homesmillbrae.com

“Even though people can afford to buy, there are not houses for them,” said Nadia Evangelou, the association’s senior economist and director of forecasting.

Bidding wars, waived inspections and all-cash offers are by no means new in the Bay Area. But the combination of record high prices and record low inventory during the pandemic has combined to put homeownership further out of reach for more households, the report found.

Long term, economists warn that the severe lack of housing options could widen the gap between the wealthiest households and middle-class residents looking to put down roots, and prompt more aspiring home buyers to leave the area altogether.

Concerns about widening inequality are magnified when breaking down the data by race. Black home buyers have less than half of the buying power of white counterparts in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area, Evangelou said, due to stark racial income gaps in the region.

As new housing and tax proposals fuel debate at public meetings around the Bay Area, stark disparities in who is best positioned to reap the benefits of skyrocketing home values have also been front and center in other recent reports. Last month, federal financial regulators were presented with major proposed reforms to the home appraisal system after lawsuits over racial bias in places including the North Bay. And an analysis of federal home lending data found that most non-white applicants still face longer loan approval odds and higher closing costs.

“Black and Hispanic borrowers bought less valuable homes than white and some Asian borrowers,” the lending report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found, “and they paid more to do so.”

Day to day, not every household in a given income bracket will be searching for a home at the same time. It’s also far from the first time that anxiety has festered about out-of-whack housing supply and demand. But the new home affordability report, titled “Double Trouble,” compared active home listings, local income data and projected home budgets in each price bracket to understand how rising home prices combined with falling inventory during the pandemic to impact affordability.

For middle-income U.S. households earning $75,000 to $100,000 annually, the number of affordable homes on the market plunged from more than 656,000 in December 2019 to 245,300 as of December 2021. Among the cities where homes are still relatively plentiful: Daytona Beach, Fla.; Des Moines, Iowa; Atlanta; Miami; and Houston.

One of the more surprising findings, Evangelou said, is that homes actually became slightly more attainable in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area during the pandemic — at least in theory. While rising local incomes and falling interest rates should have combined to help put homes within reach for more people, she said those gains were offset by a sharp decline in the number of places available in many price points.

“If there are not homes out there to buy,” Evangelou said, “what can you do?”

While Realtors stand to make more frequent commissions if there are more homes for sale, broader concern about the dearth of affordable homes in the Bay Area has already triggered a wave of state and local proposals to increase home construction. That includes last year’s SB9, which allows for up to four homes on land previously zoned for single-family houses, and has already triggered creative appeals from affluent communities like Woodside that have long been averse to new development.

Tension is also threatening to boil over in San Francisco, where the city is being sued for rejecting new residential developments on a SoMa parking lot and a Tenderloin church site, and state regulators last week warned local politicians about local approval processes impeding state housing targets. In the meantime, tenant advocates in the city and beyond are pushing for state and local politicians to consider taxing vacant existing homes or further limiting evictions as renters struggle to rebound from the pandemic.

At a time of deep divides over where to go from here on housing, Evangelou said opting to build more entry-level homes — or not — will have long-term economic impacts.

“Homeownership is one of the main sources of wealth accumulation,” Evangelou said. “We want to see everybody have those same opportunities.”

Lauren Hepler is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler

Except in May, when I came to the city to do a comprehensive overview of the Bay Area real estate market for SFGATE (Spoiler alert: Housing here is expensive). I didn’t have the time to do any of my usual bougie meal planning before coming. I had to WORK, and work I did. I walked miles across (and up and down) the city, touring every last open house I encountered and talking to real estate agents until my tongue became petrified. House hunting, even when you have no intention to buy a house, is a fantastically exhausting enterprise.

One day, while canvassing around the Mission, I needed lunch. The photographer for our story knew just the place.

“It’s my favorite burrito joint. I always take people there,” he told me. I trusted him. Also, I needed the burrito. It’s a rare moment when you actually have to eat a burrito for sustenance, but holy s—t I had done so much walking. More walking than Gandhi did. And no food delivers 1,200 calories to your system as efficiently and tastily as a burrito can.

We got into my colleague’s car and he took me to Papalote, where you order your burrito at the counter and then wolf it down under the dining shed outside. I ordered the al pastor: pork, rice, beans, pico de gallo. Very simple, but I wasn’t in the mood to get cute with my lunch. Food-as-fuel people are a deeply annoying lot, but sometimes your workload reduces you to being one yourself. I was expecting a good burrito. I was not expecting transcendence, mostly because I was not looking for it.

My burrito came out. I took a bite, and I was like, “F—k, this is good.” Sometimes you praise a restaurant dish because you planned your visit meticulously, paid for your meal, and whetted your anticipation so thoroughly that the praise almost comes off as a sales job you’re doing on yourself. Other times, the praise comes out of sheer surprise. Instinct. You didn’t know this dish would be THIS good. You didn’t ever care what you were eating until the dish forced the issue. This burrito — this beautiful, perfect burrito — fell into the latter category. Not a shred of the pork was dry. The rice and beans melded so perfectly with the meat that I couldn’t tell what had been layered upon what. I doused each bite with a flight of house salsas (Papalote, like a lot of small restaurants, has found that retailing its own sauces is a handy way of creating a secondary revenue stream), but the salsa was beside the point. The burrito itself had enough tang to balance itself out. Also: I now refuse to eat any burrito that isn’t properly griddled.

I know I’m out of my element here. I’m not writing a hot take where I’m ready to declare X place THE best burrito in the galaxy. If you’re a local, you almost certainly have burrito opinions of your own. This very website is a haven for such opinions. And I, as a non-Californian, have an ignorant palate when it comes to burrito authenticity.

Prior to my Papalote visit, my favorite burrito was a duck burrito at Canyon Road in Manhattan. You don’t have to yell at me that Manhattan is a Mexican food wasteland. I promise you that I already know that. And that burrito was a yuppie burrito: the kind of meal I splurged on back in the late ’90s when I was making $25,000 a year and wanted to impress a date. Plus it had duck, so I liked it. But it wasn’t a real burrito. Live in a burrito desert your whole life and you might trick yourself into believing that burritos are just burritos; one can’t possibly be that much more superior to another. Not only is this wrong, it’s shockingly detrimental to your well-being, and I say that knowing what any burrito can do to your intestinal tract.

I went back to work that afternoon, and for the rest of the week. I toured more houses and conducted interviews and went back over all of the research … but I never stopped thinking about that burrito. I still haven’t. I haven’t bothered to look for a comparable burrito back home in Maryland because I know it doesn’t exist. You, the native San Franciscan, know that the most basic burrito in your town blows anything mine has out of the water. And I have to tell you that it is an absolute PLEASURE to discover this fact firsthand, even knowing that, back home, I am now so far removed from the burrito pleasures of San Francisco. The burrito haunts me. It tempts me. It calls for me. I don’t find this desire painful. I find it oddly thrilling.

It’s been three months. I wanna go back for more. I WILL go back for more, and for every other burrito on that Papalote menu (there’s a mole one; I’ve never had mole burrito, but I bet it kicks ass), and for every other San Francisco burrito. My journey has only just begun. I had no idea that burritos could be this good. But now that I do, I have a lot more work to do.

Two of those three are in the Bay Area: Oakland’s median one-bedroom rent in August was 9.5% below March 2020 — the lowest growth rate of the 50 cities included in the data. San Francisco followed with an 8.5% drop over the same time period.

Minneapolis was the only other big U.S. city still in the red for rental growth, with the median price down 2.5%. All other cities saw growth, ranging from 3.9% for Washington, D.C., to 43% for Tucson, which had the biggest increase.

Many major cities saw rental prices plummet during the first year of the pandemic, from March 2020 to early 2021, as offices shut down, and workers fled for more affordable areas, including out of state. But while others have since rebounded, experts said several factors explain why Bay Area cities are slow to catch up.

“The slow rent rebound in the Bay Area is really concentrated in San Francisco, Oakland, and the Peninsula, markets with both the highest pre-pandemic rents as well as the highest share of remote capable jobs, per research conducted by our team last year,” said Rob Warnock, senior research associate for Apartment List, in an email.

According to U.S. census data, he added, from July 2020 to July 2021 the Bay Area experienced a net decline of almost 156,000 residents, with the highest population decline in San Francisco of 6.3%.

“This translated to a drop in rental demand, a surge in apartment vacancies, and a dramatic drop in rent prices that in some individual cities, remains today,” he said.

Tech companies overall have been slower to bring employees back to the office or pivoted to flexible work schedules. While San Francisco is seeing more signs of life, some companies in recent months have been downsizing or canceling their office spaces, or closing down their offices for good.

Some major tech companies have called employees back to the office on hybrid schedules, including Google, which began requiring that most workers return at least three days a week in April, and Apple, which recently announced that corporate employees would need to come in at least three days a week beginning Sept. 5.

Rent in San Jose, which also declined earlier in the pandemic, was up a modest 6.6% in August since the start of the pandemic — the fifth-lowest growth rate out of the 50 largest cities.

San Francisco is “denser and has smaller unit footprints, two features that housing demand moved away from during the pandemic,” Warnock noted. So as the San Francisco and San Jose markets rebound, he said it’s possible that the type of housing offered in the San Jose area is more attractive to new renters, “especially if they are working remote and proximity to the office isn’t a dealbreaker.”

Outer-lying Bay Area communities have seen bigger growth in rent prices since the start of the pandemic. For example, median rent in Fairfield in August was 21.9% above March 2020, and Santa Rosa saw growth of 17.1%.

Rent in Sacramento, a popular destination for people leaving the Bay Area during the pandemic, rose 23.1% from March 2020 to August 2022 — a rate that put it in the middle of cities nationwide.

Unlike the Bay Area’s biggest cities, other parts of the state didn’t experience such a significant population loss, Warnock said.

“As people moved around, one thing we witnessed universally was a flow of people from higher-cost to lower-cost cities, even within expensive regions,” he said.

In the larger San Francisco metropolitan area — defined as San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin counties — median rent has finally edged just above pre-pandemic levels: the median one-bedroom was $1,969 in March 2020 and $1,970 in August 2022.

Despite the sluggish growth, rents in the Bay Area remain much pricier than most of the rest of the U.S. The San Jose metro — which includes all of Santa Clara and San Benito counties — had the country’s highest one-bedroom median rent in August, at $2,295, followed by the San Francisco metro at $1,970.

In third place was the metro area encompassing Ventura County in Southern California, at $1,951. The New York metro area came in fourth with a median rent of $1,948.

Tight supply helps explain why Bay Area prices have remained so high, Warnock said.

“Despite a softening of the rental market … the Bay Area continues to suffer from a massive housing shortage, which props up prices,” he said. “Open houses may have fewer prospective renters lining up for a showing, but that does not mean that landlords are suddenly desperate for new tenants.”

Apartment List data shows vacancy rates remain below 5% across the Bay Area, Warnock said.

So what is in store for the future of Bay Area rents?

Nationwide, rent growth is decelerating, Warnock said, which is a “welcome sign indicating that the rental market is falling back into its typical, pre-pandemic seasonal trend.” In San Francisco, monthly rent growth in August 2022 was 0.7%, compared with 2.7% in August 2021.

“Last year is proving to be an anomaly, while this year is behaving more normally,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that prices will go down substantially, but rather that price increases should continue slowing for the remainder of the year, unlike last year when they accelerated throughout the fall and winter.”

Article source: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bay-area-housing-market-possibly-cooling-off-august-2022-more-inventory-price-drop/

“People that had some interest in the property are back making a decision about whether they want to make an offer or not,” Green said. “You either participate or the house is gone. The sense of urgency as well as reaching a broader pool of people is what attracted us to the auction process.”

There are people from all over the world that specifically watch the luxury property auction market, she said, and she also wanted to get the word out to those people.

The main house spans 11,447 square feet, with seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms, a media room, a 500-bottle wine cellar, and walk-in closets that store more than 400 items. It’s all surrounded by sweeping views of Mount Diablo.

There’s lots of design pedigree within the walls. Renowned Beverly Hills architect Brian Tichenor of Tichenor Thorp designed the estate and is known for having a hand in buildings like the Los Angeles Times headquarters in Los Angeles and the interior of the Cecil B. DeMille estate in Los Feliz.

There’s also a one-bedroom carriage house, a one-bedroom “tennis house,” an outdoor kitchen and bar, a pool, a tennis court and a 14-car garage on the grounds. Two gates protect the property.

322 Lark Lane is within walking distance of downtown Alamo, a suburb about 30 minutes east of downtown Oakland.

“It is rare to see an estate of this quality check all the boxes for today’s lifestyle,” Green told SFGATE in April. “The ability to retreat to privacy, while remaining part of a true community, less than a mile away, is extraordinary.”

The auction concludes Aug. 22. Interested bidders must register and contribute a $100,000 refundable deposit.

Real estate reporter Anna Marie Erwert contributed to this story.

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/east-bay-estate-for-auction-17361816.php