This story today was the first I'd written about Vantage Pointe, the biggest residential condo project to be built in downtown San Diego. But it's not the first time the project has been covered in voiceofsandiego.org. My colleague Will Carless used to write about the housing market and he wrote this story in February 2006 about some of the issues while Vantage Pointe was under construction.
Will looked at the fact that the developers had raised prices on some of the units reserved in the first phases of sales. He talked to Randy Klapstein, the CEO at the developer, Pointe of View, about the change. Klapstein said that they'd had to shift some design and architectural pieces around, and some buyers saw their units increase in size. They had to pay for that somehow, he said.
Will talked to a guy who wasn't so happy about the change:
But investors like Beau Randall, who saw his condo shoot up in price from the $385,000 he reserved it at in March 2004, to $495,000 after the design changes in July 2005, said he was devastated when he had to drop out of Vantage Pointe. He said he had missed out on a "once in a lifetime opportunity," and had also missed out on other projects that he could have bought into.
"I spent a year and a half of my life waiting for this project to move forward," he said.
I caught Randall on the phone this week to ask how he feels now about getting out of the project. He said he ended up buying a unit in Fahrenheit, another downtown project, and was happy about that decision, especially since the others who reserved units alongside him have yet to move in to their new homes.
Every once in a while, I hear stories of people trying to survive in San Diego, and I just can't keep them to myself. This afternoon, I heard one of those.
Sana Hanna lives in El Cajon in an apartment with her 18-year-old son. She was born in Iraq and moved to the United States about 20 years ago.
A few years ago, when she was living in Detroit, she was shot by a gang member after he'd tried to force her to drive him somewhere. Since then, Hanna's been paralyzed, unable to walk.
The Detroit weather was deemed an impediment to her treatment, so she and her son moved to San Diego a couple of years ago. She just started classes at Cuyamaca College to learn to read and write English, a language she picked up conversationally when she worked in a grocery store in Detroit.
A few nights ago, Hanna and some friends and her care workers took her to Ali Baba restaurant in El Cajon to celebrate her birthday. They came back to her apartment for birthday cake, and her guests left about 9:30 p.m. Hanna and her son went to sleep.
In the morning, she realized her power chair, the motorized scooter she uses to get from place to place, from home to school to the grocery store to church, had been stolen.
She called her friend Brooks Ashby, one of the seven people who'd been out for dinner the night before.
"I was crying a lot, because it's like my legs," Hanna said.
Ashby is a care worker who functions as Hanna's advocate when she needs help negotiating with a landlord and various other tasks. He said the chair was too big to fit in her apartment, so Hanna usually has her son wheel it under the stairs outside her apartment door to store overnight, running an extension cord under the front door to charge it overnight. That arrangement had never been a problem for the year she's lived in the El Cajon apartment, he said.
"What we really think happened is they came in at 2, 3 in the morning and just lifted the chair," he said.
The chairs run more than $2,000, a replacement cost too astronomical for Hanna, who receives $870 a month in a disability allowance.
"She's just scraping by," Ashby said.
Hanna said she doesn't know what she'll do now. She said the theft leaves her housebound, unable to get to class. She worries she'll be dropped from her classes because she's missed the second week.
Jose Powell has moved up from a Level II drywall apprentice to a Level V apprentice since we followed him for a day last year, a graduation that puts him a few notches closer to becoming a full-fledged drywall journeyman.
Powell was the subject of last September's People at Workinstallment. He was 19 then -- is 20 now -- and has just completed coursework last week to achieve the Level V status, he said when I caught him on the phone yesterday afternoon. That gives him some certifications for driving a tractor, operating an aerial lift and using some other tools and technique, he said.
And it gives him a raise. He made $12.47 an hour when we met him where he was working at the Hard Rock Hotel last year. Now he's making $21.68 an hour, he said. Apprentices pass through eight levels before becoming a journeyman. Powell said he thinks he has another year before that happens. He'd told me for the story last year he was thinking about going to college to become a nurse. But when I asked him yesterday whether he'd stick it out to become a journeyman, he sounded confident: "Oh, yeah," he told me.
Since last September, Powell finished up the Hard Rock and has worked on projects at UCSD, including a student center and the music building, and the Rincon casino. Powell's still living with Danny Castro, his supervisor at Standard Drywall Inc. Castro's son is one of Powell's best friends.
And, Powell said, he bought his first new car this year -- a "black pearl" 2008 Ford Escape.
Chuck Thomas was not much of a boat guy despite 32 years as head painter for the iconic Star of India and the other ships in the San Diego Maritime Museum. He said he much preferred riding his motorcycle out in the desert to an afternoon cruise on a sailboat.
Thomas was the first person I ever spent the day with for our People at Work series (which is celebrating its two-year anniversary today). Our former photographer, Jessica Horton, came along with me, too, and snapped this photo.
I gave Thomas a call this afternoon to see what he's up to now, two years later. He retired in January, he told me, but quickly found something to make him only semi-retired -- he's now a lifeguard, fitness instructor and swim instructor at the YMCA in City Heights.
"It's a completely different vocation but there's still water involved," he said
He took the gig to supplement his Social Security payment. He said he wasn't ready, financially or emotionally, to retire.
"Some people look forward, I guess, to watching the roses grow, but that's not me," he said.
Something that struck me about Thomas when I interviewed him was how passionate he was about the ships. It was his job to know what paint went on what windowsill, what wall was getting sun-bleached, what banister's finish was chipping. He said by the time he left in January, the passion for working hard hadn't disappeared but he wanted to find a new outlet for it.
"If you enjoy what you're doing it makes it a lot easier than if you're just doing it for the money," he said. "I'd been doing it for 32 years and it was getting a little bit stale. ... But I know there are a lot of places as a painter that would've been a whole hell of a lot worse than working at the Maritime Museum."
Now, Thomas is the one who opens the Y in the morning for lap swimmers, the (mostly) seniors who show up when the pool opens. He teaches aqua-size classes to seniors and some swim classes to kids.
"It's not really Baywatch, it's gray-watch," he joked.
I asked Thomas if he's been back to the museum to see how the ships are looking. He has, he said, and he had nothing to worry about.
"The guy who's the head painter now, Sal -- I've been grooming him for years," he said. "He fit in just like he was supposed to; there wasn't even a hiccup.
"I invested a lot of time into those boats," he continued. "It wouldn't do to have any Joe Blow that comes down the boulevard with a paintbrush that comes in and takes over."
It's the second anniversary of People at Work, our monthly series that tells you about a day in the life of a San Diegan, through the lens of his or her job. Whatever you call it -- job, career, 9-to-5, vocation -- it likely occupies at least eight hours of your day, five or more days (or nights) a week. Some work solely for sustenance, for food and shelter. Others pursue hobbies or interests and find ways to make money doing what they love.
My coverage of the housing market, the job market and other issues related to surviving in San Diego often barrages you with data and graphs and statistics. But this series is an effort to illuminate the local economy through a human lens.
We launched the series in September 2006. We wanted to know, who are the workers in hospitality, in construction, in the big companies, like Geico and WD-40, based here? Who is the woman who serves my wee-hours meal in the drive-thru? Who's the guy I see trimming trees along the thoroughfares of Tierrasanta? What's the life story of the man who helps grieving families choose a casket at the funeral home? Where did the guy who takes my money at the cafe grow up?
I think one of journalism's many ideal functions is to help the people who live in a place talk to each other, learn about each other, identify with each other. Part of that means understanding the way a local economy is structured. And a subsequent part of that means knowing and beginning to understand better the stories of their neighbors.
A large component of each story is a photograph or several of the subject in the workplace. Our photographer, Sam Hodgson, captures a good mix of candids and portraits of the person in his or her job. Recently, he's started adding video, which adds a whole new dimension to our efforts to introduce you to each of these people. It sounds like a cliche, but the subjects have been so interesting I often feel as if the most recent one is my new favorite.
Today's story about Andre Garrett marks the 25th installment in the series. If you've missed any, we've archived them in this index page. I've made some calls to check in with the subjects of the last two September profiles -- Chuck Thomas, the Star of India painter, and Jose Powell, the drywall apprentice. I'll let you know what I hear back about what they're up to now, a year or two after I spent the day with them.
As always, please send me your tips or suggestions for future pieces in the series. You can e-mail me at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org.
I just saw this on BusinessWeek's real estate blog. It's a graph compiled using the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index data for the 20 cities studies in the national index.
Bespoke Investment Group created the graph, which lines up the 20 cities in order by the size of their markets' drop from the peak. San Diego's decline is fourth-deepest, with the 30 percent drop I wrote about earlier this week. It comes in after Phoenix, Las Vegas and Miami.
The red bars in the middle represent the drops in the national indexes -- the 10-city and 20-city indexes.
In my story last week about downtown condos, I included some details about the Miami and Phoenix downtown cores, next to which San Diego's sizable stock of new unsold condos absolutely pales.
The local economy sustained another sharp drop in July, according to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators compiled by University of San Diego economics professor Alan Gin.
The index has fallen 15 percent since July 2007. Gin said July's reading marked the 10th consecutive month of drops for the index, and the 27th month of declines in the last 28 months.
All of the categories monitored by the index logged declines except for one; building permits showed a slight increase.
Last month, Gin and other economists noted the region had entered a regional recession. Here's how Gin characterized the month's results:
The outlook for the local economy continues to be negative, with no signs of a rebound in sight. Job growth remains negative, although most of the damage remains in the real estate sectors (construction, lending, and real estate). ... One positive development is the drop in gasoline prices, which have fallen more than 70 cents per gallon since the peak earlier this summer.
That good news for gas prices could turn around the fading consumer confidence in the region, which in July was down more than 50 percent compared to a year ago, Gin said. Those results would come in a future index:
It remains to be seen whether the recent decline in local gasoline prices will be enough to turn around the negative feelings among consumers.
The Center on Policy Initiatives released its analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2007 American Community Survey this afternoon, noting that little has changed since 2006 with regards to income, poverty and earnings in San Diego County.
Although most of the numbers pertaining to San Diego are different compared to last year's, CPI Director of Research and Policy Murtaza Baxamusa said, some statistics may not actually suggest increases or decreases. For example, he said, because the U.S. Census Bureau's margin of error was +/- 0.5 for San Diego County's poverty rate, the 11.1 percent figure this year does not represent a statistically significant decrease, compared to the 2006 number.
"We cannot say with significance whether (the poverty rate) has increased or decreased," he said. "That really is a sad thing because we would like to say whether something has increased or decreased, but it is within the margin of error."
Click here to see the margins of error for the poverty rates of San Diego County's cities. Click here to see the margins of error for the Gini Index Scores of the United States, California, San Diego County and San Diego cities.
CPI's new report also doubles the federal poverty threshold in order to calculate what it calls a more realistic assessment of economic hardship. The federal government considers poverty to be $10,787 for a single adult under age 65 and $21,027 for a family of two adults and two children. CPI uses 200 percent of that figure to calculate its poverty line, saying it is a more realistic figure. With that number, 27.4 percent of county residents -- or 787,991 people -- live in poverty.
Here are a few excerpts from the CPI report:
Almost half (45.1%) of county residents over age 16 who lived below the official poverty level in 2007 were working.
Almost a quarter of all full-time workers -- 207,864 workers -- earned less than $25,000 for a year of work.
Among full-time, year-round workers, inflation-adjusted earnings were flat from 2006 to 2007 for both genders, but the median earnings for women (38,680) were 20% lower than the median earnings for men ($47,955).
Update: The original version of this post contained a small list of categories that displayed some significant statistical change. We have removed that list because it was compiled based on a misunderstanding of the formula CPI uses.
The U.S. Census Bureau released today a portion of its American Community Survey data for the year 2007, which includes statistics on poverty, income and earnings across the nation.
As it has in previous years, the left-leaning Center on Policy Initiatives and the San Diego Institute for Policy Research will be publishing an analysis of the data as it relates to the county of San Diego in the next few days.
But while we wait for their insights and colorful charts, here are some comparisons between the Bureau's 2006 and 2007 numbers:
We're also going to try some color coding here in Survival to make it easier to read. Let's see how it goes. Here's the key: (red = increase) (green = decrease) (blue = same)
Poverty
San Diego County's poverty rate in 2007 was 11.1 percent (11.7 percent in 2006) , with 320,378 people below the poverty line (331,370 people in 2006) . Of those, 110,124 are children.
Poverty Rates by San Diego cities breakdown:
Carlsbad: 5.9 percent (6.0 percent last year)
Oceanside: 7.8 percent (10.0 percent last year)
Chula Vista: 9.1 percent (11.0 percent last year)
San Diego City: 12.1 percent (13.4 percent last year)
Escondido: 12.5 percent (13.5 percent last year)
Vista: 14.1 percent (15.2 percent last year)
San Marcos: 14.5 percent (13.1 percent last year)
El Cajon: 20.6 percent (15.8 percent last year)
Nationally, the census ranked the city of San Diego as the fifth richest "place" with 250,000 people or more, with a median household income of $61,863. San Diego city also had the 10th lowest poverty-rate in the country last year, among places with 250,000 or more people: 12.1 percent.
Income
Median Household Income in San Diego County: $61,794 ($59,591 in 2006)
Gini Index Scores (wealth inequality)
The Gini Index is a score between 0 and 1, 0 being a perfectly equitable distribution of wealth and 1 signifying that one person has all the income, and others have none of it.
San Diego County: 0.451 (same as 2006)
California: 0.469 (0.466 in 2006)
United States: 0.467 (0.464 in 2006)
San Diego County's City Breakdown:
Oceanside: 0.397 (0.402 last year)
Chula Vista: 0.398 (0.397 last year)
Vista: 0.401 (0.383 last year)
El Cajon: 0.412 (0.437 last year)
San Marcos: 0.423 (0.429 last year)
Carlsbad: 0.433 (0.459 last year)
Escondido: 0.444 (0.424 last year)
San Diego City: 0.461 (0.456 last year)
Last year, CPI reported that "among the county’s 995,021 full-time, year-round workers, the average annual earnings were $55,700. There were 214,160 full-time workers who earned less than $25,000 a year."
This year, of 958,582 full-time, year-round workers, the average annual earnings were $57,668. There were 208,012 full-time workers who earned less than $25,000 a year.
The New York Times' Vikas Bajaj takes a look today at an idea catching on in a few cities in the country to deal with foreclosure.
The idea is to use some combination of government and business funds to purchase foreclosed homes:
Using taxpayer and private money, Boston, Minneapolis, San Diego and a handful of other places are buying foreclosed properties to refurbish and resell them to developers and homeowners in an effort to prevent troubled neighborhoods from sliding into urban decay.
The efforts so far have been taken on a small scale. But local officials say they can become an important pillar of any housing recovery with the help of $4 billion in federal grants that were part of a housing bill Congress approved in July.
I've written a bit about the San Diego plan, called a land bank. The plan would raise private and government funds to purchase foreclosed homes in the region and keep them from becoming blighted.
The Times has an update on the local version of the plan, spearheaded by Jim Bliesner at the City-County Reinvestment Task Force:
San Diego, a city grappling with swaths of foreclosures, is better positioned to take a more sweeping approach. Officials there are raising private money to acquire, refurbish and resell hundreds of properties. Investors including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the Washington Mutual bank have committed $20 million so far, said Jim Bliesner, director of the San Diego Reinvestment Task Force, which plans buy its first homes by the end of the year.
"This has to be large enough to deal with the problem at scale," Mr. Bliesner said. "We have 14,000 properties in foreclosure. If we fix up four of them, it doesn’t make a difference."
Prices for resale houses reached a new low, down 30 percent from the market's peak in November 2005, according to June's Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Index, released this morning.
The overall index logged a 24 percent decline compared to the June 2007 index. With the market broken into thirds by price, the lowest tier experienced the worst year-over-year decline, 32.7 percent. The middle tier declined 24.4 percent and the high tier's declines neared 16 percent, all compared to the June 2007 index.
We learned last week that home sales in San Diego County have turned positive compared to summer 2007 -- more homes sold in July than sold in the same month a year ago, according to DataQuick Information Systems. It increased 10.5 percent.
We will, of course, be partying all day with these data, so stay tuned for more.
Update: The original version of this post incorrectly stated the percent drop for the lowest tier. We regret the error.
The 760 area code split will go to yet another set of public hearings, the California Public Utilities Commission just announced.
The 760 area code is almost out of seven-digit combinations. Last year, the CPUC started the process to decide whether to split the code geographically or with an "overlay zone," where only new phone lines generated would get the new prefix. The commission held six public meetings on the issue in Apple Valley, El Centro, Palm Springs and Carlsbad.
The commission decided a few months ago to split the code geographically -- carving off North County San Diego and assigning that region a new code, 442.
But now the chambers of commerce in Carlsbad, Encinitas, Escondido, Oceanside, San Marcos, and Vista have filed a petition, "contending that the CPUC’s decision was the result of erroneous interpretation of public comment received and the absence of comment from significant portions of the affected public," according to a press release. North County Assemblyman Martin Garrick added his name to the complaint.
Here's more, from the CPUC:
Claiming inequitable economic harm imposed on northern San Diego County businesses and residences, the petition asks the CPUC to modify the decision to adopt an area code overlay, rather than the geographic split that had been adopted.
The commission will hold a meeting in Victorville and one in Carlsbad to hear further public comment:
September 4, 2008, 4 p.m. n 7 p.m. Carlsbad City Hall, Council Chambers 1200 Carlsbad Village Dr., Carlsbad
The region served by 760 is vast, reaching North San Diego County and chunks of Imperial, Inyo, Riverside, Mono and San Bernardino counties. It touches the Mexican border in the south, sprawls beyond the Mojave National Preserve in the east, stretches up past Mammoth in the north and arcs to the Pacific Ocean to grab a cluster of North County cities and unincorporated areas.
I've got a couple of blogs to recommend for any of you who are as obsessed by mortgage fraud as I am.
This one is the California Real Estate Fraud Report and is compiled by Monique Bryher, a real estate broker in Studio City. I came across it when Bryher linked last week to my story about Vladimir Shainskiy, the Russian music composer who was allegedly duped into a series of real estate transactions.
And this one, the Mortgage Fraud Blog, is compiled by California attorney Rachel Dollar, who represents lenders in mortgage fraud suits.
I e-mailed Dollar last week when I was reporting my story about Shainskiy, and she had this to say:
The elderly are often targeted and victimized in fraud schemes -- whether mortgage fraud, securities fraud or other types of schemes. We are seeing an increase in reports of all types of mortgage fraud and a corresponding increase in elderly victims.
Here's another graph to go with our downtown story today. Here's a look at the median price-per-square-foot for resale condos in downtown by quarter compared to countywide. The numbers came from DataQuick Information Systems:
When I checked in with the guys who launched You Walk Away LLC earlier this year, they'd had their doors open for a month and had signed up about 100 people.
Today I got a press release from the company, reporting a total of 1,035 clients in the first five months of the year. The company broke down the clientele geographically this way:
59 percent are located in California, 12.8 percent are in Florida, 8.3 percent are located in Nevada, and 7.4 percent are in Arizona.
The rest are scattered across the country.
The company originated from the premise that foreclosure was a choice, not just a last resort. It's sometimes better to deal with the fallout from foreclosure than keep paying the mortgage on a house that's worth nowhere close to its original price, they argued.
I haven't confirmed that this is definitely the man I wrote about today, but here's a video I found on YouTube of Vladimir Shainskiy, the Russian composer
Nearly 41 percent of the homes sold in the county last month had been foreclosed at some point in the previous 12 months, DataQuick Information Systems reported this morning.
That was up from 38.7 percent in June. Only 11.6 percent of the sales in July last year were such sales.
In neighboring Riverside County, foreclosure resales counted for 64 percent of all sales in July.
In a press release, John Walsh, DataQuick's president, labeled the housing news across Southern California a "fire sale of properties" purchased or refinanced near the peak of the market using "lousy mortgages."
The increased appetite for discounted homes bumped the San Diego County sales totals positive in July. All homes sold in July totaled 3,431, a 10.5 percent increase over July's sales total a year ago. The categories of resale houses and resale condos each saw sales volume increases of more than 20 percent.
The price pressure from foreclosure sales pushed the median price among all homes sold down to $364,000 -- a 25.6 percent year-over-year drop and a 29.7 percent drop from the November 2005 peak.
The local unemployment rate was 6.4 percent last month, according to preliminary numbers released by the state Employment Development Department this morning.
That's up from 6.0 percent in June, and up 1.5 percent from last July's estimate of 4.9 percent.
In the same period, California's rate was 7.6 percent and the nationwide rate was 6.0 percent.
Overall, the region had fewer jobs in July than it had in the same month in 2007, continuing the year-over-year job loss pattern that led economists last month to concede the region is in a recession.
The Grantville settlement will go ahead, the City Council decided in closed session yesterday.
The council directed the city attorney and the Redevelopment Agency counsel to sign the settlement papers related to Grantville redevelopment within five days.
The council also specifically directed its counsel not to open the kind of legal challenge the City Attorney's office proposed, nor to "take any other action which seeks to challenge or obtain judicial review of the Grantville Settlement."
The vote was unanimous on those two motions, with council members Donna Frye and Toni Atkins absent.
City Attorney Mike Aguirre had raised concerns about the specifics of the settlement:
[Aguirre] said he's concerned about the machinations of sending money from Grantville to the city, and from CCDC to the county, to fulfill indirectly a settlement that couldn't be carried out directly.
"I believe that there's a legitimate issue about whether you can transfer the money in the way that it's contemplated," Aguirre said.
The council approved the settlement on July 29 to resolve a lawsuit filed by the county in May 2005. Here's a description:
The settlement involves a complicated series of financial transfers in order to satisfy the county's worry that it would lose out on tax money that would go into the city's new zone. It sends $31.36 million in Grantville redevelopment dollars to the city for improvements along the C Street trolley line in downtown. In turn, $31.36 million from the downtown redevelopment area goes to improvements to county-owned land as part of plans to renovate the North Embarcadero.
Another $7.8 million would be set aside to fund part of the joint projects and the payments would begin to be made in 2012. The settlement means the county retains about 80 percent of the taxes it was poised to lose if redevelopment went forward unhindered in Grantville.
Some Grantville business and property owners assembled as the Grantville Action Group have retained an attorney who is investigating whether they have grounds to sue over the specifics of the settlement.
I gave the City Council candidates in District 7 a call to get their take on Grantville. (Here's a breakdown of the District 7 race from my colleague, David Washburn.)
Marti Emerald said she supports the Grantville Action Group, the group of some of Grantville's business and property owners who oppose the designation of the community as a redevelopment area. She said she sides with the small business owners there who fear being pushed out in favor of the new vision for the community under redevelopment.
"I'm not a supporter of it," she said. "If this is what I inherit, I think we really have to be careful with how we proceed with redevelopment. I think we've all seen redevelopment that is basically scraping communities and gentrifying, and I want to make sure that's not done here."
April Boling said she believes Grantville will redevelop whether it's a redevelopment project area --"Redevelopment, capital R," she calls it -- or not. She supports the creation of a master plan for Grantville and the creation of the redevelopment area. Her chief reason: reinvesting the tax increment generated there to take care of the big infrastructure needs in Grantville, like aligning Mission Gorge Road with Interstate 8.
Such projects are too big to require individual private developers to cover them in their development plans, she said.
"If we do case-by-case redevelopment, we'll end up with a mess like they have in Mission Valley," she said.
She contrasted her support of redevelopment with the Council Jim Madaffer's leadership in the effort.
"I am not planning to lead any charge," Boling said.
Both candidates expressed disappointment with the way the settlement came down to send $31.4 million dollars of Grantville money downtown.
"When we launched this blog in August 2006, we knew that housing concerns and job issues -- the building blocks of surviving in San Diego -- were grinding away a little bit of our readers' bliss. We thought the blog would be a great chance to share little bits of our longer housing and economics stories. And what a couple of years we've had covering such hot topics."
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Powell was the subject of last September's 
Thomas was the 
That's up from 6.0 percent in June, and up 1.5 percent from last July's estimate of 4.9 percent.