Trump Bump in Housing Turns into Trump Dump
Donald Trump continues to claim victory, but the blue wave was undeniable on the left coast. You might say, California was already a bunch of lefties. Yeah, except Orange County has always been a Republican stronghold since the days of R.C. Hoiles. In a review of Brian Doherty’s “Radicals for Capitalism,” I wrote,
One of the genuine heroes of the movement who the book enlightened me to is R.C. Hoiles. It should have occurred to me sooner that a courageous man was behind a very libertarian daily newspaper being published from the middle of liberal California: the Orange County Register. As Doherty describes, "Orange County became known, to a large degree thanks to Hoiles himself, as 'nut country,' the hotbed of the rightest of the right wing."
"Any time a man has to pay for something he does not want because of the initiating of force by the government, he is, to that degree, a slave," Hoiles wrote. Now that's my kind of guy, and the fact that he owned a newspaper with all the pressures of making advertisers happy to keep the presses running is heroic.
"Hoiles was an earthy and simple man and a notorious union-busting anarchist cuss," writes Doherty, "who'd thrust himself into picket lines surrounding his property to tell the union boys why they were all wet." Just learning about the late Mr. Hoiles is worth the price of the book.
Orange County “nut country” went bluer than blue on election night. Was it Trump’s fault, or maybe the Trump Bump has turned into Trump Dump in west coast housing with voters voting their falling property values.
In the seemingly always red-hot Bay area and Silicon Valley homeowners are rushing to put their homes on the market. Wolf Richter writes,
So it’s time to unload. Sellers are putting their homes on the market, and active listings in those three counties combined – San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, which cover the area from San Jose to San Francisco – surged by 76% in October compared to October last year, to 4,149 listings, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The chart below dramatically illustrates the Bay Area price cutting.
The market is no better in Southern California. KTLA 5 News reported at the end of October,
A chill is settling over the once white-hot Southern California housing market.Listings are up. Sales are falling. Price reductions are becoming more common.
The Seattle market also hit the ditch this summer. The number of listings doubled in October, from a year ago, with the number of listings matching the lows of 2012. Price cuts in King County (Seattle and Bellevue) have tripled according to Wolfe Street.
Mr. Richter makes the point that Seattle and San Francisco voters didn’t side with Trump in 2016, “But when it comes to home prices in these liberal bastions, the ‘Trump effect’ made property owners a ton of money – if they’re able to get out in time.”
If they are not out by now, they may have waited too long.
