Category: Market trends

New info regarding trends and analysis of the local Shasta MLS market

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New Urbanism in Redding California

Redding sprawls out in suburban, automobile centricity. Over the last few years, we had a couple of developments aimed at a more human centric design, most often referred to as New Urbanism. All of the examples have met with mixed success. Perhaps the lack of eager adoption has more to do with the recently depressed housing market conditions than the appeal. But change is hard anyway, and in this housing market, it’s brutal. So what building we do see going on in 2011 tends to be very similar to what we have seen for the last few decades. Suburban, auto based housing. The market speaks, and those that don’t listen do so at their peril.
Still…

I took this video below of the block and a half of the completed Parkview neighborhood yesterday. And seeing it I was pleasantly imagining our town laid out for walking, with small community parks, and tree lined streets of front porches. $4 gas surely takes a huge bite out of our local economy, but it wouldn’t matter all that much if you could walk to a marketplace or work. I wonder if we haven’t built ourselves into a suburban box, from which escape will be difficult.


Driving around to shoot video of a walkable neighborhood. That’s Really Redding.

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More inevitable cat photos

Butch, the neighbor’s cat wandered by our backyard BBQ for Mother’s Day.
Butch the cat
The key to hunting is to look relaxed.
Butch the cat
When he spots something, he hits them with the ol’ hypnotic eye.
Butch the cat

Butch the cat!

Butch the cat
Hope you had a most excellent Mother’s Day.

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Where the rubber meets the track on Kool April Nites

Jet car
Hope to see you at Kool April Drags this evening, and over the rest of the weekend. The weather is supposed to be perfect.
car
I’m only a casual fan, but I run their website. This event is their biggest of the year, and with dueling jet cars after dark, no less. Definitely worth coming out. They’ve made a lot of track improvements.
car
This is oldest continuously operating dragstrip in the US. A longtime Redding tradition.

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We took the Bullet Train to San Diego

Bullet train

We spent a few days in San Diego after taking the Bullet Train out of Redding. It just took a few hours. I remember when it took all day on I-5 back in the bad old days. What a great trip. The train was really nice, and we met some cool people. San Diego has a terrific Light Rail system. Look at what they’ve done to their cityscape HERE. We even took the Red Car to Tijuana for an afternoon of fun.
Bullet train

The Red Car is quaint and fun, but not as nice as our Green Car system that stretches from Shingletown to Whiskeytown. Of course, the best part of any trip is coming home to Redding. Our NicholsMelburg&Rossetto designed train station is one of the nicest in the world.
Bullet train

Of course I’m making all this up. I was thinking about this as we started getting so many e-mails this week about trying to beat down the proposed SCRIP (formerly Fix 5) building fees that are ostensibly meant to pay for widening I-5. Widening I-5? Are we maybe preparing for the wrong scenario here? They have “freeways” ten lanes wide in the Bay Area and they are still jammed. What if we had a decent rail system like they have in Europe? Why is that Europe has a better transportation system than we do? We are spending trillions of stimulus dollars and all we get is widened roads? I’m feeling really gyped. Where is the vision that built Shasta Dam? Our leaders today spend big, but think small.

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A basket of Tulips

February is early Spring in Shasta County. We have lots and lots of emerging bulbs.
Tulips
These showy tulips look wonderful all bunched together. Ironically, Tulip Mania was responsible for an economic bubble and collapse, similar to the housing cycle we are experiencing now. From Wikipedia: “At the peak of tulip mania in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.” It seems our economic history is filled with bubbles and collapses.
Tulips
It’s hard to capture an image that accurately displays their deep scarlet loveliness.
Tulips
Such is the transitory nature of beauty.

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1,474 Megapixel view of the Inaugural

Click on the image below to see a spellbinding view of the recent innaugural by David Bergman.
Obama inaugural in impossibly detailed resolution

The photographer’s blogsite is here:

http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/22/how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address/

Or at GigaPan here:

http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374&window_height=867&window_width=1663

Really quite a technical photographic achievement that now has become an amazing artistic accomplishment as well. Well worth your time. Scrolling around, you really get a feel for how cold it was. And it’s also interesting to see just how many cameras were there, between the crowd and the pros. Obviously, it was an important moment, and it was covered. I have done many stitched panoramas for online home virtual tours, but this is more extraordinary by an order of a magnitude. The equivalent of 220 photos stitched.

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Welcome to deflation

Cheap gas in Redding
The other day I wrote about gasoline prices falling twice in one day. It’s fallen again. Before you rejoice too much about the sudden cheap gas, you may want to consider it as a leading indicator of a deflationary economy. They didn’t just find more gas on Gas Point Road or anything. There was no increase in supply. Prices are falling with demand. What’s that mean for us? Well I don’t exactly know, but you might want to read what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said about this possibility 6 years ago today. Take a few minutes and read through his thoughts about the subject HERE. Definitely worth your time. Somewhat frightening, actually. (I got a couple of offline comments about my post scaring people. that wasn’t the intent. If you read the Bernanke piece, it looks like his main weapon of choice to fight deflation will be a printing press, to print a bunch of money to spread around “willy nilly” ((his words)) That’s a prospect you may want to plan for.)

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Fleas

Apparently, I spent much of my adult life sheltered from what must be a daily reality for some. I showed an inexpensive bank-owned house yesterday evening to a curious buyer. Among other issues, it was infested with fleas, a quick Google search for “pest control experts iowa” was so useful for this though. But up until the most recent housing cycle, I had never seen fleas swarm one’s ankles when walking into a home with wall to wall carpet. I am unfortunately familiar with that now. It is still disturbing to think that humans live this way, and maybe even unimaginable for most people until you see it with your own eyes. Imagine Redding summer heat and no electricity for so much as a vacuum cleaner.

Yesterday started me thinking about the health implications, so I browsed over to the CDC website.
flea cycle
Ever heard of Typhus? (2 kinds) Tapeworms? Flea-borne Rickettsiae? I was wondering about plague (Yersinia pestis, known in history as black death) but that’s not prominently mentioned. From the site, “flea-borne diseases could reemerge in epidemic form because of changes in vector-host ecology due to environmental and human behavior modification” and “economic factors, as well as changes in human behavior, have resulted in the emergence of new and the reemergence of existing but forgotten infectious diseases during the past 20 years.” Hmm. Anyway, here’s the website if you’re interested:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol3no3/azad.htm -and thanks to the CDC for the image seen above.
It’s quite a sight to behold, fleas leaping from carpet to your feet and legs with such swarming gusto. As I witness how annoying fleas can be for humans, imagine the discomfort these little pests can have on animals? This is why understanding the difference between frontline plus and frontline gold products, for example, could help with the discomfort that the fleas may bring to your pet. It may also be a preventative measure, which could be beneficial. Pets can be a big factor in bringing fleas into the home as the pests attach themselves to the pet’s fur. If you want to avoid bringing them into the home, you may want to consider an outdoor dog kennel, even if it is just while you treat the carpets.

Not all bank-owned properties have fleas. Its not that bad in the winter, but on a hot day, they have remarkable mobility. It doesn’t even startle me anymore. Maybe it should.
The one that still haunts me is the house in south Redding/north Anderson last year, where it was apparent that the evicted had been doing child day-care. I saw the home pre-eviction when there were kids there, and then a few days after they had left. Along with fleas were the largest rats I’d ever seen. That one was brutal. My sheltered life left behind.

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And then there were 3……..

Two Redding area Title and Escrow companies have shut their doors. Alliance Title closed shop statewide, and Chicago Title closed their Redding doors as well. Their respective escrows are being handled by one or another of the 3 remaining companies: Fidelity, First American, or Placer. Alliance Title in Redding Having 5 competing companies in our market was probably too many anyway, but less choice is never better for the consumer. All those admin and clerical worker folks are out of work now, including the woman I wrote about in my previous post, who fought back tears while helping me as her assistant had been laid off. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. I hope they can all be absorbed back into the local job market, but it must be very difficult for lots of good people. The Redding real estate market can be very cyclical, but I can’t remember losing title companies in the last downturn. Chicago Title in Redding