[livinincali]

[quote=bearishgurl]
I disagree, Livinincali. My neighborhood is over 65 years old and thus, we were “here first.” as were the rest of our “brethren” neighborhoods. Existing unburied overhead lines or no, it is what it is and we are frequently/likely “coastal” in location. We should not have to subsidize the Lizardland inhabitant hshld (more often with A/C as well as backyard pool). IT’S NOT OUR PROBLEM that other ratepayers chose to live in lizardland. Many of us ALREADY PAID OUR DUES IN THIS LIFE and wish to retire with utility bills reflective of OUR OWN USE USAGE ONLY, NOT that of subsidizing a family of five who can’t manage to turn off their lights or TV’s they aren’t using.

In other words, the “infrastructure” was always there for ME. Why should I pay for it over again when my infrastructure was paid off in 1962?? What about YOU? Your choices are YOUR problem …. not mine.

IT’S NOT MY PROBLEM, NOR SHOULD IT BE!![/quote]

So you mean when Chula Vista blew up the 1950’s era fuel oil power plant a couple years ago you shouldn’t have to pay for the replacement power plant to provide you power (you paid for that plant but now it’s gone and has to be replaced because it doesn’t last forever). Maybe you should get no power since you aren’t contributing to the new power plants that need to be built to replace the old power plants that were inefficient and at the end of life. How do they replace the power generated by San Onofre which was a lower cost nuclear power plant?. With more expansive Solar farms and other renewables but you shouldn’t have to pay for that either. LOL.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/03/local/la-me-0203-power-plant-20130203

[livinincali]

[quote=bearishgurl]
Yeah, I got that e-mail as well. Since my last kid left a year ago, I’ve always been in Tier 1 and my bills have been only $33 to $66 mo for a 4/2/2 SFR. I’m going to get slammed by next spring when there are only two tiers.

So much for being an energy conservationist. I feel the two-tiered system will be very unfair to single-person households with no A/C or pool. We will undoubtedly end up subsidizing energy-hog households and they shouldn’t be my problem …. at all.[/quote]

Actually bigger users have been subsidizing your lower cost for a long time. A lot of energy cost is sunk costs like the infrastructure to deliver it and produce it. The fuel itself is relatively cheap all things considered. Solar with net metering has the same advantage where they win while they’re neighbors pick up the tab. Granted I don’t use a lot of power so I’ll get hit too but I’m not surprised by the change.

[livinincali]

[quote=all]Flu, common core requirements make more sense as you move to slightly more complex material.

Sixth grade handbook has a problem similar to this

Person A is asked to find the least common multiple for the following pairs: (17, 41), (31, 11), (29, 37). Person A concludes that LCM(a1, a2) can be calculated as a1 x a2, for a1, a2 > 0.
Person B is given the following pairs: (8, 32), (12, 36), (9, 45). Person B concludes LCM(a1, a2) = MAX(a1, a2).
Person C is given (14, 18), (42, 10), (22, 4) and person C comes up with LCM(a1, a2) = a1 x a2 / 2.

Are A, B, or C conclusions accurate? If not, what additional requirement(s) must a1 and a2 meet to make each formula accurate?

I thought it was good problem and it is very different from what no child left behind requirements were.[/quote]

I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of a question where the correct response ends up being a simple yes. I’d be more of a fan if the test question asked the taker to figure out an algorithm to get the LCM for the following pairs.

[livinincali]

[quote=CA renter]
Agree that we should pay math and science teachers more if we’re not getting them in sufficient quantity and quality with the current pay structure.

And since some teachers can earn more for being bilingual or for having certain certifications, I think one could easily make the argument that math and science teachers could be paid more.[/quote]

Teaching is the one of the few decent paying job centers for liberal arts majors. Really want to displace some of those opportunities for History and English majors with Math and Engineering majors.

The fundamental problem with public education is it socialistic approach to everything. Teacher compensation is based on time served because any other performance based approach would be unfair for some reason or another. Students can’t be failed and held back and they also can’t advance and perform at a higher level because that too would be unfair. Every decision made is based on some sort of perceived fairness so when that is your guiding principle you underachieve in everything.

Teaching the way you teach math probably isn’t going to solve the problem that you continually allow kids to underachieve and fail math without any consequences. All in the name of not hurting anybody’s feelings. Until being able to do math and solve problems is more important than feelings the problems will remain.

[livinincali]

[quote=poorgradstudent]
Mostly I’m just worried that as more and more millenials cut the cord for cable TV and only use cable internet, the cable companies will try to make up their revenue by raising rates. I don’t like being in a position where one company can more or less change me whatever they want because I “need” their service and there’s no other decent option.[/quote]

It’s not only the lost revenue it’s the increased cost of having infrastructure that handle that bandwidth load. The internet providers can only advertise these high speeds and unlimited usage because only a few people at a time use that speed and require that amount of usage. If a material percentage of people all tried to use that bandwidth at the same time the backend infrastructure wouldn’t be able to handle it.

With net neutrality my guess is that we are going to end up with metered connections. I.e. you might get some base usage for some relatively modest fee but if you’re going to be streaming a bunch of 4K content you’re going to be paying at least a couple hundred dollars per month.

Bottom line cord cutters that think they are getting a great deal for $10 netflix plus $50 internet are not going to be liking things as much in the future.

[livinincali]

[quote=njtosd][quote=moneymaker]It seems to me there are 2 options for the government for stimulus, lower rates or create jobs. Ok already tried to lower rates, now can’t go any lower. So time to create jobs soon, 2 ways to do that also. Hire more government workers/create infrastructure jobs or the Trump strategy (deport the illegals).[/quote]

I don’t necessarily agree either of your points but you have, at least, left out one other option. The government should institute reforms to issue patents more quickly. This piece is about 5 years old but is still relevant. In short, stop siphoning money from the US Patent Office and issue patents faster. Each newly issued patent creates *on average* 3-10 new jobs.

Unfortunately the authors of the actual study say the 3-10 jobs per patent is bullshit.

http://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/08/guest-post-what-we-said-and-didnt-say-in-the-berkeley-patent-study.html

[quote]
Our results solely concern U.S. startups. The vast majority of patents are filed and owned by established companies. More than half of all patents are awarded to foreign companies. Because U.S. startups use and are affected by the patent system in ways quite different from established and foreign entities, it is impossible solely from our data to draw conclusions about the general role of patents on innovation or jobs.
Even limiting the issue of jobs to those of U.S. startups, there is no principled way to determine from our data whether or not additional patents lead to additional jobs, much less the number of jobs created by each patent. Granted, we reported the average number of employees, including the percentage of engineers, at our respondent companies. But to reason that these positions were the direct result of the respondents’ patent portfolios would be to ignore a host of other potential factors (e.g., first-mover advantage, other IP protection, management team quality, etc.) leading to those jobs. And there is no sound way using our data to remove these other potential effects so as to calculate the impact of patents on jobs.
[/quote]

[livinincali]

[quote=no_such_reality]
The rental market for 3 bedrooms or more is pretty lean. Selling those properties that have low tax rates will disporptionately hit the higher bedroom count of the rental market.. Essentially, you will see slightly less competition for significantly less properties in that property space.

Where today you may essentially have 11 people vying for 10 SFR rentals, after stripping the tax basis, I suspect you will end up with 9/10 vying for 6 or 7 available SFR properties. More competition on those properties will put upward pressure on rents there. While eventually the number of renter at a given property type balances back out, you have more people substituting a lower end good for a higher end good because the higher end unit isn’t available. That in turn actually pulls those rents up on the better quality lower end units which in turn pushes more up.
[/quote]

I’m not sure why you think there would be such an impact on supply of rentals. Ask yourself what is the alternative? If you have a house the only way for it to be removed for the rental supply is for it to be sold to an owner user (could be a new household/former renter/or move up buyer). It’s not like you are going to leave it empty or tear it down.

Vacancy is what kills the mom and pop landlord in the SFH space. Big apartment complexes just look at vacancy as a cost of doing business and even they make adjustments based on the vacancy rate. If you try to adjust the rent up $50-100 because of increased expense but it ends up sitting vacant a month or two because of that it can take years to recover that lost revenue. So most single family home landlords will take whatever they can get in order to get that revenue flowing in again.

[livinincali]

[quote=FlyerInHi]
They, meaning governments, should develop policies to put that money to productive uses. But it’s not like “they” are all in agreement and all act in unison.

So what are central bankers to do? They can only act within their domain.

CAr, the “they” that you refer to requires coordination between monetary and fiscal policy. Not possible because of politics and ideology. It also requires a new world order.[/quote]

They, meaning the central bank, should do nothing for exactly the reason you state above. Since, they can’t control where the money goes, they should let the bad debt liquidate. They can lower the interest rates but they can’t make people borrow it for productive uses. As the rate of interest approaches 0 there’s an increased incentive to speculate rather than invest. If you have to borrow at 10% you aren’t going to be using the money to buy back stock, but you will borrow if you actually have a smart productive idea.

Granted there’s a ton of people via various retirement accounts that really really need asset prices to remain inflated.

[livinincali]

[quote=spdrun]Good, about time the world (starting with CA) was weaned off oil use for energy.

Nuclear/hydro/renewable FTW.[/quote]

Yeah except that it’s rather hard to substitute the energy density of a gallon of gas for transportation purposes. It’s almost impossible that you’d ever be able to design an airplane that can run on electric via battery storage. I suppose with a large enough investment you could change your infrastructure around to do long ground transportation without petroleum but it’s not necessarily going to be more efficient or convenient.

[livinincali]

I think there’s a couple points here to consider.

Tax policy in CA certainly encourages inherited properties to be kept within the family either via heirs moving into the property or as a rental.

I’m not entirely convinced that in 10 to 20 years that we could see significant owner user communities turn into mostly renter communities for a couple of reasons.

1) I just don’t think the market for dated 3/2 smaller properties at @ $2500+/mo is really that deep.
2) I think some significantly portion of properties will get the equity striped out via reverse mortgage or some other means.
3) I think this next generation that inherits these properties may want the instant gratification of selling rather than land-lording even though it might be in their long term interest to do so.

The last point is that there is a significant number of likely dated properties that could potentially hit the market over the next 10-20 years. Might be a flippers dream come true or it might just mean appreciation going forward in housing is much more limited than people are currently considering.

[livinincali]

[quote=CA renter]
Stuff like this…how interconnected is it? A short-term blip, or is this a sign that things are about to get really interesting?
[/quote]

Subprime was contained right. Biggest lesson I learn from the housing bubble is that there’ no such thing as decoupling. Not sure when it’s going to matter (well maybe today?), but it’s going to matter at some point.

[livinincali]

I have the assessment data available to me. I ran zip 92117 (Clairemont) for all properties less than 5,000 sqft (there’s no real good way to separate residential from commercial except picking a size)

Here’s the numbers
AverageAssessment = 233038
NumberLessThan100K = 4224
NumberGreaterThan100KLessThan200K = 3175
NumberGreaterThan200KLessThan300K = 3596
NumberGreaterThan300KLessThan400K = 2871
NumberGreaterThan400K = 2178
TotalParcels = 15983

I do think bg probably has a point. Just about half of clairemont’s properties are assessed at less than 200K. The average selling price price for a home in 92117 right now is 500K+ from what I can tell.

Seems like that’s true even for newer high end areas. This is 92130 (Carmel Valley).

AverageAssessment = 598220
NumberLessThan250K = 1741
NumberGreaterThan250KLessThan500K = 5038
NumberGreaterThan500KLessThan1M = 7076
NumberGreaterThan1M = 1611
TotalParcels = 15431

[livinincali]

[quote=skerzz]I’m hoping for 5%+ annual rent increases for the foreseeable future! I’d love to be in a position to use the cash flow from my SFR rental to cover 100% of my primary residence carrying costs so I can have no net housing costs (mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.). It’s going to take approximately 15 years of 5% annual rent increases to make that happen, so perhaps I’ll need to look at getting into another rental property to speed this up. Anyone have statistics on the annual rents for SFR properties in SD county over the past 20+ years? I’m thinking 5% is much too aggressive for modeling purposes and 2-3% might be more reasonable.[/quote]

In 2000 average asking rent in San Diego city was about $900/mo. Now it’s almost $1600/mo. In 2010 it was about $1250/mo. So it’s really gone up quite a bit in the last 5 years. From 2000 to 2010 you had about 3% annual increases. From 2000 to 2014 you had close to 4% annual increases.

For rents over the long term you aren’t going to get much more than nominal wage inflation. I suppose if you get big minimum wage increase and it successfully rises all boats instead of having negative unintended consequences then maybe you could expect 5% for awhile.

[livinincali]

[quote=urbanrealtor]
Low payment and low cash down mean purchase can be almost as cheap as current rent prices.
Also, and I think more importantly, it explains that current prices are back-stopped to a certain extent.

If prices in condos drop even 10% they become cheaper than renting.

Barring a broad rent fade (and we are not currently at risk of a deflationary rent spiral) those currently high prices are effectively fixed.

There are some nuances and changes but that is the short version.[/quote]

Well as long as mortgage rates stay constant. The monthly payment for 200K at 4.0% is less than the monthly payment for 180K at 5.0%. Granted it’s close and once you factor in the additional property tax it’s probably a wash. The point is that the market is really being backstopped by the low interest rates. Interest rates may remain low for awhile so maybe’s there’s nothing to worry about but 5’s or 6’s on mortgage rates would have a huge negative impact on housing prices.

[livinincali]

This funniest thing in the article is the housing authority’s rational for allowing this to continue.

[quote]
But the 15 authorities investigators looked at told them they had no plans to evict these families, because if they did, poverty would continue to be concentrated in government-subsidized housing. The goal, they said, was to create diverse, mixed-income communities and allow tenants who are making good money to serve as role models for others.
[/quote]

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