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Voters Reject California Rent Control Measure In Blowout. For the third time, Californians have said no to a measure that would allow municipal governments to expand rent control by voting against Proposition 33. The proposition would have repealed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which dictates how local governments can apply rent control. Doing so would have left decisions about which properties can be subject to rental regulations — single-family homes and newer apartments, for example — up to local governments, which would be able to expand rent control to those properties if they chose. Just over 62% of voters rejected the proposal, according to the New York Times, which called the race Wednesday morning. Commercial real estate and real estate interests generally came out in force to oppose Proposition 33. As of midday Monday, groups opposing the proposition had raised nearly $125 million, more than double the roughly $48M raised in support of it, the Los Angeles Times reported. The largest opposing donors were a California Apartment Association committee and state and national real estate associations, according to the LA Times. Supporters, including the proposition’s majority donor, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, emphasized that allowing local governments to regulate rents on a broader range of properties will help deliver relief to renters who are strained by the ever-increasing cost of housing. But opponents said allowing rent control to expand would only aggravate the state’s affordability crisis by depressing property values and discouraging developers from building new housing.
Crisis-Era Mortgage Strategy is Making a Comeback. High home prices and elevated mortgage rates are making it expensive to buy a home, but state agencies are offering interest-free “piggyback loans” to aspiring homeowners. In 2022, only about 10,400 households used the agency’s down-payment-assistance programs. In 2023, about 11,200 households used them. The government has reached out to local real-estate agents and mortgage lenders to encourage more people to utilize them, but with little success. “It’s shocking to me, after doing this for eight years, how many folks still don’t know about our programs.” Though home buyers have been slow to take advantage of the state agency’s piggyback-loan program, second mortgages are growing in popularity nationwide, especially among first-time buyers and people with low to moderate incomes. Between June 2022 and June 2024, the share of mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration that had a secondary lien rose more than 7 percentage points, to 18% from 10.8%, real-estate-data company CoreLogic says ina new report. The buyers include many who have found it difficult to meet traditional down-payment requirements or who lacked the credit history needed to qualify for a conventional mortgage, CoreLogic notes. In the first six months of the year, among buyers who used a conventional mortgage and paired it with a secondary mortgage, the median loan size on the piggyback mortgage was $15,000, Yanling Mayer, the author of the study says. For first-time home buyers with an FHA-backed mortgage, the median size of the piggyback loan was $10,500. Last in vogue in the early to mid-2000s, piggyback loans were a tool to make down payments seem more affordable. Instead of taking one 30-year mortgage to finance the purchase, home buyers would take a second loan at the same time to borrow additional money to lower the down payment. Piggyback loans typically have higher interest rates than a borrower’s primary mortgage, and those rates are often adjustable, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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