A weekend topic starting with the New York Post. "Authorities in California have ceded prime real estate on the Venice Beach boardwalk to a rotating cast of vagrants — a microcosm of the insanity plaguing the Golden State amid its spiraling homeless crisis. Scott Beers, who took over the primo real estate with his girlfriend, promised to keep it cleaner than the previous 'tenant.' 'I’ve had homes before so I get it,' said Beers, who keeps his belongings neatly stacked on an airport luggage cart. 'These people pay millions of dollars to live by the beach and they don’t want to see that s–t all over the place. Venice is my favorite because you can get hot showers every day. You can go out to the food bank three days a week. There is a church nearby that gives you a hot meal. And you can’t beat the views!' he said, noting that he gets by with panhandling and $221 a month from 'general relief' funds from the Welfare Office."

The Union Tribune in California. "Jack Mogannam, manager of Sam’s Cable Car Lounge in downtown San Francisco, relishes the days when his bar stayed open past midnight every night. He's had to drastically curtail those hours because of diminished foot traffic, and business is down 30%. 'I’d stand outside my bar at 10 p.m. and look, it would be like a party on the street,' Mogannam said. 'Now you see, like, six people on the street up and down the block. It’s a ghost town.' Empty storefronts dot the streets. Large 'going out of business' signs hang in windows. Shampoo, toothpaste and other toiletries are locked up at downtown pharmacies. And armed robbers recently hit a Gucci store in broad daylight. Hotel revenues are stuck at 73% of pre-pandemic levels, weekly office attendance remains below 50% and commuter rail travel to downtown is at 33%, according to a recent economic report by the city."

KGW-TV in Oregon. "Blood-stained walls cover a historic Southwest Portland storefront. It’s just one of the many vacant buildings downtown struggling to get off the market. The Charles F. Berg building once stood out for its avant-garde design and pure gold façade. Now, it’s the latest side effect of the drug and homelessness crisis plaguing Portland. Squatters broke in and took over the 20,000 square-foot space. 'They were living here for a couple of weeks before we noticed,' said Denise Brohoski, the broker behind the listing. The building has been on the market for a few years. The current owner purchased it back in 2019. He’s asking for $3.75 million. 'We've got a 30% vacancy rate. It changes these buildings, in that no one's here to take care of them. I feel empathy for the building owner — he has already lost a million on this and he's probably going to lose another million before it's all said and done,' said Brohoski."

Fox Business on Texas. "Calls are growing to get Austin’s homeless and crime crises under control as more business owners and nonprofits warn that zero action has been taken by the Texas city. 'They say that we are a few years behind San Francisco, usually in Austin,' Documenting Austin's Streets and Homeless head Jamie Hammonds told FOX Business’ Grady Trimble. 'And we're starting to see that. We've had a few windows broken. We've had a few people camping in carports behind the house, actually,' Austin-area realtor Jordan Moorhead also told Trimble. 'We have a listing I keep running somebody off from right now.'"

"'Just recently we were starting to get some things done from the city where they started to clean the encampment out and getting the folks off the street,' said Craig O’s Pizza & Pastaria owner Craig Plackis. 'But what we're hearing is that, once they get them into the housing, they're maybe staying there a day or two and then getting right back on the street again.'"

The Star Telegram in Texas. "Home values have tripled in east and southeast Fort Worth neighborhoods like Polytechnic Heights and Stop Six, according to a report. The neighborhoods of mostly one-story, single-family homes are among the city’s oldest. They are also among the city’s poorest: The median household income is $27,000 lower than the city’s $67,927 and one in four families live below the poverty level. Realtor Brandi Vaughn pointed to a client who purchased a plot of land near Texas Wesleyan University three years ago for roughly $10,000 before selling it in 2023 for nearly $50,000. 'Where you used to be able to get a house for $100,000 or maybe $200,000, now the average price is $300,000,' Vaughn said."

"A lot of buyers started to look at areas like east Fort Worth during the Covid-19 pandemic when interest rates fell below 3% and there was rabid competition for housing, said Shelby Kimball, a Fort Worth-based Realtor. At the same time, interest rate hikes starting in 2022 have take a lot of people out of the market, he said. 'There’s still not a lot of houses, but now there’s not a lot of buyers,' he said."

KJZZ in Arizona. "It was a bit like group therapy when these residents of Scottsdale met recently at an Old Town restaurant. Adeolu Adebayo says he dreads the weekend, not knowing what havoc might happen. Stephanie Nestlerode hears constant noise and sees a 'constant rotation of strangers.' Cheryl Triplett has had people trying to enter her home at 4 a.m., and was attacked by guests who brought their dogs. Kristie Hudson’s neighboring backyard was full of '10 extremely drunk screaming adults that I can hear inside my home.' Her front yard is often filled with trash. She observed a drug deal in the alley."

"These longtime Scottsdale residents are fed up because they feel their neighborhoods are being taken over by short-term rentals and their transient visitors. Triplett says the noise and the nuisance never stops. 'We’ve suffered property damage with our landscape lights. The garbage has just been piled up and left for days. [We were] woken up in the middle of the night from women and men just, 'WOOOOO HOOOOO!' hooping and hollering at the top of their lungs.' Triplett even claims her underage daughter and her friends were harassed by unruly and rude guests leering over her property wall. She regrets living here now. 'If somebody had said that I would end up living next door and across the street from five short-term rentals, we never would have bought on our street,' said Triplett."

Fox5 Vegas in Nevada. "Some homeowners are risking hefty fines to operate short-term rentals and list their properties online, as the process to issue licenses in unincorporated Clark County faces some delays. Homeowners told FOX5, they are missing out on the busy summer travel season and possibly Formula 1 crowds as they await approval of their applications. To apply for a license, all short-term rental owners had to cease current listings. Leslie Doyle, 83, said her income has been cut by at least half as ended listings on Airbnb and chooses to wait out the process for a legal license. 'Some of us will die waiting. we [seniors] are the ones who need it most,' Doyle said."

Multi-Housing News. "Some real estate players are seeking to benefit from the devalued or distressed properties out there, while others continue to remain on the sidelines until the grey clouds over the economy disappear. The commercial and multifamily mortgage origination volume index dropped 56 percent in the first quarter of 2023, compared to the same period in 2022, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Walker & Dunlop Investment Partners Chief Investment Officer Marcus Duley: 'Many owners will become forced sellers, as they lack the capital for a ‘cash in’ refinance and are unable to recapitalize their investments. Currently, buyers and sellers are still in the price discovery phase. Buyers are hesitant to purchase properties with declining values, akin to catching a ‘falling knife,’ while sellers are unwilling to leave money on the table by selling too soon. Furthermore, the higher cost of debt and underwriting with negative leverage poses significant challenges in making deals financially viable without downward adjustments in seller price expectations.'"

CTV News in Canada. "Frustration and emotions were high at a town hall meeting as residents expressed their concern over a homeless encampment at the proposed Consumption Treatment Services site in Cambridge. The majority of the pleas centered on the tents in the parking lot of the proposed CTS site, with many fearful about what they say are growing levels of crime. 'I witness firsthand the countless overdoses in the parking lot,' said another resident. 'Many who are intoxicated or high, staggering around the parking lot.'"

The Toronto Sun in Canada. "All of Asuman Najib Ssali’s worldly belongings hang from a tree outside a downtown Toronto shelter. He fled Uganda because of government persecution and now has a hard-plastic grey suitcase, two canvas grocery bags, a blue foam bed roll, a beige jacket, his prayer mat, a large plaid floor sheet and an umbrella. Ssali has become part of the growing mass of African people outside of the shelter, where some refugees looking for a place to stay have been camped out for over two weeks. Mid-afternoon Friday, a grey pickup truck rolled up to the shelter blaring African music and two men hopped in the back and started unloading a few bikes, scooters, food, water, and flinging clothing to those clamouring around it."

"Toronto’s Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie said back in May that the number of asylum seekers in the city’s shelter system grew by 500% in 20 months from a low of 530 per night in September 2021 to more than 2,800 throughout the month of May this year. Diagonally across from the Peter St. shelter, one of the area’s many former nightclubs is boarded up with large 'For Lease' signs plastered on the exterior walls. One of the advocates, Rachel, a helper from the Ugandan centre, asked: 'Why doesn’t the city just go to them and ask to put temporary beds in there for shelter?'"

Radio Canada. "According to official figures, there are currently six million residential mortgages in Canada right now, and about 1.2 million of them come up for renewal every year. About one-third of all mortgage holders have already seen their rates increase, and everyone else should expect to start paying more soon. Mortgage broker Ron Butler says anyone with a mortgage should brace for much higher rates and payments than they were probably ever expecting. 'In some cases, double the rate they were experiencing and nothing but bigger payments moving forward,' he said."

"Lately, Butler says he hears daily from borrowers with a desperation in their voice he's never heard before. 'We take calls from some people who are actually in tears,' he said. 'They've got a renewal [and] they don't know what they're going to do.' Butler said lenders have been delaying some of the payment shock for many borrowers by extending amortizations. That brings relief upfront by keeping monthly payments steady, but it tacks on years to the life of the mortgage by effectively turning them into interest-only loans."

"'We hear these stories about 70-year amortization, 90-year amortization — instead of paying off your mortgage, these people's mortgages are actually getting bigger,' Butler said. But that doesn't work forever, as the debt has to be paid back under possibly worse terms later. 'At renewal … those rates, those payments are going to go up.'"

"Kara Hishon knows that first-hand. She lives in Stratford, Ont., with her husband and three kids. They bought their family home in the summer of 2018 on a fixed-rate loan at 2.8 per cent, which kept the payments well within their budget. While they love everything about their home, the same can't be said of the loan options she's been presented with now that their five-year term is up. It's going to add about $400 a month to their mortgage costs — and comes with another catch: In order to keep the payments comparable, they've had to undo the diligent work they've done to get their original loan down to 16 years, and re-amortize at 30 years."

"'It's kind of a bummer to have to forego that,' she said 'but there's no way we could have done it otherwise.'"

From Bloomberg. "CityPoint, a 36-story office building in London’s financial district, became one of the symbols of the financial crisis when a Beacon Capital Partners Inc. fund missed a payment on loans secured by the property just over a decade ago. Now, the rise of work from home and surging interest rates mean Bank of America analysts are warning that a default on loans linked to the property is likely. The building isn’t alone in facing a wobble having become tangled up in problems after the 2008 crisis. An office complex in Frankfurt and towers in New York are also running into difficulties again."

"'The low cost of debt due to quantitative easing has led to the same property value expansion as observed during the previous cycle,' said Nicole Lux, a senior fellow at Bayes Business School whose research areas include real estate finance. 'Lenders and investors now have to admit that they are facing the same refinancing issues for their properties.' 'At least some of the lessons from previous crises have been forgotten,' said Tolu Alamutu, a credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who was speaking generally. 'The real estate sector may be facing a much more testing outlook than some issuers may be able to weather.'"