An Update From Our 1 Percent World: Southern California Housing Edition

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The LA Times reports that the Southern California housing market is once again getting frothy:

But a deeper look at the market reveals a recovery divided between the rich and everyone else.

The market for high-dollar homes is hopping, with sales on the rise and buyers launching bidding wars. But sales of low- to medium-priced homes have plummeted during the same period — with many potential buyers priced out….Those declines came even as sales of high-end homes increased. Sales of homes costing $800,000 or more grew 12%, while sales of homes costing less than $500,000 fell at twice that rate.

….”We’re getting multiple offers on just about everything,” said Barry Sulpor, an agent with Shorewood Realtors in Manhattan Beach, where he said there is a new wave of tear-downs and new construction in prime beachfront locations. “The market is really on fire.”

I think partly this is a bit of a statistical artifact: a lot of investors were buying cheap houses a year ago, figuring they could rent them out and make a killing. That didn’t work out so well, and now a lot of those houses are back on the market. Long story short, some of the increase in low-end housing prices over the past year or two has been a bit of an investor-fueled mirage, and now reality is catching up to that.

Still, the overall picture is clear: At the lower end of the market, ordinary people have been increasingly locked out for a while, and that’s still the case. Nor is it any surprise. After all, median wages have stagnated during the entire period that we so laughingly refer to as a “recovery.” As always in our brave new 1 percent era, things are going pretty well for the rich. For the not-so-rich, not so well.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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