Tag Archives: pending home sales

Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up

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  • The Furman Center has released discussion 16, A New Approach to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing  in its ‘The Dream Revisited’ Series, a “slow debate.”  Discussion 16 contains five essays on the subject of affirmatively furthering fair housing.  This Author recommends HUD’s New AFFH Rule: The Importance of the Ground Game, by Michael Allen, which argues the HUD lacks the resources to enforce its rule which requires grant recipients not just avoid housing discrimination but “affirmatively further fair housing.”  Allen believes that the only way to hold the public housing agencies and block grant recipients accountable is through grass roots and legal advocates implementing their own enforcement strategy, through litigation if necessary.
  • The National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index is up for the 12th straight month, year over year, despite a slight decline from July to August. The index decreased 1.4 percent to 109.4 in August from 110.9 in July but is still 6.1 percent above August 2014 (103.1). Watch NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun discuss his view of the housing market.
  • The National Housing Conference has released Paycheck to Paycheck a database that compares wages for selected occupations to assess the affordability of housing for full-time employees in different areas of the United States.  A companion report, A Snapshot of Metropolitan Housing Affordability for Millennial Workers explores housing affordability for millennials in five occupations, including: administrative assistant, retail cashier, e-commerce customer service representative, food service manager, and cardiac technician.

Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up

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  • National Association of Realtors reports April Pending home sales, up 1.3% – the strongest in 9 years.
  • A joint study by the NYU Furman Center and Capital One  Renting in America’s Largest Cities: National Affordable Rental Housing Landscape reveals a trend in all 11 of the largest metro areas in the U.S., which the study focused on, of rent increases outpacing inflation, tending to not keep up with the increase in number of renters and an increase in severely rent burdened low income renters.
  • Zillow’s recent research concludes that the rent affordability crisis leads to lower homeownership rates because renters cannot afford to save for a downpayment in high rent metros like Los Angeles.