Housing

Not News: Only 1.1% of Americans Live in Unemployment Rate-Recovering Counties
By Tom Blumer | January 26, 2015 | 6:11 PM EST

This post follows up on Friday morning's entry (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters) showing that "Fewer Than 0.5% of Americans Live in Fully Recovered Counties." This is the kind of news which would be front and center with the nation's establishment press if such a report came out during a Republican or conservative presidential administration. With Team Obama in place, NACo's work has been virtually ignored.

Some commenters at the Friday post raised a potentially valid objection to the criteria used by the National Association of Counties to determine "full recovery." NACo's four bases were returns to pre-recession bests in number of jobs, the unemployment rate, GDP, and home prices. Objectors wanted to completely discount the group's work based on its inclusion of home prices, arguing that pre-bubble home prices were artificially high, and that a failure to return to those levels was not a valid indicator of economic malaise. If all three other metrics were impressive, they would have had a point. But they weren't. This post will look at the unemployment rate metric, because that will be the only one needed to show that they still don't have a point.

Recovery Watch: Homeless Problem in LA Is Growing
By Tom Blumer | January 25, 2015 | 11:55 PM EST

As President Barack Obama and Governor Jerry Brown continue to extol the wonders of the alleged economic recovery of nation and the Golden State, respectively, stories of significant growth in homelessness continue to rain on their parades. The latest example comes on the heels of reports on Seattle's burgeoning problem and the city's apparent willingness to allow officially sanctioned outdoor encampments to serve as a "temporary" (yeah, sure) solution.

In a Saturday item in the Los Angeles Times about the expansion of "homeless camps" outside of what had been known as the LA's "skid row," Times reporter Gale Holland apparently learned not to repeat a revealing disclosure she made in a December Times report covering the situation in San Jose. Her coverage was remarkably vague, failing to provide specifics I believe she could have relayed with little effort, especially given that homelessness and poverty is her assigned beat. Excerpts follow the jump.

As National Press Mostly Snoozes, Add Seattle to the List of Cities Where Homelessness Is Rising
By Tom Blumer | January 22, 2015 | 11:53 PM EST

A week ago, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a Democrat, called homelessness in his city and the rest of King County a "full-blown crisis."

Based on the numbers presented in coverage of the area's situation, we can certainly add the Emerald City to the list of areas where homelessness has been on the rise. Odds are that many readers here didn't know that, because the national press hardly ever pays attention to homelessness when a Democrat occupies the White House. Now imagine the firestorm which would erupt if a Republican or conservative proposed the "solution," however allegedly temporary, Murray is advancing (bolds are mine):

Vox.com Bumbles on Homelessness and Mental Illness
By Tim Graham | January 18, 2015 | 7:11 AM EST

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal picked on the liberal "explainer" site Vox.com on Friday under the headline "Two Voxen In One!" In a story on "11 myths about homelessness," German Lopez seemed very contradictory. There was "Myth #4: Homelessness is typically related to mental illness."

Lopez then immediately allowed that "Serious mental illnesses are more prevalent among the homeless."

Not Reported: The South Is Carrying the Nation's Homebuilding Industry
By Tom Blumer | November 19, 2014 | 11:52 PM EST

Today at the Assocated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Martin Crustsinger covered the Census Bureau's report on new home construction in the usual way. Regardless of whether a given month shows improving or declining data, the wire service's overall message is almost invariably, "Things are really getting better. No, really."

The sentence promoting that point of view in Crutsinger's report came from one of the AP's go-to analysts:

PBS Promotes Obama's Claim Country Has Improved ‘By Every Economic Measure’; Lou Dobbs Proves Otherwise
By Curtis Houck | October 2, 2014 | 10:43 PM EDT

Following President Obama’s speech on the economy on Thursday, the PBS NewsHour offered a 48-second news brief on the subject, in which co-anchor Gwen Ifill offered no opposing viewpoint to the President’s claim in his speech that “by every measure, the country is better off than when he took office.”

The show then played a soundbite of the President, in which he lamented that “millions of Americans don't yet feel enough of the benefits of a growing economy where it matters most, and that’s in their own lives and these truths aren't incompatible. Our broader economy, in the aggregate, has come a long way, but the gains of recovery are not yet broadly shared.”

AP Tries to Make Horrid Homebuilding Numbers Palatable
By Tom Blumer | September 18, 2014 | 5:33 PM EDT

The Census Bureau reported earlier today that seasonally adjusted housing starts and homebuilding permits fell by 14.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, in August. The detail wasn't any better, as the two categories within each statistic — single-family and multiple-dwelling homes — also fell.

You can tell that the news wasn't seen as good at the Associated Press, because Josh Boak's related dispatch had already fallen to number nine in the list of the wire service's top ten business stories by 3:30 p.m. The headline and content at Boak's report tried to convince readers that apartment-building volatility was almost entirely to blame, and that things are all right in single-family homebuilding. As will be seen, nothing could be further from the truth.

Fantasy at AP: Housing Has Had a 'Steady Rebound' Since the Recession Ended
By Tom Blumer | August 26, 2014 | 9:20 AM EDT

Someone must have slipped the wrong data to the Associated Press's Josh Boak yesterday before he composed his dispatch on the Census Bureau's latest report on new home sales.

Boak got the current month's news right, though likely by accident (like almost everyone else in the business press, he relies on seasonally adjusted figures, and rarely goes to the unadjusted data), telling readers that "Fewer Americans bought new homes in July, evidence that the housing sector is struggling to gain traction more than five years into the economic recovery." That's fine, but his characterization of the longer-term history of home sales was woefully incorrect:

ABC, NBC Ignore Grim Housing Report; Focus Instead on Selfie with Queen, 50 Shades of Grey Trailer
By Curtis Houck | July 24, 2014 | 10:40 PM EDT

Both ABC World News with Diane Sawyer and NBC Nightly News failed to mention a new, troubling report from the Census Bureau on Thursday night that sales of new homes decreased by 8.1% in June and that May’s originally reported double-digit increase was revised lower, from almost 19% to only 8%. 

The CBS Evening News did cover this story, but it only was in the form of a 12-second news brief from anchor Scott Pelley. Pelley grimly reported that: “Today's report on the housing market is raising concerns about the economic recovery. Sales of new homes dropped sharply last month, more than 8%, and that's the largest decline in nearly a year.” [MP3 audio here; Video below]

AP Quickly Buries Bad Housing News, While Reporter Crutsinger Blames It All on 'the South'
By Tom Blumer | July 17, 2014 | 11:59 PM EDT

Late this afternoon, I went to the Top Business Headlines page at the Associated Press's national web site to get today's new home construction news. Because the AP didn't have a story there (saved here for future reference), I knew it had to be bad, especially because to ignore it, the wire service made room in its Top 10 stories for an item on Toyota experimenting with fuel cells and aircraft orders at an air show in England.

The Census Bureau reported that seasonally adjusted housing starts fell by 9.3 percent in June after declining 7.3 percent in May. Seasonally adjusted applications for new building permits declined by 4.2 percent after a 5.1 percent revised May drop. Reporter Martin Crutsinger, doing his utmost to earn the "Worst Economics Writer" tag the National Review's Kevin Williamson conferred on him last year, blamed the weather, blamed "the South" without telling readers how the Census Bureau defines it, and ignored how, even after a very bad month, that region is still outperforming other regions in new homebuilding. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Time Warp: Bloomberg Touts UN Report Calling for U.S. Emission Cuts to 1901 Levels
By Julia A. Seymour | July 9, 2014 | 7:17 PM EDT

Bloomberg’s Eric Roston attempted to keep a straight face while promoting a draft report for the United Nations. It said U.S. emissions would need to be “cut to one-tenth of current levels, per person, in less than 40 years.” Short of societal regression, it is unclear how that could be done.

“It’s perilous to say these things in the U.S., where a mere description of the scale of the climate challenge too often invites ridicule and dismissiveness. Americans are each responsible for about 18 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Taking that down 90 percent would mean a drop in emissions to what they were in about 1901 or 1902. Cue ridicule and dismissiveness,” Roston wrote.

AP and Delusional Bloomberg Completely Disagree in Covering Today's Homebuilding Declines
By Tom Blumer | June 17, 2014 | 10:48 PM EDT

There must have been a double delivery of Obama administration koolaid over at Bloomberg News this morning.

The business wire service, which ordinarily is slightly less imbalanced in its business and economics reporting than the Associated Press, somehow interpreted a 6.5 percent seasonally adjusted decline in housing starts during May and a nearly identical percentage drop in building permits — with both figures lower than May 2013 — as evidence that "the homebuilding industry stabilized after a first-quarter swoon." That's ridiculous. The first quarter was supposedly as bad as it was because of bad winter weather; so there should have been an overcompensating bounceback. It hasn't happened. Meanwhile, that second Bloomberg koolaid delivery must have been the one meant for AP, whose Josh Boak turned in a report noteworthy for its unusual sobriety (bolds are mine throughout this post):