“Industry tailwinds look to be gaining steam, but we believe Toll has one very large impediment to cross: The sequester,” said housing analyst Stephen East at ISI Group. “With a large portion of its sales in the Mid-Atlantic area, the next few months order streams will be extremely important as the sequester knife is falling hard on well-paying defense industry jobs.”

Sequestration could even slow the improvement in the nation’s foreclosure rate. It would result in 75,000 fewer households receiving foreclosure prevention, pre-purchase, rental or other counseling through HUD grants, according to the government agency.

(Read More: The Inside Story of America’s Economic Crisis)

“This counseling is crucial for middle class and other families who have been harmed by the housing crisis from which we are still recovering, and are trying to prevent foreclosure, refinance their mortgages, avoid housing scams, and find quality, affordable housing,” said Secretary Donovan. “Studies show that housing counseling plays a crucial role in those two efforts. Distressed households who receive counseling are more likely to avoid foreclosure, while families who receive counseling before they purchase a home are less likely to become delinquent on their mortgages.”

—By CNBC’s Diana Olick; Follow her on Twitter @Diana_Olick or on Facebook at facebook.com/DianaOlickCNBC

Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.com

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100474955

Carol Galante led affordable development firm Bridge Housing before President Barack Obama tapped her to serve in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Carol Galante, who made her mark on the Bay Area as a trailblazer for affordable housing, now applies her passion for housing policy on the federal level.

Galante served for years as executive director of Bridge Housing and had previously been executive director of Eden Housing before heading to Washington D.C. a few years ago.

President Barack Obama recruited Galante to serve in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she is assistant secretary, and also serves as acting Federal Housing Administration Commissioner.

The mortgage crises of 2008 and subsequent downturn shook the real estate industry giving public officials like Galante with plenty of issues to address.

She recently sat down with the San Francisco Business Times to talk about her role, the future of foreclosures, the role of FHA financing in the housing industry and what she misses most about the Bay Area.

San Francisco Business Times: You’re tracking housing all over the country, can you talk about how the Bay Area compares with the rest of the nation?

Carol Galante: It’s very, very micro market in terms of how different areas are doing. Even within California what we see are some incredible strengths and then neighborhoods that still have some significant challenges.

SFBT: Since you’ve taken on this role, what have been the greatest challenges you’ve had to deal with?

CG: The depth of the housing crisis. When I was thinking about leaving the Bay Area, at least temporarily, and going to Washington, we knew there were challenges, but they’ve been deeper, and more intractable than any of us would have expected. We saw the crisis kind of evolve over time.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

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Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2012/10/carol-galante-talks-hud-fha.html

Worried that the city’s 14 postsecondary schools are pushing low-income individuals and families out of apartment buildings and residential hotels to provide beds for their students, the Board of Supervisors is looking to ban almost all conversions of existing residential space into student housing.

“We want to encourage construction of new student housing and block the cannibalization of our existing residences,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener, author of the ordinance that will go before the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee on Monday.

Although Wiener and other affordable housing advocates are reluctant to name names, the restrictions are aimed directly at the fast-growing Academy of Art University, which has been taking control of buildings across the city as its enrollment has soared from 2,300 10 years ago to more than 16,000 today.

“The academy has grown a lot in the past decade, with a continuing need for more space,” said Rebecca Delgado, a vice president at the school.

While the for-profit university was founded in 1929, it never had the traditional central campus of other schools like San Francisco State University, UCSF and the University of San Francisco. Without land, expansion has meant buying, not building.

In an October 2011 letter to the city Planning Commission, a university spokesman described its plan for growth.

The university “plans to expand by leasing buildings within the city that become available,” said the cover letter for the university’s institutional master plan.

That’s a strategy that threatens housing for the city’s low-income residents, housing advocates say.

Of the 17 residential buildings Academy of Art University owns or operates, five were former residential hotels, according to a May 10 report to the Planning Commission, “representing a loss of 263 residential hotel units.” Other schools, like the much smaller San Francisco Art Institute, also told planners that they plan to lease student housing from “tourist or residential or mixed residential-tourist hotels and similar quarters.”

No one is denying there’s a housing crunch for college students in San Francisco. The San Francisco Housing Action Coalition estimates that 40,000 to 50,000 of the city’s more than 120,000 college students are scrambling for off-campus housing every year.

“San Francisco’s official student housing policy is Craigslist; come here and hope,” said Tim Colen, the coalition’s executive director.

But when schools try to satisfy that demand by buying existing buildings or negotiating exclusive leases with residential hotels, it pits students against other, often older and poorer, city residents.

“It’s a policy issue,” said Brad Paul, an affordable housing advocate who was deputy mayor for housing and neighborhoods under Mayor Art Agnos. “We have to decide how to encourage schools to build student dorms and take the pressure off city housing.”

The proposed ordinance is the second part of the city’s carrot and stick effort. Two years ago, the board passed an ordinance that exempted any newly constructed student housing from the city’s low-income housing fee, which typically adds $50,000 to $60,000 a unit in building costs.

The new proposal also encourages new construction by exempting new student housing from the city’s requirement for a mix of various-size units, allowing greater density and cutting open-space requirements for developments with small, 350-square-foot or less apartments.

But there’s also a stick in the ordinance. Except for limited exceptions, it bars conversion of existing dwelling units into housing limited to students.

While the city’s residential and apartment buildings “can rent to students individually, schools can’t put together a master lease and remove (the buildings) from the general housing market,” Wiener said.

The new ordinance is the product of long discussions between college officials, housing advocates, landlords and city planners, all working for an agreement that both serves student needs and protects other renters in the city, the supervisor added.

Discussions already are under way with developers interested in building new student housing in the city, said Colen, who sees it as a potentially profitable market for local builders.

The new ordinance “is a real good start,” he added. “Let’s pass it and see how the market responds.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-proposes-new-rules-on-student-housing-3725276.php

The study by Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology, released Tuesday, adds transportation costs to the usual measure of affordability – housing prices. It concludes that the average Bay Area household spends 48 percent of its income on housing and transportation. And while it probably doesn’t seem like it – especially at the gas station – the cost of transportation in the Bay Area is the second lowest among major metropolitan areas, behind only New York.

Affordability, according to the study, is a combined housing and transportation figure below 45 percent.

Scott Bernstein, the center’s president, said the affordability index aims to provide planners, decision makers and everyday folks with information about the true costs of choosing where to live. This year’s survey, based on figures from the Census’ American Communities Survey, has been updated to include about 89 percent of the nation’s population.

Often, Bernstein said, people in search of more affordable housing will head to the distant suburbs where real estate is cheaper but won’t always consider that transportation is costlier because driving distances are longer and public transportation is often unavailable.

“You think you’re buying a cheap house 30 miles out,” he said, “but it’s 10 o’clock at night, and you need a gallon of milk. You have to get in your car, drive out of your subdivision down a two-lane road, get on the freeway and drive 10 miles. You just spent a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk.”

The study allows visitors to the center’s website, www.cnt.org, to see and compare the costs in 180,000 neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, denser communities with access to public transportation fare better than far-flung suburbs.

In the Bay Area, for instance, San Francisco households spend 39.5 percent of the average income in the region on housing and transportation compared to 41 percent in Oakland, 43 percent in Berkeley, 50 percent in San Rafael, 51 percent in Antioch and 59.1 percent in Brentwood.

Jennifer Yeamans, a lifeline and equity planner for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, has used affordability data from earlier versions of the study and compared it against Bay Area foreclosure data, finding far more foreclosures in areas with high transportation costs. She also points out that the parts of the Bay Area in which real estate prices have remained most stable are those with walkable neighborhoods and better access to transit.

Bernstein said he hopes planners will use the study information to help design better communities that don’t require households to own multiple cars.

“I would really be thrilled,” he said, “if someone would wave a wand and require that these numbers be listed right next to the sales prices of homes.”

The research should be used, Yeamans said, to help people realize the trade-offs in choosing where to live, not to drive everyone toward settling in an urban community with a BART station down the street.

“This is an opportunity for people to truly understand what their preferences cost,” Yeamans said. “Some people prefer to live in low-density areas, some prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods. That’s not to say everybody should do this or everybody should do that.”

What it costs to live in Bay Area

The typical household spends this percentage of the average Bay Area income on housing and transportation combined:

San Francisco: 39.5%

Santa Clara: 47%

Alameda: 47%

Napa: 50.7%

Contra Costa: 52.8%

San Mateo: 53.3%

Solano: 54%

Sonoma: 55.2%

Marin: 56.3%

Source: Center for Neighborhood Technology

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Twitter: @ctuan. mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page C – 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/28/BATV1NDJAQ.DTL