Word: rente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...talking with someone who works in your dining hall or stopping to catch up with the janitor you’ve seen in the Science Center, you may learn that someone you see every day has lost an eighth of her salary and can no longer afford to pay rent. These human interactions are a key ingredient to having a respectful community, but they also contribute to the public’s understanding of how administrative decision-making affects real people...
...spectrum: the cities where houses for sale look inexpensive compared with rentals. The top 10 metro areas on that list are Cleveland, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Cincinnati and, in California, Oakland, Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose. An important caveat: those cities' 15-year price-to-rent ratios include the bubble years. Does Las Vegas appear cheap? Sure. The current ratio there is 14.6, significantly below where it's been over the past 15 years (19.3). But that average has been influenced by the go-go years. Exclude them - by looking at just the 1990s...
...tangled in the numbers. "I wouldn't worry too much about a small amount above or below," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who has done his own analysis of price-to-rent ratios. "It's when you see large divergences that it matters." After all, there are other considerations that go into the decision to buy a house. When Choe bought last fall, he figured the air was still coming out of real estate, but his older son was about to start kindergarten, and he wanted to settle into the right school...
...another example take, well, Dean Baker. He and his wife sold their condo in Washington in the spring of 2004 and started renting. The cost of a house relative to a typical apartment rent had doubled in four years - you didn't have to be an economist to notice. That spread has narrowed substantially, but by Baker's calculations, there's more to go. Yet that didn't stop him from buying a couple of months ago. "We got an interest rate at the absolute bottom," he says, "and we wanted outdoor space...
Plus, Baker plans to stay put for a while. That also influences the math on how financially savvy it is to buy. The government mortgage agency Ginnie Mae has a rent-vs.-buy calculator on its website - using the default settings, buying starts to make sense after committing to stay for at least four years, although a lot of assumptions go into that calculation: everything from the property-tax rate to mortgage closing costs to the money spent on homeowner's insurance to the yearly home-price appreciation. If prices stay flat instead of going up 2% a year...