A Time When Homeownership Was Depicted In Popular Culture As A Smart Bet Or A Painful Mistake

A report from the Wall Street Journal. “Soaring costs for home insurance and property taxes are busting homeowners’ budgets. Nationwide, taxes and insurance make up more than half of the monthly mortgage payment for 9% of single-family mortgages. That is up from less than 4% at the end of 2014. When Lisa and Michael Landry bought their New Orleans home in 2015, their property taxes, home insurance and flood insurance cost about $725 a month. Now they pay $2,448 a month for property taxes and wind and hail insurance. They can afford the rising costs as long as he is working, but they will likely need to move once Michael Landry, who is 70, retires. ‘Had I known what I know today, we would not have moved here,’ he said.”

“Janet Raggi, who is retired, said she is selling her home in Bradenton, Fla., because her property tax, home insurance and homeowners’ association costs have all risen since she moved in four years ago. But the three-bedroom house has sat on the market for more than a year. Raggi wants to move back to Nevada for a lower cost of living. ‘We got a great house for a great price with great interest rates, and now that’s all turned on its head,’ she said. ‘I’m looking to get out.’ Homeowners who bought in the past two years at higher mortgage rates might already be stretched thin in terms of what they can afford. Christopher Moynihan got a pay raise last year when he moved with his family from Utah to Nebraska to take a new job. Nearly the entire increase has been eaten up by higher expenses, he said. Their current mortgage rate is more than double the rate they had on their prior home, and property taxes and home insurance account for 34% of their new mortgage payment. ‘It was kind of a bitter pill to swallow,’ he said.”

The Palm Beach Post. “More than two years after landfall, Hurricane Ian property insurance disputes are now hitting the courts and the first to be heard in the state’s hardest-hit county clashed over a point that could be key in damage disputes from this year’s set of storms. Is the source of drenching damage the result of wind or water? More common insurance disputes, says Stacey Giulianti is an argument about the scope of what insurance should cover. ‘For instance, a roof has some damage and the homeowner and roofer think that the whole thing should be replaced,’ said the chief legal officer for Windward Risk Managers, comprised of Florida Peninsula and Edison insurance companies and Ovation Home Insurance Exchange. ‘We’ll look at it and potentially, for example say, ‘Well, it’s only 10 tiles. Just repair it. You don’t need to replace it,’ but people want to get a new roof, and that’s understandable … And, unfortunately, that’s what causes premiums to go up when people start asking for things that are technically and legally not due under the policy.'”

From WZZM TV. “A West Michigan family said they paid a man $70,000 to build an addition onto their home so several generations could live together, but they have little to show more than a year after work started. Stephanie Balbuena said what started as a dream project had to be downsized after she was diagnosed with cancer and required months of treatment. A close-knit family, Balbuena, her daughters, her mom and her stepdad all decided they wanted to live together. They were told it would take about a month to build and they took out a second mortgage to pay for the project. In Sept. 2023, the family said they paid Jose Martin Ortiz with Render Building Concepts $40,000. Work started in Nov. that same year and they said right off the bat, getting in touch with him was difficult.”

“They said they then paid him another $30,000 in November or $70,000 total. ‘We finally just said, no, we’re not gonna give you any more until it’s done.’ Eventually, Port Sheldon Township shut the project down due to lack of a permit. Given the money they’ve shelled out, Balbuena said her stepdad’s retirement is in jeopardy. ‘I just want it done, I wanna be able to come home and sit, ya know, with my kids and watch my granddaughter, but I, I can’t, because there’s no room here for me to stay,’ she said.”

Georgia Reporter. “A man is sleeping on the ground next to a bus stop wrapped in a blanket when he is spotted by a police officer. A City of Las Vegas Marshal notices the 55-year-old while patrolling near the Fremont Street Experience in Downtown Las Vegas on a recent November morning, according to the police report. Officer James Blaisure determines the man is unhoused and violating an expanded ban passed by the city council earlier in the month that restricts camping or lodging citywide even if there aren’t available shelter beds. The man is asked if he has been to the Courtyard Homeless Resource Center, roughly a mile away that can accommodate up to 550 people with a sleeping mat at night. He tells the officer ‘he was going to make his way over there eventually,’ according to the police report. It was the second time in a week that officers had warned him for the same offense – camping or lodging without consent, a misdemeanor that could carry a $1,000 fine.”

“Roughly a third of all camping bans the National Homeless Law Center has tracked since July were passed in California, the state with the largest homeless population. Illinois had the second highest with 13 ordinances. Violating camping bans could result in a $50 fine in Merced, California and a $100 fine in Phoenix, Arizona. Kinsburg, California has fines up to $500. Similar to Las Vegas’ fine, ordinances passed in some California cities like Fresno, Indio and Hemet could come with up to $1,000 fines. In the days following his re-election, Republican Donald Trump vowed in his second term to ‘use every tool, lever and authority to get the homeless off our streets.'”

“Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homeless Law Center, said the court’s decision might have prevented Trump from pursuing aggressive plans toward pressuring cities to enact punitive measures toward the unhoused. ‘Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the Martin v. Boise principle in the Grants Pass case, that has basically paved the way for him to pick up right where he left off, only bigger, better and worse,’ Tars said. Tars said it’s not just Republicans who have embraced harsh stances toward the unhoused. ‘Democratic mayors, governors, people who should know better, are aligning themselves with the same position that Trump is taking,’ he said. One example Tars points to is California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed an executive order less than a month after the Supreme Court decision around encampments.”

The Fresno Bee in California. “Fresno police have made at least 224 arrests of people under what they call the ‘sit lie sleep camp: public place’ ordinance adopted in September, which leaders have said was aimed at unhoused residents who would not agree to treatment or other services. Police records show William Ferguson was arrested at 9 a.m. Oct. 9 under the new law, a misdemeanor. He was also in possession of a shopping cart away from a store, which is also illegal, according to Fresno police Sgt. Diana Trueba Vega. She said Ferguson denied needing help from a drug program, so he was arrested. Ferguson said he had a lawyer taking care of the case, and was mostly angry that his possessions were taken.”

“Ferguson stood Dec. 10 with his 1-year-old pit bull terrier, Cocoa, and fellow unhoused man, Bryan Oakley. They had a lawn chair, some blankets and few other belongings nearby. Oakley said he since qualified for $369 a month in Social Security. That would not cover rent and other expenses in Fresno, where the metro market average is $1,591 per month — more than $500 more than January 2020. Oakley was with Ferguson the day he got arrested, but had stepped away from the noisy traffic to talk on the phone. He walked back to see Ferguson in handcuffs. ‘They took our stuff and threw it away, right in the trash can. I stood there and watched them,’ Oakley said. ‘Took our tent, my $100 heater, blankets, everything gone.'”

From Barron‘s. “Born from 1981 to 1996, millennials came of age during two momentous events: a housing bubble that began to burst in 2006, and the Covid-19 pandemic starting in 2020. While the financial crisis and ensuing recession demonstrated some perils of homeownership—rapidly falling prices and difficulties selling quickly—the pandemic, with its soaring home prices, reinforced just how volatile prices could be while making ownership unaffordable for many. They didn’t have to lose a home from the crisis to consider buying property a gamble. They grew up in a time when homeownership was depicted in popular culture as a smart bet or a painful mistake—often as two sides of the same coin. Re/Max agent Todd Luong, who has worked with buyers in the Dallas area for nearly two decades, has noticed a hesitancy among some young buyers. ‘I’ve had some people come to me and [say], ‘I heard buying a home is a liability,’ he says. ‘That was kind of shocking to me.'”

“In fact, nearly half of all millennial and Gen Z respondents to a recent Santander survey said owning a home is more trouble than it’s worth, a significantly higher share than the 27% of Gen X and boomers who said the same. These conditions threaten the perception of homeownership as a path to wealth. Some millennials who can’t buy will fall behind in wealth creation, while others will seek alternative investments. An annual National Association of Realtors survey showed that the smallest share of recent buyers see a home as a better investment than stocks than any since 2006.”

Bisnow Washington DC. “On some of the most prime real estate in D.C., in between the National Mall and the $3.6B waterfront megaproject The Wharf, sits a swath of aging, underutilized federal office buildings. The government is looking to offload one of those buildings — an 845K SF structure built in the 1930s — but that announcement earlier this month may be just the first domino to fall in a strategy that could reshape this prominent part of the nation’s capital. A report in March from the PBRB found that agencies are using just 12% of the space in their headquarters buildings on average. The report has helped accelerate the conversations around disposing of underutilized office buildings this year.”

“The building the GSA identified for disposal this month, 300 Seventh St. SW, had previously been under consideration for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters, but that would have required a costly renovation, said GSA Public Buidings Commissioner Elliot Doomes. ‘We crunched the numbers, we took a look at it, and we decided that was not the best value to taxpayers, so we pivoted,’ he said. ‘We said ‘This is a piece of the property in the middle of the city, so let’s dispose of it.'”

Kelowna Capital News in Canada. “A Penticton construction company is set to end 2024 the way it started, with a lawsuit over unpaid bills. Southside Builder’s Mart in Oliver is suing Jason Stutzke, doing business as Okanagan Extreme Homebuilders. This will be the 12th time Stutzke and his company were sued since January 2024 as the Oliver company filed on Dec. 12 for $35,000 in unpaid business materials and interest stretching back to May, 2023. This is on top of the over $7 million in previous lawsuits for unpaid materials and work and foreclosure filings on mortgages on Stutzke’s home. The home at 148 Garnet Way had been listed for sale earlier in 2024 for $17 million, but the listing has since disappeared.”

“An AirBnB listing for a guest house labelled Garnet Way Extreme Dream hosted by a Jody and Jason, remains online though no dates are available to be booked. The company’s website has also been made inaccessible, and its entry on the Canadian Home Builder’s Association website has also been deleted. Although it has been deleted, extremehomebuilders.com is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and lists Jason Stutzke as the company’s founder and his history as a home builder since 1993 in Manitoba. One of the previous lawsuits filed in 2024 against Stutzke in Penticton alleged that he had taken money for constructing new homes to pay for building his own house on Garnet Way.”

“Several of the lawsuits went unanswered, with some receiving applications for default judgements due to a lack of a response. In his response to the mortgage foreclosures, Stutzke claimed that the market value of the Garney Way property exceeded the mortgage and that the mortgage was thus adequately secured, and that he was in the process of refinancing to cover his debts. The most recent lawsuit does not give a local mailing address for Stutzke. It lists his company’s office location, and for a mailing address, it lists a property near Malakwa that, according to BC Assessments, has nothing on it except for a shed and outbuilding.”