A bizarre hunt for a movie superstar, a continued sense of builder optimism and a legendary crooner’s love letter to a once-great city. Looking into the wild and wooly world of real estate, here are our Hits and Misses for this week.
Miss: Preying on Tom Cruise. One of the most deranged stories to be published online this week – and, for that matter, this year – belonged to Caity Weaver, whose New York Times Magazine piece “My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise” detailed the extreme lengths that the writer went to determine where filmdom’s “Top Gun” lives – even going so far as to scour the English countryside based on a vague tip that Cruise hangs his hat in rural Britain. Weaver claimed she was trying to “reintegrate him into our shared reality” by finding him in order to conduct an in-depth interview, yet she lamented that Cruise’s very private life is “perhaps rooted in avoidance of a press corps that asks questions he doesn’t want to answer.” Well, if I had some pushy character like Weaver crossing continents in order to invade my privacy, I’d also keep the media as far away from me as possible.
Hit: Legislators Who Share a Housing Experience. At the other end of the media spectrum, the New York Times also had the most intriguing news article this week with “Who Will Stand Up for Renters? Their Elected Representatives, Who Also Rent.” This article profiled five members of the California who created a caucus that represents their status as rental housing tenants. According to the Times’ coverage, 17 million households in California – slightly less than half of the state’s population – live in rental housing. Whether or not these legislators can enact positive results for California’s renters remains to be seen, but it is interesting to have elected officials who understand their constituents’ unique housing needs.
Hit: Happy Builders. Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes during July posted a one-point uptick to 56 this week in the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. This marked the seventh consecutive month of rising confidence among builders and the highest level of HMI confidence since June 2022. The drought of available existing homes has created a sharp demand for new home construction. According to NAHB Chairman Alicia Huey, a custom home builder and developer from Birmingham, Alabama, “The lack of resale inventory means prospective home buyers who have not been priced out of the market continue to seek out new construction in greater numbers.”
Miss: How Not to Fill Empty Office Properties. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has a solution for the glut of empty offices in her city: turn them into classrooms. This week, the mayor called on the University of California, the San Francisco Unified School District and City College of San Francisco to consider moving their classrooms and operations into the vacant offices. She also called on City Administrator Carmen Chu to consider relocating her department’s employees into these privately-owned properties – with Breed claiming the empty municipal offices could be turned into housing. However, Breed didn’t have an answer for what could be done with the vacant schools if classes were transferred into office buildings. Even by the standards of California politics, this is a new low in ridiculousness.
Hit: The Ultimate Love Letter to a City. Earlier today, we learned that the legendary singer Tony Bennett passed away at the age of 96. While today’s San Francisco is identified by crime, empty buildings and idiot politicians, the San Francisco of an earlier generation was defined by Bennett’s song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Bennett never worked in real estate, but his melancholy tune about “where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars” was the greatest sales tool in highlighting the Bay Area’s charms to the romantically inclined. Mercifully, I’m old enough to still associate San Francisco with Tony Bennett and not London Breed.
Phil Hall is the editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo by Marcen27 / Flickr Creative Commons
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