always difficult situations, without easy legal answers,” says David Reiss, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School.

“When you escalate by calling the police or filing a lawsuit, you risk developing a Hatfield and McCoys scenario with nobody getting what they want,” Reiss says. “It’s also important to remember that what you think to be utterly reasonable may not be perceived that way by your neighbor or even by disinterested third parties. What is loud music to you may just be a run-of-the-mill Saturday night party to them.”

True enough, and your neighbors have rights, too – which is, again, why it can be difficult to work out a disagreement.

If you can’t resolve problems with your neighbors, Reiss says, “you can try to determine whether your neighbor is breaking any local ordinances. For instance, loud noise.”

You may want to involve the police and see if they will deal with the problem informally, Reiss adds. “They may or may not,” he says.

Racial & Ethnic Change in NYC

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Brooklyn's poet, Walt Whitman

Brooklyn’s poet, Walt Whitman

Michael Bader and Siri Warkentien have posted an interesting mapping tool, Neighborhood Racial & Ethnic Change Trajectories, 1970-2010. They had set out to answer the question:

how have neighborhoods changed since the Civil Rights Movement outlawed discriminatory housing? We study how neighborhood racial integration has changed during the four decades after the legislative successes of the Civil Rights Movement. We were unsatisfied with previous studies that focused mostly on defining “integrated” and “segregated” neighborhoods based on only on whether groups were present. We thought that the most interesting and important changes occur within “integrated” neighborhoods, and we set out to identify the common patterns of those changes.

We used a sophisticated statistical method to identify the most common types of change among Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Whites in the metropolitan neighborhoods of the four largest cities in the U.S.: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. We were disappointed to learn that many integrated neighborhoods were actually experiencing slow, but steady resegregation — a process that we call “gradual succession.” The process tended to concentrate Blacks into small areas of cities and inner-ring suburbs while scattering many Latinos and Asians into segregating neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area.

While we reserve a healthy dose of pessimism about long-term integration, we also find neighborhoods experiencing long-term integration among Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Whites. We call these “quadrivial” neighborhoods, which derives from Latin for the intersection of four paths. We thought that seemed appropriate given the often different paths different racial groups took to these neighborhoods. (emphasis in the original)

I was, of course, interested in the New York City map. While NYC is highly segregated, it was interesting to see the prevalence of these so-called quadrivial neighborhoods. The authors find that

About 20 million people call the New York metropolitan area home. The metro area is one of the most segregated in the United States and, as a result, New York has a large proportion of neighborhoods following stable Black and stable White trajectories. Some of the segregation came about because of White flight during the 1970s. Black segregation following this path clusters in the Lower Bronx, North Brooklyn, and in and around Newark, New Jersey.

Large-scale Latino immigration to the New York metro area has been relatively recent, and the number of recent Latino enclaves bears out that pattern. Neighborhoods experiencing recent Latino growth are scattered throughout suburban New Jersey, Long Island and northern New York neighborhoods. New York also experienced high levels of Asian immigration relative to other metropolitan areas. Neighborhoods experiencing recent Asian growth are scattered throughout the metropolitan region.

New York also contains a large number of quadrivial neighborhood and the highest proportion of White re-entry neighborhoods. The latter are found near transportation to Manhattan in the gentrifying areas of Jersey City and Weehawken, New Jersey and the Brooklyn terminals of the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges.

New York, therefore, contains the contradiction of containing a large number of segregating neighborhoods along with a distinct trend toward integration.

I am not sure that I have any insight to explain that contradiction, although Walt Whitman, Brooklyn’s poet, notes:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes).

Tale of Two Airbnbs

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photo by Chordboard

CBRE has issued a report, The Sharing Economy Checks In: An Analysis of Airbnb in the United States. It opens,

The sharing economy has become a prominent though not well understood economic phenomenon over the past several years. Airbnb is the market leader as it relates to the temporary accommodations industry. CBRE Hotels’ Americas Research compiled select information from STR, Inc. and Airdna, a company that provides data on Airbnb, for hundreds of U.S. markets to assess the relevancy of this sharing platform to the traditional hotel industry.

Airbnb’s presence in key markets throughout the U.S. is growing at a rapid pace, with users spending $2.4 billion on lodging in the U.S. over the past year, according to analysis from CBRE Hotels. Over the study period of October 2014 – September 2015, more than 55 percent of the $2.4 billion generated was captured in only five U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Boston), represents a significant portion of the lodging revenues in these markets.

CBRE Hotels compiled select information for hundreds of U.S. markets to assess the relevancy of this sharing platform to the traditional hotel industry. From this data, the firm has developed an Airbnb Competition Index. This measure incorporates a comparison of Airbnb’s Average Daily Room rates (ADR) to traditional hotel ADR’s; the scale of the active Airbnb inventory in a market to the supply of traditional hotels, and the overall growth of active Airbnb supply in that market, into a measure of potential risk. New York was identified as the number one domestic market at risk from the growth of Airbnb, with an Airbnb Risk Index of 81.4, followed by San Francisco, Miami, Oakland and Oahu. (1)

What I find interesting about this is that Airbnb’s footprint is so hyperlocal. On a national level, just a handful of markets account for a majority of its revenues. But then, if you look at one of those individual markets, New York, just a handful of neighborhoods account for a majority of the revenue coming from that market. I cannot yet imagine what the hospitality sector will look like once the sharing economy fully saturates it, but it will surely be different that what it is today.

 

Ending Homelessness

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"Homeless Man" by Matthew Woitunski

The Christian Science Monitor quoted me in Los Angeles to Serve as Crucible for Reform in Ending Chronic Homelessness. It reads, in part:

As the heavy winter rains sweep across southern California, Los Angeles’s homeless residents hunker down. Many – like former farmworker Andreas, who huddled in the doorway of a parking structure – are unable or unwilling to find shelter off the street.

These are the chronically homeless, a large portion of the 44,000 people in L.A. that make this city the West Coast’s homelessness capital.

Nationwide, the chronically homeless represent roughly 20 percent of the nation’s homeless population at any given moment. And, both in California and across the country, they form the core target of an intensified effort by activists and politicians determined to get at the roots of intransigent homelessness.

     *     *     *

The US is not going to conquer chronic homelessness until it addresses the structural issues that hand homelessness down from one generation to another, says Brooklyn law professor David Reiss, who specializes in housing issues.

The absence of a safety net for those who fall out of employment is the beginning of the cycle, particularly for at-risk populations such as foster-care children who age out of the system and single mothers with young children. Job scarcity is also a factor. Big cities with the highest cost of living, like Los Angeles and New York, usually present the most possibilities for those in search of work.

“Very low-income people often prefer to stay in such cities, even if they are at risk of homelessness, because it is the best of a set of bad options,” he points out.

The basic costs of maintaining a home are driving more people onto the street, says Professor Reiss – a growing problem tied to the issue of income inequality.

A recent study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that this trend is increasing and, says Reiss, “we should expect more and more households to have trouble paying rent in the coming years.”

A Different Approach to Homelessness

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JCS

Pacific Palisades Coast near Porto Marina

The Christian Science Monitor quoted me in In One California Community, a Different Approach to Homelessness. It reads, in part,

On a sunny morning in the beachfront community of Pacific Palisades, Steven “Boston” Michaud perches confidently on a large dock tie just above the sand. He waves vaguely at the hills above the Pacific Coast Highway, indicating where he sleeps. “It’s up there, but you’ll never see me,” he says, pointing to his own shadow on the ground, “because I’m a shadow and I don’t bother anyone.”

Mr. Michaud is one of about 170 homeless people in Pacific Palisades, an affluent waterfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. Pacific beaches have long been a magnet for the homeless from around the world.

Overall, California experienced the second-largest increase in the number of homeless people (1,786 individuals) among the 50 states this past year, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. As their ranks have swelled, some homeless people have edged out of the shadows and have taken up in tidier areas in the Golden State. That, in turn, has attracted the attention of residents – especially when crimes have occurred.

Even Michaud isn’t as invisible as he says he is. A local supermarket took out a restraining order against him.

 By and large, California has been dealing with these issues from a legal standpoint. In general, cities in the state have more anti-homeless laws than cities in other states, with an average of almost nine such laws in each of 58 Golden State cities, according to a report by the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law.

But some communities in the state think that too much emphasis has been put on law enforcement to deal with homelessness – and not enough on other approaches that account for the needs of homeless people and try to address the root causes of the problem. These places are thus coming up with a new generation of creative ways to deal with the persistent problem of homelessness. Pacific Palisades, which is trying out a private, philanthropic approach, is one of these communities.

*      *      *

Private philanthropy in support of community needs is not new, says Mr. Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. But what is new and less common in dealing with homelessness, he says, “is the organized approach to philanthropy at the local level.”

While she applauds the ambition of the effort, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, has concerns about the implications of a privatization approach. “The government’s role is to provide for public needs in critical times,” she says, adding, “This just serves as yet another example of the government stepping away from that role.”

Beyond that, there is the question of who can afford to duplicate the Palisades approach. Raising enough money to hire social services staff is beyond the reach of many communities, says Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss, who specializes in housing policies. “So it is unlikely that Pacific Palisades is going to start a big trend, but a well-intentioned program could be effective locally, like many other community-based initiatives.”

SF’s Airbnboom

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Brian Johnson & Dane Kantner

The Christian Science Monitor quoted me in San Francisco Votes Down Airbnb Limits: Can Competing Interests Be Balanced? It reads, in part,

A defeated ballot measure in San Francisco, which would have imposed further restrictions on users of Airbnb and similar websites, is a sign of how the issue of short-term housing rentals is vexing city governments in the United States and beyond.

From Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Los Angeles, lawmakers and residents alike are struggling to balance the power of technological change with the many critics of the home-sharing industry: homeowners who complain about deterioration in the quality of life in residential neighborhoods, hotels that fret about lost revenues, and activists who say that short-term housing is stripping the marketplace of affordable long-term units.

Yet even some of the trend’s most ardent critics suggest that more restrictions are not necessarily the answer. Better enforcement of current laws would go a long way toward balancing the conflicting interests, they say.

*     *     *

On the other coast, just as many cities are struggling. New York City is still up in the air about how to handle the sharing economy, says Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss, who has followed Airbnb’s evolution.

This week, Airbnb promised to provide detailed data to the New York City Council, he notes. “The company is doing this in part to fend off [legislation] that would severely limit their reach in NYC,” he says via e-mail. One piece of proposed legislation increases penalties for violations of existing laws, and another mandates that the city track illegal apartment conversions, according to Professor Reiss.

Still, the sharing economy is with us for the long term as consumers continue to vote with their wallets, he says. “The bottom line is that we are in a period of transition. And while it is unlikely that we will return to the pre-sharing economy, it is also unlikely that we will have a sharing economy that is driven just by market actors, without government regulation,” he adds.

From Owners to Renters

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Frank Nothaft

Frank Nothaft

CoreLogic’s July issue of The MarketPulse has in interesting piece by Frank Nothaft, Rental Remains Robust (registration required). It opens,

A vibrant rental market has been an outgrowth of the Great Recession and housing market crash. Apartment vacancy rates are down to their lowest levels since the 1980s, rental apartment construction is the most robust in more than 25 years, rents are up, and apartment building values are at or above their prior peaks. But the rental market is more than just apartments in high-rise buildings.

Apartments in buildings with five or more residences account for 42 percent of the U.S. rental stock. Additionally, two-to-four-family housing units comprise an additional 18 percent of the rental stock, and one-family homes make up the remaining 40 percent.

The foreclosure crisis resulted in a large number of homes being acquired by investors and turned into rentals.  Between 2006 and 2013, three million single-family detached houses were added to the nation’s rental stock, an increase of 32 percent. The increase in the single-family rental stock has been geographically broad based, but has impacted some markets more than others.

*     *     *

While the growth in the rental stock has been large, so has been the demand. Some of the households seeking rental houses were displaced through foreclosure. Others were millennials who had begun or were planning families, but were unable or unwilling to buy. (1-2, footnotes omitted)

Nothaft’s focus is on the investment outlook for rental housing, but I find that his summary has a lot to offer the housing policy world as well. He describes a large change in the balance between the rental and homeowner housing stock, one that has had an outsized effect on certain communities and certain generations.

Housing policy commentators generally feel that the federal government provides way too much support to homeowners (mostly through the tax code) and not enough to renters. Perhaps this demographic shift will spur politicians to rethink that balance. Renters should not be treated like second class citizens.