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Marin was among the Bay Area counties with the largest outward migration after the start of the pandemic, according to a new report.

Since the COVID-19 crisis began, the number of people who have left California has decreased by 38%. Not so in the Bay Area, which remained one of the few regions that has seen an uptick in residents relocating, according to the California Policy Lab, a research institute based at the University of California.

Marin ranked No. 4 in the region, with an exit rate of 24% in the first four months of 2020, outpacing Contra Costa and Sonoma counties — at 22.2 % and 20.9%, respectively. San Francisco tops the list of the most exited counties, at 37.9%

Marin residents also moved at a 5.2% higher rate than they did pre-pandemic, compared to Contra Costa County at 1% and Alameda County at 6%.

The Bay Area had been one of the top four destination regions in the state, attracting new residents between 2016 and just before the pandemic, according to the report, which was released Dec. 15. Tens of thousands of people flocked to the area for high-paying tech jobs despite high housing costs.

Analysts say the report corresponds with a recent trend of population loss. Marin lost 1% of residents in 2020, or 2,614 people, according to the California Department of Finance. The highest losses were in unincorporated areas, at 2.6%, or 1,809 people, and in San Rafael at 0.6%, or 369 residents.

Mike Blakeley, chief executive of the Marin Economic Forum, said the reason for the defections is unclear.

“It’s really hard to know why it occurred,” he said “The flow of people in and out of Marin is really an individual choice.”

Blakeley said relocation might have been prompted by an ability to work remotely or for quality of life and affordability.

Cynthia Murray, chief executive of the North Bay Leadership Council, said the report’s significant finding is in “the steep drop in people choosing to locate to Marin, which exacerbates the residents choosing to move out of Marin.”

Those factors combined may have a significant impact on the availability of Marin’s workforce and economic vitality, she said.

Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, said she thinks the high exit rate seems connected to concerns about affordability and racial disparity.

Marin home values continued to soar, reaching an average of $1.5 million for a single-family home, a 15.8% increase over last year, according to the real estate data firm Zillow. Rental prices rebounded to more than 6% higher than before the pandemic — with the average apartment priced at $2,683, according to real estate data provider CoStar Group.

”My major concern from a fair housing perspective is that the lack of affordable housing means we will continue to become a less diverse county,” Peattie said.

“Particularly given the recent Race Counts Marin report, this is something Marin County should be focusing on,” she said, referring to a study of inequity. “We need to do more to affirmatively further fair housing.”

Steve Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Lab for Continuing Study of the California Economy, said the Bay Area’s cost of living is a key factor.

“We continue to be very expensive,” Levy said. “Except for very high-income people, it’s not surprising that the number of people dropped.”

But Levy thinks the trend could reverse, noting that the Bay Area has had an increase in the number of residences for low- and medium-income people.

Marin cities and towns continue to struggle to meet state mandates to increase housing stock.

“The main factor in both exits and entrances is the high cost of living in Marin, especially due to the high cost of housing,” Murray said. “It has been a growing trend that the pandemic accelerated that those whose work allowed them to work remotely or are able to find other employment have been relocating to areas of higher affordability and lower cost of living.”

“As long as Marin doesn’t build more workforce housing, we can expect growing families to move to where housing meets their financial needs and for outsiders to avoid the inflated housing prices in Marin,” she said.

Bay Area News Group contributed to this report.

Article source: https://www.marinij.com/2022/01/01/marin-ranks-among-top-four-counties-residents-left-in-2021/

The couple, who are Black, got a second opinion last February. This time, they asked a white friend named Jan to sit at the kitchen island and pretend to be the homeowner. They also “whitewashed” their home by hiding art and family photos. That appraiser said their house was worth $1,482,500.

The $487,500 discrepancy between the two 2020 appraisals pushed the couple to file a fair housing lawsuit in federal district court this week against appraiser Janette Miller, her firm Miller and Perotti Real Estate Appraisers Inc., and national appraisal company AMC Links LLC. It’s the latest escalation in a series of similar cases of alleged racial bias in the home appraisal process as California property owners move to reap financial gains from record home prices.

“We did our homework,” Austin told the Reparations Task Force in a panel on the racial wealth gap in October. “We believe the white lady wanted to devalue our property because we are in a Black neighborhood, and the home belonged to a Black family.”

Miller’s firm and AMC Links did not respond to requests for comment.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution have found that owner-occupied homes in majority-Black U.S. neighborhoods are undervalued by an average $48,000 per home, representing some $156 billion in cumulative losses — a dynamic that has prompted calls for policy reform to automate more of the home valuation process and otherwise minimize bias. Some in the appraisal industry, meanwhile, contend that the process is inherently subjective and driven by extreme pressure to increase home values, opening appraisers to unfair personal liability when homeowners disagree with the results.

In the case of Austin and Tate-Austin, the large appraisal discrepancy illustrates how even Bay Area residents able to purchase a home in one of the nation’s most expensive real estate markets can be shut out of some of the massive wealth generated by increasing property values.

The Austin family bought the home in late 2016 for $550,000, according to the lawsuit, and Austin said they spent around $400,000 expanding the footprint, renovating the interior and adding features like an outdoor deck and an in-law unit with bay views. With the higher second appraisal designed to take race out of the equation, the home is now worth nearly triple what they paid five years ago.

“There are definitely things about this complaint that are uniquely strong,” said the couple’s attorney, Julia Howard-Gibbon of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California. “They erased themselves from the home, essentially.”

Though similar cases with extreme differences in appraisal values have also surfaced in Oakland, Stockton and other California cities with large Black populations, the new lawsuit revolves around the North Bay’s unique racial dynamics.

Austin knows firsthand that Marin City, an unincorporated area wedged between affluent Sausalito and Mill Valley, grew out of the pre-World War II migration of tens of thousands of Black workers seeking employment around the Sausalito shipyard. His own grandparents lived and worked there.

Though they saved money to move to other areas of Marin County, Austin said in his October testimony, they were unable to buy property elsewhere because of exclusionary practices like discriminatory bank lending and racial covenants.

The fact that his family encountered what seemed like a new version of the same old problem more than a half-century later, he said at the October meeting, made him feel ill.

“My stomach hurt, my head hurt, just because of what we went through,” Austin said. “I don’t wish that on anybody.”

Attorneys for the couple argue in the new lawsuit that “Marin City has a long history of undervaluation based on stereotypes, redlining, discriminatory appraisal standards, and actual or perceived racial demographics.”

By focusing the first appraisal only on the small number of homes sold in the immediate Marin City area, Howard-Gibbon said the appraiser “built an invisible barrier” around the home by comparing it only to other sale prices in a long-marginalized area — a result she called “recycled discrimination.”

The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial, financial damages and a court order directing the appraisers to take action to ensure the issues in the complaint are not repeated.

Austin said at the October meeting that he is also focused on ongoing issues like recent desegregation orders issued for Marin County schools. He still can’t help but notice that neighbors’ homes on smaller lots have already crept up to values around $1.6 or $1.7 million.

“Yes, I do want to see a change,” Austin said. “I don’t want to see my children have to deal with this.”

A temperature gauge at the Oakland Museum hit 73, surpassing the former record of 71 set in 2014.

To the south of the Bay Area, the Salinas Airport recorded a high of 85, beating the record of 83 set in 1956. 

Dec. 1, 9:30 a.m. The San Francisco Bay Area is expected to see record-breaking temperatures Wednesday afternoon as a ridge of high pressure over the state deflects storm activity to the north, the National Weather Service said. 

“To hear we’re approaching record-high temps in the 70s may be strange as usually we’re talking about record temperatures in the 90s, but it is December 1,” said Gerry Diaz, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Monterey office. “We do expect to approach a few record high temperatures.”

Temperatures have been running up to 10 degrees above normal this week, and they’re expected to peak Wednesday afternoon with widespread 70s in the Bay Area and temperatures in the 80s to the south of the region. 

Oakland hit a high of 73 degrees Tuesday, while Sonoma and Half Moon Bay hit 71 degrees, and San Francisco and San Rafael hit 70, the weather service said. To the south of the Bay Area, Pinnacles National Park was a balmy 84.

Here are forecast highs for the Bay Area on Wednesday:

San Francisco: up to 72 degrees

Oakland: 74 degrees

Santa Rosa: up to 76 degrees

San Jose: up to 77 degrees

To the south of the Bay Area, southern Monterey County and the Santa Lucia Range in Big Sur could see temperatures in the 80s.

“Even this morning on the Big Sur coast, we’ve seen some stations start the day at 76,” Diaz said. “To start the day at 76 that’s a sign we’re going to get into the 80s. If this were a summer setup, we’d very easily be getting into the 90s.”

Diaz explained that with the sun starting to go down at 4:30 p.m., there’s less daylight and solar warming, preventing temperatures from getting too hot. 

“If this high pressure were set up earlier in the season, we’d be talking about much higher temps but because we’re so close to the solstice and days are shorter it’s not as warm as it could be if this occurred earlier in the year,” he said

The high pressure is keeping conditions dry and the Bay Area hasn’t seen significant rain since Nov. 9. There’s a weak signal for rain on Monday, but on Wednesday morning, weather models showed that only the North Bay may get some sprinkles.

“As we look at models it’s trending away from rain in our region,” said, Diaz, adding that there’s a more promising outlook for rain in a week and a half. 

In San Francisco, 64.35% of household income is used toward mortgage payments and property taxes, according to the report. That’s compared to the least affordable city, New York, where 84.03% of income is spent on homeownership. Miami is next at 83.18%, followed by Los Angeles at 81.18% and Newark, N.J., at 80.18%.

Long Beach and Hialeah, in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, were each up one spot this month, ranking as the fifth and sixth least-affordable cities with 65.49% and 64.4% of income spent on homeownership, respectively.

But Shane Lee, a data scientist with RealtyHop, explained that this doesn’t mean San Francisco’s homes are any less expensive — it still has the highest average home price, according to RealtyHop’s data.

“San Francisco was expensive and is still expensive today,” Lee said — but its median income, which RealtyHop pulled from the U.S. census, is higher than the cities that outrank it on the most unaffordable list — though the Bay Area continues to struggle with severe income inequality.

Lee added that the city moved down the list this month because its housing market isn’t growing quite as fast as some other metro areas, which are seeing home prices move up more quickly. Inflation is also worsening the problem, she said.

Overall, she said, housing prices are on the rise, due to an increase in demand and a slowdown in building, especially in metro areas like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Long Beach.

A Chronicle data analysis also found that most neighborhoods in San Francisco have seen sluggish or negative growth in home values over the latter half of the last decade, while the northern and eastern parts of the Bay Area have seen their home values increase faster in the past few years than earlier in the decade.

San Francisco’s rental market has also been slow to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to a Chronicle analysis, though experts say that the rental market has mostly returned to pre-pandemic seasonal behavior, and prices could soon catch up.

Wage growth in many metro areas is also slower than rises in housing prices, Lee said, which also drives homeownership out of reach for many people.

“It’s possible wage growth is not keeping up, so affordability will continue to be a problem,” she said. “Homes are still going to be unaffordable for the foreseeable future.”

It’s not your typical Silicon Valley home. In San Jose, Calif., a property asking $3.68 million sits on roughly 30 acres atop a mountain ridge.

The seller is Charles Armstrong, 41, a product manager at Google. Mr. Armstrong said he bought the empty plot of land, at an elevation of approximately 1,600 feet above sea level, in 2016 for roughly $650,000. He said he spent about five years developing it into a home for his family, installing everything from a septic system to a well to an off-the-grid solar system. He even paved the roads that lead up to the house.

Article source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/outside-san-francisco-a-mountaintop-home-for-sale-11638983126