Images from the Homage to the Square series by Joseph Albers when he was chair of architecture and design at Yale University in the 1950s. These are on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
La Gerbe /
"La Gerbe" is a ceramic created in fifteen sections by Henri Matisse in 1953, and originally placed on a patio wall at the A. Quincy Jones-designed Brody residence in Los Angeles and now graces the Ahmanson Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Income levels of those who move into and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area /
In a post at BUILDZOOM, Issi Romen offers perspective on the high cost of housing that deters potential newcomers from moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, especially if they have modest financial prospects once there. It also prompts current residents to leave to seek more affordable housing in other regions. The income level of departing residents is on the increase.
Urban light /
In the foreground is “Urban Light”, a large-scale assemblage sculpture by Chris Burden located at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 2008 installation consists of 202 restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. In the background is 5900 Wilshire, a 132-metre, 32-story skyscraper completed in 1971.
How will the Tax Cut and Jobs Act affect real estate investment and development? /
Now that the “Tax Cut and Jobs Act” (TCJA) is the law of the land in the USA, we begin the challenge of figuring out how it will affect real estate investment and development. Key changes in the tax code affecting real estate, include:
- more favorable treatment of pass through income benefitting income property owners
- shrinking income tax deductions for mortgage interest rates, which will increase the cost of home ownership for some tax payers
- reduction in the deductibility of state and local taxes, which will affect the cost of owning higher value homes
- a doubling of the standard deduction, which will reduce the number of tax payers whose cost of homeownership would be reduced via the remaining mortgage interest and state and local tax deductions
- a reduction in the tax loss benefits of Low Income Housing Tax Credit investments due to the reduction in the corporate tax rate, which could decrease capital available for affordable housing development.
Since the TCJA reduces tax incentives for consumption of ownership housing, it could reduce demand for such housing And if the TCJA leads to higher interest rates due to a substantial increase in the federal budget deficit as forecast by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center ($1.23 trillion by 2027), it could further increase the cost of homeownership and reduce purchases of ownership housing.
Gregg Logan of the real estate advisory firm of RCLCO notes that deficit growth may result in cuts to the federal budget, particularly to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. This could influence the depth of demand for independent living, assisted living, and active adult retirement real estate, because reductions in these programs would affect the disposable income of most older Americans.
A longer-term question is what, if any, effect the TCJA will have on the form of metropolitan regions in the United States. It reduces tax incentives for consumption of ownership housing, most of which is located in the lower density sprawling suburbs of the metropolitan regions of the USA. But it is unclear as to whether the reductions in home ownership contained in the TCJA will be sufficient to offset other factors, such as school quality, that have attracted families with children to lower density suburbs for more than seven decades.
The Tax Foundation has provided a summary of the TCJA and estimated its impact on the economy. See their report entitled “Preliminary Details and Analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”
Positive train control not the most important rail safety improvement /
The deadly passenger rail crash in Washington State on December 18, 2017, appears to have been the result of excessive speed. This raises questions as to why positive train control that would have automatically slowed or stopped the train was not put in place along the recently upgraded rail line where the crash occurred. But, in a posting at newgeography.com on December 22, 2017, Randal O'Toole points out that safety improvements other than positive train control would actually have a greater effect on reducing injuries and deaths resulting from railway crashes. He notes that, " . . . Around 800 people die in railroad accidents a year. PTC would prevent only about 1 percent of these fatalities; far more would be saved by spending the same amount of money on better grade crossings and fencing of rail rights of way."
Growth in spending at the City of Seattle /
On December 21, 2017, the Seattle Times published an article by Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Beekman reporting on the surge in spending by the City of Seattle from 2007 through 2017. Key takeaways are:
- Excluding operations that have revenues that cover their own costs, expenses are increasing faster than revenues.
- The City added 850 full-time employees since 2012, a 12.8% increase during a time when the population increased by 11%.
- Spending increases at the City of Seattle significantly outpaced those at the other two larger municipalities in the region--nearby City of Bellevue and the City of Tacoma to the south.
- John Wilson, the Assessor for King County (in which Seattle is located) warns that the extent to which the City of Seattle has been raising taxes is not sustainable.
The University of Washington in 2017 /
It was a good year for the University of Washington in 2017, as reflected in this video.
An early assessment of dockless bike rentals in Seattle /
Here is an early assessment of dockless bike rental programs in Seattle by Josh Cohen at Next City. Key takeaways are:
- After six months of operation, three rental companies provided about 347 thousand rides that travel a million miles. This compares to the docked system that City shut down in January 2017, that had provided 278 thousand rides in two and a half years.
- About 80% of the rides were in non-peak travel hours, suggesting that they were mostly recreational.
- The biggest problem is parked bikes that block sidewalks, wheel chair curb ramps and transit access. As a way of addressing inappropriately parked bikes, the Seattle Department of Transportation is considering creating bike parking "corrals" in busier locations.
LimeBike in Seattle (Photo by Joe Mabel)
Malheur occupation reflected an alternative view of government land management /
Ryan Bundy, the key defendant in a trial underway in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, NV, offers a uniques perspective on governmental land management in the United States. This perspective is highlighted in an article by Tay Wiles posted on the High Country News website on November 20, 2017.
Mr. Bundy has been a thorn in the side of U.S. Government land managers for at least two decades. He takes the view that grazing on public lands is a right rather than a privilege. Mr. Bundy bases this argument on the fact that for decades ranchers have used permits as capital or collateral for loans and improving the value of real estate. In his view, that makes them similar to personal property, akin to rights, rather than a mere license that can be revoked.
In his article, Tay Wiles points out, that mainstream scholars dispute Bundy’s, interpretation of how federal law treats grazing rights." Wiles cites comments from Matthew Pearce, a University of Oklahoma lecture who specializes in natural resource history in the American West and Joseph E. Taylor, a history professor at Simon Fraser University. According to Professor Taylor, U.S. law and Congressional hearings are clear and consistent on the point that the grazing leases convey privileges that the government could revoke.
No doubt, this perspective that a grazing lease offers an irrevocable right was on the mind of Ryan Bundy when he played a key role in mobilizing the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January and February 2016. Mr. Bundy and the other occupiers sought an opportunity to advance their view that the United State Forest Service, Bureau of Land Managment and other agencies are required to turn over the public land they manage to the individual states. Links to articles about that occupation are available here.
Another Malheur occupier goes to prison /
A second participant in the early 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Reserve in central Oregon received a prison sentence on Tuesday, November 21, 2017, from U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown. Darryl Thorn will spend a year and a half in federal prison followed by three years supervised release. For more on this see this article by Conrad Wilson posted at the website of Seattle-based KUOW. Mr. Thorn is the second preserve occupier to be sentenced to prison within a week. On November 16, 2017, Judge Brown sentenced Duane Ehmer to a year and a day in prison as noted in this post. The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Preserve began on January 2, 2016, and ended on Day 41--February 11, 2016. A library of articles about that occupation may be found here.
Malheur occupier receives a prison sentence /
The wheels of justice turn slowly following the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Preserve in January and February 2016. It took 21 months for Duane Ehmer to be convicted and finally sentenced to a year and a day in prison as reported by Conrad Wilson of Oregon Public Broadcasting in this posting on November 16, 2017.
Background on "disability" in the USA /
Per a series of articles in the Washington Post, the number of working-age adults receiving disability in the USA climbed from 7.7 million to 13 million between 1996 and 2015. The federal government this year will spend an estimated $192 billion on disability payments, more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies and unemployment assistance. The rise in disability has emerged as yet another indicator of a widening political, cultural and economic chasm between urban and rural America.
The first article in this series was published on March 30, 2017, and the latest was published on October 7, 2017. They offer insight on the human side of this story that goes beyond dry statistics. Here are links to the articles:
2017-03-30 Disabled or just desperate: Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up (WAPO)
Decline in transit ridership in the USA /
The Antiplanner highlights a dramatic decline in transit ridership
Will Boyle Heights be ruined by one coffee shop? /
Interesting gentrification debate in L.A.'s Boyle Heights neighborhood as reported in the Los Angeles Times.
" . . . But the activists who have fought against gentrification have so far failed to rally a large number of residents to their cause.
Some longtime residents like the rising property values and increased retail choices. Others are concerned about people being pushed out of the neighborhood. They also struggle to connect the dots, like the activists, between widespread gentrification and a cafe or art galleries in an isolated part of Boyle Heights."
Neighborhood preservation in New York City /
On this day (June 23) in 1973, I went to work for the City of New York in what was then called the Housing and Development Administration (HDA) and is now the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Shortly after joining the city staff as a "quantitative analyst", I was assigned to the Neighborhood Preservation Program (NPP) that the Mayor (John Lindsay) created by executive order[1]
These were the days of massive housing abandonment in areas such as the South Bronx and East New York. The NPP was designed to try to prevent abandonment to spreading to nearby neighborhoods that had a solid stock of one to three-family ownership housing mixed in with multi-family structures experiencing disinvestment and deterioration. In a 1974 Fordham Urban Law Journal article [2], Philip Weitzman described the program, " . . . as the first truly comprehensive effort in the nation aimed at preserving sound urban neighborhoods."
[1] NEW YORK, N.Y., ExEc. ORDER No. 80 (May 23, 1973), in 101 The City Record 2066 (1973)
[2] Weitzman, P. (1974). Neighborhood Preservation in New York City. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 3(3)
LinkedIn data tells a lot about the draw of metropolitan regions in the USA /
Global warming if no action is taken /
An article in the on-line edition of the California Section the New York Times on June 22, 2017, by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich contained dynamic map of how 95-degree (Fahrenheit) days would increase world-wide If there is no action to reduce global warming, and emissions continue to rise at the same pace they did in the first decade of the 21st century.
The mapping is based on an analysis from the Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration of climate scientists, economists, data engineers, researchers, analysts, and students from the University of California at Berkeley, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), Rhodium Group and Rutgers University.
Health care questions /
In response to a New York Times op-ed on health care by Christy Ford Chaplin posted on June 19, 2017, in the New York Times (https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/health-insurance-american-medical-association.html), an anesthesiologist posted a helpful comment on the facts that are needed and questions that should be asked to address healcare in the USA.
Wesley Clark - Brooklyn, NY
Although the article's highlighting of the AMA's destructive role in all of this is welcome, the article itself does absolutely nothing to prove that prepaid physician groups are the way forward. It identifies a real problem, but in response to it says, essentially, "Hmm - well, I don't know - maybe we should try this - ?"
We need a clearer answer, and we should start with a few facts and questions: 1) Other countries do it much better and for less money - what are they doing differently? 2) Upper-management salaries in medicine have ballooned to obscene levels lately - why are we paying them so much money? 3) Doctors make much more in the US than in many other countries - is there any reason for this? 4) Drugs cost much more here than in other countries - why should we put up with this? 5) American medical students overwhelmingly choose lucrative specialties as opposed to primary care - should we regulate this? 6) There seems to be a generalized, clunky inefficiency in American medicine (recent ER waits for non-life-threatening conditions: New York - 5 hours; Austria - 0 minutes) - what is going on here?
By the way - the AMA and other physician organizations are still at it. In my specialty (anesthesia), I regularly receive messages from my professional group asking me to lobby against allowing nurses to do various tasks that they are perfectly well qualified for. Doctors are no less self-dealing than anyone else. They must not be allowed to regulate themselves.
Climate change in Antarctica /
Antarctica Is melting http://on.natgeo.com/2rfVUq3 via @NatGeo
