Housing

Laguna Niguel, California May 11, 2022- Firefighters battle a brush fire at Coronado Pointe in Laguna Niguel Wednesday. Wally Skalij | Los Angeles Times | Getty ImagesRaging New Mexico and California wildfires may offer an ominous outlook for a growing swath of America, and not just in the West.Wildfire risk is increasing, likely due to global warming, and its destruction is becoming ever more expensive. Of the wildfires that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked since 1980, 66% of the damage has…

U.S. retail sales and existing-home sales data for April highlight this week’s economic calendar.China’s economic activity is expected to cool further in April after authorities tightened rules to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal forecast that retail sales, a key gauge of consumer spending, fell 5.4% from a year earlier in April, widening from a drop of 3.4% in March. Industrial production and fixed-asset investment are expected to rise, but at a slower pace than earlier in…

People who agreed to buy homes under construction but haven’t yet closed are facing mortgage-interest rates that could be nearly double what they anticipated when they paid their deposits.New-home buyers are confronting multiple obstacles this year, from surging mortgage rates to home construction that is taking longer than usual due to supply-chain and labor constraints. Many home buyers who signed contracts for new homes in 2021 or early this year calculated monthly payments based on near-record-low mortgage rates of…

Denver’s housing market was the second most competitive out of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas, with seven in 10 homes selling for above the list price in April, according to a new report from OJO Labs. The San Francisco Bay Area led the nation with 82% of listings selling for above the initial asking price in April. Right behind San Francisco was Denver, which has shot up the ranking in recent months and is now at 70%, up from 66% in March, which ranked fifth, and 59% a year earlier. On average, Denver-area homes…

OTTAWA—Canada’s 12-year real-estate boom appears to be coming to an end following the Bank of Canada’s recent rate increases, which have triggered a sharp decline in residential sales and a slowdown in home-price gains.The slack in one of the Canadian economy’s main engines of growth illustrates the trade-offs faced in countries where central bankers are racing to douse red-hot inflation by raising interest rates. In Canada, the impact on housing carries extra weight, given the outsize role the sector has played in…

Over 120 million laboratory rats and mice are used worldwide each year. Many are used to study distressing conditions like cancer, arthritis and chronic pain, and nearly all spend their lives in small, empty box-like cages: a kind of permanent lockdown.  Our new analysis shows that this restrictive, artificial housing causes rats and mice to be chronically stressed, changing their biology. This raises worrying questions about their welfare – and about how well they represent typical human patients.We identified this…

Credit: Shutterstock "Going home" is a classic metaphor for exiting prison. But most people exiting prison in Australia either expect to be homeless, or don't know where they will be staying when released. …

Credit: Shutterstock Housing is expensive in Australia. But it doesn't have to be this way. Higher quality, more affordable housing is a matter of policy choice. A key problem is…

Two Harvard University freshmen have launched a website designed to connect people fleeing Ukraine to those in safer countries willing to take them in — and it's generating offers of help and housing worldwide.Moved by the plight of Ukrainian refugees desperate to escape Russian bombardment across the former Soviet republic, Marco Burstein, 18, of Los Angeles, and Avi Schiffman, 19, of Seattle, used their coding skills to create UkraineTakeShelter.com over three frenzied days in early March.Since then, more than 18,000…