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Seattle $15/Hour Minimum Wage Being Pushed

“Washington already has the nation’s highest state minimum wage at $9.19 an hour. Now, there’s a push in Seattle, at least, to make it $15. That would mean fast food workers, retail clerks, baristas and other minimum wage workers would get what protesters demanded when they shut down a handful of city restaurants in May and others called for when they demonstrated nationwide in July. So far, the City Council and mayoral candidates have said they would consider it in the famously liberal city. One said, however, that it may not be soon.” Continue reading →

Feds seized $2.9M in Bitcoin funds from Mt. Gox, court docs show

“The federal government sent a strong signal to Bitcoin traders earlier this year when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seized an account belonging to Mt. Gox, the most popular exchange for people to buy and sell the crypto-currency. It was unclear at the time just how much currency the government confiscated. But a new filing in Baltimore federal court shows the feds seized $2,915,507.40 held in an account controlled by Dwolla, a third-party payment platform similar to PayPal. The funds belonged to Mutum Sigillum LLC, a U.S. subsidiary of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox. It’s unclear what will become of the funds.” Continue reading →

What The 25% Collapse In Homebuilder Stock Prices Tells Us

“The most important factor that sets the fate of the homebuilder stocks is the housing market. If the housing market has growth potential ahead, then you can bet on homebuilder stocks to provide a stunning performance to the upside. If it’s the opposite scenario, with the housing market looking shaky, then homebuilder stocks usually tank. In other words, homebuilder stocks are very fickle, but they are also a great indicator of future activity in the housing market. Since mid-May, the Dow Jones Home Construction Index has plummeted roughly 25%, and it’s in negative territory year-to-date.” Continue reading →

In homebuying, cash is king again

“If you’re looking to buy a home right now, you’d better find some cash and you’d better find it fast. Right now homebuyers across the country, already in frenzied bidding wars for homes, are increasingly losing out to the almighty all-cash buyer. These folks are mostly investors — but not just the monolithic, institutional investment investors that have been snapping up distressed properties and foreclosures over the past few years. There are also a slew of well-heeled individuals with extra cash to invest, and they believe the real estate market is the place to put it. In fact, many of the buyers paying cash don’t plan to actually keep all that cash in the house.” Continue reading →

List of top places with bargain homes; don’t look for California cities

“Looking for a cheap fixer-upper? You might check the list of the 15 best cities for do-it-yourself housing bargains, published this week by RealtyTrac, the Irvine-based real estate data firm. Shocker: No California cities made the list. The five best cities to find a bargain home are in the Rust Belt: Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and Cincinnati. The rankings come from the number of bank-owned homes that were built before 1960 and are valued under $100,000. There are 3,773 such homes in Detroit, which is more than double Chicago’s inventory, which is ranked just below the Michigan city.” Continue reading →

NYC goes Tokyo: Micro apartments proposed as solution to overcrowding

“Tiny — and affordable — modular living spaces could soon become the latest real estate craze in the highly crowded city of New York. Fifty-five micro apartments are being constructed in Manhattan to test whether New Yorkers are willing to follow the example of Tokyo and Mumbai. According to Bloomberg News, micro apartments at the new ‘My Micro NY’ building will be only 250 to 370 square feet. Rents will range from $939 to $1,873. Currently, the average monthly rent for a studio is more than $2,000.” Continue reading →

Artist Gregory Kloehn turns $1,000 dumpster into tiny home

“There’s nothing trashy about Gregory Kloehn’s Brooklyn pied-a-terre: a live-in dumpster that sleeps two with ease, hosts impromptu barbecue parties and sports its own sundeck. In a nation where the average home is 2,600 square feet (241 square meters), tiny houses are fetching more attention, not least from aging baby boomers looking to downsize in their retirement years. ‘There are more builders. There are more people seeking to live in tiny houses,’ Mitchell told AFP by telephone. There would be even more tiny homes, he said, if if local zoning regulations and housing codes were not so restrictive.” Continue reading →

The New Deal Origins of Fannie Mae and the Government-Housing Complex

“Fannie Mae is a classic crony capitalist progeny of the New Deal that began life in 1938, quite innocently, as still another ad hoc New Deal program to boost the depression-weakened housing market. It grew into something quite different: a monster that deeply deformed and corrupted the nation’s entire financial system seventy years later. The policy aim of Fannie Mae was ‘forcing water to flow uphill’ in the residential mortgage market so that low-rate thirty-year home mortgages became available to wage-earning households of modest means. Such mortgages did not then exist for a good reason: they were not economic.” Continue reading →