| By Lisa Brown
In this EXCLUSIVE, Dashevsky says because of the Bay Area’s development hurdles, national players don’t have the footprint as in markets such as New York or Chicago, providing niche development opportunities.
Article source: http://www.globest.com/2018/06/14/bay-area-allows-for-niche-and-creative-deals/
California is in the news a lot for the state’s skyrocketing housing costs — but did you know there’s an entire town up for sale for less than a million dollars?
That makes it less expensive than a home in the Bay Area that sold for $1.23 million back in April — despite being condemned.
The town is Cerro Gordo, just east of Lone Pine in Inyo County. It includes about 22 buildings that total about 24,000 square feet and 300 acres of mining claims, according to the property’s listing. And it could be all yours for $925,000.
“The site has been extremely well protected from diggers, artifact looters and Mother Nature herself,” the listing reads, adding that Cerro Gordo was the first major mining camp south of the Sierra Nevada. “Restoration has been undertaken on most of the buildings and the rest are in a state of protected arrested decay.”
The ghost town was privately owned by the same family for decades, the listing says, and the family “felt it was the right time to sell it,” Realtor Jake Rasmuson told Mental Floss.
Rasmuson added that there are no conditions attached to the sale, but he told the publication “one would hope that some of the history would be maintained and that it would still be open to the public.” Rasmuson also told Mental Floss that the property has already received interest, primarily from history buffs who’ve visited the ghost town.
In the 19th century, Cerro Gordo was a booming mining town that became known as the “silver thread” to Los Angeles, according to the town’s website. A 2006 Los Angeles Times story corroborates that account, noting that silver miners in Cerro Gordo shipped what they dug to Los Angeles.
Cerro Gordo’s heyday lasted from just after the Civil War until the late 1870s, when a fire and falling silver prices caused prospectors to abandon the mine, according to the town’s website.
However, mining operations revived in 1905 and continued for the next few decades, the website states.
The town’s late owner, Michael Patterson, told the Los Angeles Times that he intended to keep Cerro Gordo in a state of “arrested decay” in memory of his late wife, who grew up in Owens Valley, according to that story.
Want to check out Cerro Gordo, but don’t want to buy it? You can take a tour of the town until it’s sold.
On Road 600, south of Ahwahnee a few miles, in Madera County, is a large sweeping curve in the road- the site of the once rough and tumble gold town of Grub Gulch, which had a lively, but short existence in the late 1800s, born in the era of gold
Article source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article213012859.html
The Vallejo area remains one of only four California real estate markets still among the nation’s hottest, according to the most recent report from realtor.com.
The move away from California markets is in sharp contrast to what happened two months ago when more than half of the hottest housing markets were here, company researchers said.
Realtor.com’s latest data reveals Midland, Texas was the nation’s hottest housing market for the second consecutive month, and that only four California markets made the monthly list of the nation’s 20 hottest. Two months ago, more than half the country’s hottest housing markets were in the Golden State.
The San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area ranks 3rd in the latest report, which lists the Vallejo-Fairfield area 5th, Stockton-Lodi 7th, and the Sacramento-Roseville-Arden area 12th out of the 20 hottest markets.
“May hotness was well distributed with nine other states represented in the top 20 list: Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio, Idaho, New York, Michigan, Colorado, Indiana, Washington and Wisconsin,” its authors said. “In fact, only two months ago the list was dominated by California markets when the top 10 included: San Francisco; Vallejo; San Jose, Santa Cruz; Sacramento; and Stockton.”
Several of these markets – San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Cruz – made the recently released news.move.com list of top areas Californians are looking to leave, they said.
“The California housing market has been hot for a long time – but may be too hot. The May hotness index further confirms we’re seeing that as prices in California continue to soar, people are increasingly looking elsewhere,” realtor.com director of economic research Javier Vivas said. “As we continue into what we expect to be the hottest home-buying season in history, look for a wide variety of locales to remain red-hot.”
That the Vallejo area is still near the top of the nation’s hotness index means the area’s housing stock is being frequently searched by perspective buyers and that homes here sell quickly. Vivas said the typical Vallejo area home sells in about 30 days, which, he said, is “very fast.”
The area’s relative affordability is likely the main factor, he said.
“It’s interesting how this compares to May last year, when the Vallejo area was No. 1 in the country,” he said. “It is not unique to Vallejo, but maybe there’s less competition compared to last year, so it’s a little easier to find a home there, than it was last year.”
Also, while the $480,000 median home price in the Vallejo area is the highest it’s been in six years, and that figure is growing at about 8 percent annually, it is still significantly less than the surrounding area – about half the price of San Francisco, for instance, “and incredibly affordable by that standard. We’re keeping an eye on it,” he said.
Solano Association of Realtor President Johnny Walker said he thinks that’s about right.
“While Vallejo’s ranking has fallen slightly, Vallejo remains the most relatively affordable city in the region with listings here usually receiving multiple offers fairly quickly, and prices continuing to climb,” he said. “Since little new inventory is being created here, there’s no reason to suspect this trend will change in the near future. That said, it shouldn’t be surprising at all if our rankings on sites like Realtor.com continue to drop as the supply of starter homes continues to diminish.”
Markets that saw the largest jump in hotness in May were Fort Wayne, Ind. and Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., which moved up 20 and 16 spots, respectively, since April, likely due to their cold climate delaying the start of spring buying season, the reports authors said.
Nationally, inventory declined 6 percent year over a year in and May and increased 6 percent compared to April, according to realtor.com monthly data. Median listing prices only grew 8 percent year over year for the third month in a row, down from 10 percent in February. Part of this deceleration can be attributed to 557,000 new listings hitting the market in May, the highest number since July 2015.
Contact Rachel Raskin-Zrihen at (707) 553-6824.
Article source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/12/vallejo-area-still-among-hottest-real-estate-markets-nationally/
Call it the Bay Area blues.
The affliction starts when you get a job that you love in a place that you adore — say, San Francisco, or Berkeley, or Marin County or Silicon Valley. You fall in love with that Golden Gate, the way Mt. Diablo rises out of the mist, the city’s sparkling skyline — then realize there is no way in hell you’ll ever be able to afford to live there without making compromises that would be laughable in most other parts of the country.
Drive 90 minutes each way to work?
Rent the dining room of a flat as your bedroom when you are on the cusp of middle age?
Step over human waste and discarded needles as you walk to your $120,000-a-year job at a promising start-up?
All of these are all well-known causes of the Bay Area blues.
And they aren’t getting better any time soon.
For the first time in the four years a business group began taking the emotional temperature of residents here, more than half of registered voters surveyed said that things in the Bay Area are “pretty seriously off on the wrong track,” a huge increase in dissatisfaction since 2014, when only 27% felt that way.
More surprising, almost half said they are “likely” to move away within the next few years.
“The Bay Area is in a funky mood,” said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored public policy group that conducts the annual survey. People are seriously put off by traffic, poverty and homelessness.
But the biggest obstacle to sticking around, they say, is the high cost of housing.
Since 2011, said Rufus Jeffris, spokesman for the Bay Area Council, the nine counties of the Bay Area have added 630,000 jobs, but issued building permits for only 146,000 homes. That’s 4.3 jobs per unit of house, far more than what experts say is a healthy balance of 1.5 jobs per house.
“And people aren’t just thinking about moving,” said Wunderman, whose council advocates for more housing construction and improvements in public transit. “They are actually doing it.”
Recently, when he and his wife returned to San Francisco from a car trip to Oregon, he was astonished by the number of U-Hauls that passed them on the road, heading north.
His own daughter, a travel writer and photographer, moved to Montana because she could no longer afford to live in San Francisco.
Ana Luisa Ahern gave up on the Bay Area last August.
After she earned a master’s degree at UC San Diego, Ahern landed her dream job: marine conservation scientist for an Oakland-based nonprofit that focuses on projects in El Salvador.
She assumed that on a salary of $62,000 she’d have no trouble finding a place with a yard that would also accommodate her rescued mutt, Chimi Chewy. Maybe a house to share. She thought she could handle a rent of $1,500.
For a year, she lived with her cousins in South Berkeley, renting a nook in their attic.
“I just thought, ‘I’ll be there til I find my own place,’” she said. “Never happened.”
Reluctantly, she left California.
Her partner, Demitri Lopez, was living in the South, where she had grown up. Despite a little trepidation about being a lesbian couple in a conservative state, Ahern decided to join her.
In February, the couple closed on a 2,500-square-foot house with a yard in the historic downtown of Columbus, a small city 100 miles southwest of Atlanta.
“Never in a million years did I think at this point in my life I would own a home,” she told me. “Now I have a home in the best neighborhood in the best part of town. Big backyard. It’s gorgeous.”
The best part? Her home cost $200,000. “I’m paying $850 a month, the same as I was paying for an attic in Berkeley.”
She has a big, diverse circle of friends that has dubbed itself “the United Nations.”
As for her fears about a hostile political climate, she said, “I have more gay friends here than I did in California. There, you are just another lesbian on the street. Here, it’s like ‘Hey, we gotta hang out!’”
::
Stuart Schuffman is a writer and political activist known around town by his nom de plume, Broke-Ass Stuart. Like many San Franciscans, he is living in a converted dining room — at the advancing age of 37.
In his 16 years in San Francisco, he said, almost all his friends have lost their housing. Many were evicted by landlords eager to raise rents. Some have fled to Oakland, which used to be cheap but isn’t anymore. Others have gone to Portland, Ore., San Diego, Los Angeles, even New Orleans.
On Tuesday, San Francisco voters, by a large margin, approved a measure to provide free legal representation for every tenant who is facing eviction.
“If this had passed five or 10 years ago,” Schuffman said, “so many of my friends and loved ones would still be here.”
Buying a home anywhere in the Bay Area, he said, “is not even a thought.”
::
Sitting in their downtown 10th-floor offices with postcard views of the Transamerica Pyramid on one side and the Bay Bridge and Ferry Building on the other, both Wunderman and Jeffris said it was painful to discover how many people in this part of the state feel they are being forced out.
“Do we really want to put those numbers out there?” Jeffris wondered. “You really worry that you become branded as a place that no one wants to be.”
This fear is nothing short of radical. After all, the population is highly educated, the economy is booming and few urban areas can boast of the extraordinary natural beauty found here.
Yet something has gone terribly wrong. “This is a failure of our own making,” Wunderman said.
Given the glacial pace of home construction, no one knows how long it will take to turn things around.
But there has to be a cure for the Bay Area blues that does not involve moving to Georgia.
robin.abcarian@latimes.com
Twitter: @AbcarianLAT
Article source: http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-bay-area-20180608-htmlstory.html
Parkway Center is a two-story 71,742-square-foot multi-tenant office building that is 100% occupied.FREMONT, CA—Further demonstrating the critical need for housing in the Bay Area, one property may eventually go from 100% occupied office building to a 100% occupied multifamily complex. The sale of Parkway Center, a two-story 71,742-square-foot office building, may pave the way for a potential redevelopment to multifamily, say sources close to the transaction. The buyer was The Stanley Group Inc. of Los Gatos, which purchased the asset for an undisclosed price.
Article source: http://www.globest.com/2018/06/11/office-property-likely-to-give-way-to-multifamily/
