There is sweet news on the true estate market at the top of 2024: there may be lots more supply. The bad news: Much of this inventory is obsolete and stays unsold for for much longer than usual.

Active listings in November were 12.1% higher than November 2023, reaching their highest level since 2020, in line with a brand new report from Redfin.

However, greater than half of those homes (54.5%) sat in the marketplace for no less than 60 days with out a purchase contract being finalized. That's the best share since November 2019 and a virtually 50% increase from a yr ago, the report said.

The typical home that truly went under contract did so in 43 days, the slowest November pace since 2019, in line with Redfin.

“Many of the offerings on the market are either outdated or uninhabitable. There is a lot of inventory, but it doesn’t seem to be enough,” said Redfin agent Meme Loggins, who was quoted within the report. “I explain to sellers that if the price is not fair, their home will remain on the market. Well-priced homes in good condition disappear from the market in three to five days, but overpriced homes can sit for over three months.”

Accordingly, mortgage rates rose to over 7% in October and largely remained there until the end of the year Daily Mortgage News. Real estate prices also continue to rise. S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller's latest monthly price report, released Tuesday, showed prices rose 3.6% nationwide in October compared to the same month last year.

“With the latest data covering the period leading up to the election, our national index has shown continued improvement,” said Brian Luke, head of commodities, real and digital assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “The removal of political uncertainty risk has led to a stock market rally; it will be revealing if a similar sentiment emerges among homeowners.”

According to the National Association of Realtors, pending home sales, that are signed contracts to buy existing homes, rose to their highest level in nearly two years on each a monthly and annual basis in November. However, they got here from a really slow base. The brokers claim that rates of interest have now reached a brand new normal.

“Consumers appear to have recalibrated their expectations for mortgage rates and are taking advantage of greater available inventory,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist. “Mortgage rates have averaged over 6% over the last 24 months. Buyers are no longer waiting for mortgage rates to drop significantly or expecting them to drop significantly. Additionally, buyers are in a better negotiating position as the market moves away from a seller’s market.”

However, the slower pace of sales doesn’t bode well for the brand new yr, especially as rates of interest remain high. There's still demand, but in line with one other Redfin report, renters are staying renters longer due not only to higher real estate prices, but additionally higher prices for agents and movers.

According to a year-end report from CoreLogic, the vendor lock-in effect, wherein some sellers are unwilling to trade of their low mortgage rates to maneuver, began to subside in 2024, but that was largely as a result of life events or the necessity to tap amassed equity. The additional inventory didn't have much of an impact on sales because costs got in the best way.

“Buyers are struggling to keep up with property prices. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of owning a home is currently at its highest level in decades. This sustained increase in prices and interest rates has created a challenging environment for both first-time buyers and those looking to get on the real estate ladder,” CoreLogic chief economist Selma Hepp wrote within the report.

After greater than every week of uncertainty over the congressional election results, Republicans appear to have done so gained control of the US House of Representatives — Solidifying the primary state GOP trifecta since 2017.

But the party's razor-thin majority poses further uncertainty for each Republicans and Democrats, as a single emptiness could tip the balance for power within the nation's Capitol.

That possibility has raised questions on a rarely discussed topic: the power of aging or ailing federal lawmakers to do their jobs effectively — and even keep their seats.

The average age of the 118th Congress in November was 57.9 years within the House and 64 years within the Senate. Next 12 months, greater than a dozen California lawmakers will likely be among the many 20 oldest members of the House; Starting with 86-year-old Maxine Waters, soon to be the third-oldest member of Congress, this list of Democrats includes Nancy Pelosi, Doris Matsui and John Garamendi.

Additionally, quite a few elected officials have disclosed cancer diagnoses or other serious health problems lately. Garamendi, who represents California's eighth District, was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in July and started chemo-immunotherapy in Sacramento. The 79-year-old incumbent is returning to Congress for his ninth term after garnering support from 74% of voters within the Nov. 5 election.

There is currently just one approach to replace a sitting federal lawmaker who’s physically or mentally incapacitated but has not voluntarily resigned: a two-thirds vote to expel the member from either house, allowing his state's governor to carry a special election. That has This has never happened within the history of Congress.

More than 110 years ago, the seventeenth Amendment ensured that senators could possibly be temporarily appointed before a special election to fill a emptiness that will be declared even when a member of Congress dies or leaves office before the tip of his or her term.

But House members should not have similar transition options.

Federal lawmakers have sporadically discussed calls for a constitutional amendment that will allow the House of Representatives to fill vacant seats with temporary appointments, arguing that elected officials should have the opportunity to call a listing of successors to forestall delays of voters could turn it the wrong way up.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one in every of the Bay Area's most distinguished Democrats, is one in every of several advocates who argue that having a substitute plan is a matter of national security and continuity of presidency.

“It's pretty obvious that if you really wanted to decapitate the Democratic government, you would have to wipe out the House of Representatives,” Lofgren said in an interview with DC on Thursday. “I don't mind mentioning it because anyone with a brain who is a foreign enemy already knows this. It’s not a secret.”

Lofgren, 76, said the approach to prevent violence from being essentially the most attractive option for bad actors to vary the bulk within the House of Representatives is to amend the Constitution to create a path to revive Congress before one Catastrophe occurs.

There's a recurring problem: A constitutional amendment requires support from two-thirds of every chamber of Congress and ratification from three-quarters of state legislatures.

Lawmakers have previously sounded the alarm that Congress's narrow margins of power could possibly be quickly upended in a disaster like Sept. 11, the 2017 GOP baseball practice shooting, the pandemic and the Jan. 6 rebel. But as tensions cooled after each of those crises, initiatives to vary House rules on vacancies were downgraded or ignored by the last seven speakers.

While Democrats were in the bulk in 2019, Lofgren was assigned to the nonpartisan caucus Select Committee on Modernizing Congresswhich adopted 97 recommendations over 4 years to make Congress a more efficient and effective institution.

That list included a review of plans to have each member of Congress create a listing of possible successors. In the event of that member's death, his state's governor would choose an individual from this list to serve until the subsequent election – the identical idea discussed in 2001, 2017 and 2021.

Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., chairman of the committee that was disbanded last 12 months, said the chance that majority power could shift for months was “terrible.”

“And our reaction can't be, 'Well, that's never going to happen.' Or, 'Well, we'll deal with it when the time comes'” Kilmer said in September. “Because when the time comes, it will be too late.”

When it involves cancer or other serious illnesses, Lofgren hopes that every one of her colleagues could make a full recovery and return to work. But she also acknowledged that it was “no small thing” that many members of Congress were temporarily absent for health reasons.

“Especially with narrow majorities, death and disease could determine the majority in Congress, not the election,” Lofgren said. “You'd think people would want to prevent that too, but I think some (of the resistance) might be because people don't like to think about their own demise.”

Previous attempts to resolve the House emptiness problem and preserve government institutions have been met with outrage, even with substantive proposals for succession planning after Congress narrowly avoided disaster in September 2001. Lawmakers like Republican Rep. David Dreier were steadfast, viewing the thought as anti-democratic, despite safeguards designed to forestall one party from gaining a bonus through appointments and special elections.

There hasn't been a significant partisan fight lately, Lofgren said, but without consensus it's not plausible to achieve the required two-thirds majority.

The biggest challenge was getting anyone to concentrate.

“I could rant and rave and spend all my time on something (like a constitutional amendment) that isn't going to happen, but I'd rather spend my time working on things that have even a small chance of happening Lofgren said. “We’re just not getting any traction.”

Originally published: November 17, 2024 at 6:15 am PST

“Can you name the truck that has four-wheel drive, smells like steak and seats 35?”

In 1998, The Simpsons joked in regards to the Canyonero, an SUV so big they were obviously joking. At the time, it was absurd to think anyone would drive something that was “12 yards long, two lanes wide, and 65 tons of American pride.”

In 2024, this joke shouldn’t be removed from reality.

And our reality is that more pedestrians and cyclists are being killed on US roads than at any time within the last 45 years – over 1,000 cyclists and seven,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone.

Vehicle size is an enormous a part of this problem. A recent article by urban economist Justin Tyndall found that a rise within the front end height of about 10 centimeters increases the likelihood of a fatal pedestrian accident by 22%For female pedestrians and folks over 65 years of age, the chance increases by 31%, and for kids by 81%.

It's hard to argue against physics, so it's somewhat logical responsible cars for the rising variety of road deaths. In fact, Tyndall estimates that a cyclist hit by a pickup truck fairly than a automotive is 291% more more likely to die.

Yet automotive manufacturers have long claimed that if everyone simply obeyed the principles of the road, nobody would die. The size of the vehicle is irrelevant to this claim.

My discipline, Traffic engineeringis analogous. We underestimate our role in perpetuating poor outcomes and the role that higher engineering can play in creating safer communities and streets.

Millions of road deaths

How bad are the negative consequences? The United States has been tracking the variety of car-related traffic deaths since 1899. As a rustic, we now have reached the brink 1 million deaths in total in 1953, 2 million in 1975, and three million in 1998. While data from recent years has not yet been released, I estimate that the whole variety of traffic fatalities within the United States will surpass 4 million sometime within the spring of 2024.

How a lot of them are pedestrians and cyclists? The analysts were unable to differentiate between the variety of pedestrians and cyclists killed. within the early yearsbut based on subsequent trends, I estimate that about 930,000 pedestrians and bicyclists were killed by cars within the United States.

How a lot of these deaths will we blame on big cars or bad roads? The answer is: only a few.

As I show in my recent book, “Killed by a traffic engineer: The illusion that our transport system is based on science must be destroyed”, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration describes the error of road users as “critical reason” behind 94% of accidents, injuries and deaths.

The crash data proves this.

Police investigate accidents and inevitably look to find out which road users – including drivers, pedestrians and cyclists – are primarily at fault. This is straightforward because in almost every accident, the road user's fault appears to be the apparent problem.

This approach helps insurance firms determine who has to pay. It also helps automotive manufacturers and traffic engineers justify all these deaths. Everyone – except the families and friends of those 4 million victims – goes to sleep at night with the great feeling that badly behaving road users just must be higher taught or higher enforced.

But the mistakes made by road users are only the tip of the iceberg of the issue.

Who creates dangerous roads?

When traffic engineers excessively wide road that appears more like a highwayand a speeding driver is involved in an accident in Canyonero, the motive force will probably be accused of speeding in the following accident data.

When traffic engineers poor zebra crossings with large gapsand someone crosses the road on a red light and is hit by the speeding Canyonero driver, the official accident report will blame one or each of those road users.

And when automotive manufacturers construct gigantic vehicles which might be easily double the speed limit and fill them with annoying touchscreensaccident data will still blame road users for nearly every bad thing that happens.

These are the sorts of systemic conditions that result in many so-called road user errors. But should you look beneath the surface, it becomes clear that many human errors represent the standard, rational behavior of typical, rational road users given the transportation systems and vehicle options we offer them with.

Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that our underlying crash data gives a free pass to everyone but road users themselves. Everyone wants a data-driven approach to road safety, but today's standard view of crash data absolves automakers, insurance firms, and policymakers who set vehicle safety standards of responsibility for the rise in size of those ever-larger cars and light-weight trucks.

It also absolves traffic engineers, planners and politicians of the blame for making a transportation system during which, for many Americans, The only good selection to get from A to B is the automotive.

Understanding road behaviour

Car manufacturers wish to sell cars and earn a living. And if larger SUVs seem safer to potential customers and at the identical time far more profitableIt is straightforward to see how the interaction between road users and automotive manufacturers – whose decisions are apparently rational – has developed into an arms race in terms of SUVs.

Even if these vehicles less safety for pedestrians, cyclists and passengers of oncoming vehiclesThis aspect is ignored in the present data-driven approach to road safety.

This cannot all be fixed without delay. But in the event that they proceed as before, automotive manufacturers and traffic engineers will proceed waste money At Campaigns responsible the victims or billboards high above the road, urging drivers to watch the road.

A greater start line can be to revamp the United States' supposedly data-driven approach to traffic safety by reinventing our understanding of the crash data on which it’s all based.

The secret is to ask why. Why did these road users behave as they did? Why did they not follow the principles that were set for them? Bad road user behaviour shouldn’t be excused, but should you dig slightly beneath the surface of the accident data, a really different story emerges.

Finding out which road user made the most important mistake could also be helpful for law enforcement and insurance firms, but it surely does little to assist traffic engineers, planners, politicians or automotive manufacturers determine what they’ll do higher. Worse, it prevents them from realising that they is likely to be doing something improper.