Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego are among the world’s least affordable cities for homebuyers, a recent report says.
When the price of a regular home is compared to regular local salaries, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and San José were among the five least affordable cities in the world, according to a survey from financial services provider Remitly conducted late last year.
Relative to local pay scales, the cities are more expensive for homebuyers than New York, Paris and Singapore, Remitly’s analysis says.
In Los Angeles, a single buyer earning the local average salary could afford a home worth only 28% of the average property in the region, according to the survey. Residents of San José can afford to buy a home worth only about a quarter of the average.
“This could mean they would have to stretch themselves financially, often finding larger down payments or asking for financial help from family to be able to make their dream of owning a home a reality,” the report said.
Two additional Bay Area cities appeared on the “20 least affordable” list. San Francisco came in at 10th place, while Oakland ranked 19th.
California homes are about twice as expensive as the typical midtier U.S. home, according to a recent report from the state Legislative Analyst’s Office. As of December, the average home price in California was $755,000, the report said.
Researchers looked at property prices, average salaries pre-tax, mortgage, interest rates and down payments and deposits to compare housing affordability across 151 cities in 11 countries.
Countries were chosen as they ranked in Remitly’s previous study of the most popular countries to move to. The study included the 50 U.S. cities with the highest populations. It excluded the United Arab Emirates and Japan because of insufficient data. The only Asian city the researchers included was Singapore.
Property prices were taken from national statistics agencies and real estate databases, the study said. Income figures were from national and regional datasets.
Detroit — where a person making the local average salary could afford more than two times the average property price — was named the world’s most affordable city to become a homeowner. It was the only U.S. city to make it onto the list, which otherwise consisted of German and Italian cities.
Michael Lens, professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, said the “writing has certainly been on the wall” for California’s housing market to be considered the most expensive in the world.
California’s draws include its “unparalleled amenities” and strong job market, Lens said. But “we make it very challenging to build enough homes to satiate the demand,” he said.
“That combination of low supply and relatively high affluence for some parts of our country make the baseline of an entry-level home very expensive,” Lens said.
Detroit’s ranking as the most affordable city in Remitly’s list reflects the city’s decades-long population loss, driven by white flight and a decline in the auto industry, Lens said. Vacancy rates are high because it was built to house a population that was once much larger.
A financially troubled skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles has gone into receivership as office landlords there struggle to keep their buildings leased.
One California Plaza — the gleaming 42-story tower on Bunker Hill that was one of the most prestigious addresses in the city when it opened in the 1980s — has dropped 74% in value from its market peak.
Earlier this year, the owners defaulted on their $300-million debt, set to mature in November, and faced foreclosure.
At the request of lenders, a judge appointed Trigild, a receivership service, to take control of the 1 million-square-foot property, the Real Deal reported.
One California Plaza is appraised at $121.2 million, down from $459 million in 2013, according to a Morningstar Credit report, real estate data provider CoStar said.
Net cash flow at the property trailed expectations by 37% last year, and the building is now 62% leased after the departure of major tenants, including law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which is set to relocate to Century City.
Ownership of the property at 300 S. Grand Ave. includes Los Angeles landlord Rising Realty Partners, which declined to comment on the receivership. Co-owner DigitalBridge, a Boca Raton, Fla., investment company, did not respond in time for publication.
In recent years, the downtown office market has shifted against landlords as many tenants have reduced their office footprints in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became more common for employees to work remotely.
Elevated interest rates recently have weighed on prices by making it difficult for building owners to refinance debt, pushing them into quick sales or foreclosures.
Some downtown L.A. office tenants have expressed concern that the streets feel less safe than they did before the pandemic and have left for other local office centers, including in Century City.
Downtown L.A. has 54 office buildings that are at immediate risk of devaluation and could result in nearly $70 billion in lost value over the next 10 years, creating a potential loss of $353 million in property tax revenue, according to a recent report by BAE Urban Economics.
The report suggested converting some of them to housing because they potentially could have more value as apartments or condominiums, which could help mitigate expected tax losses.
Converting just 10 big office buildings to housing would boost their combined assessed property value over a decade by $12 billion, adding $46 million in tax revenue and creating more than 3,800 residential units, the report said.
The Gas Company Tower on Bunker Hill sold for around $200 million to Los Angeles County last year, down 68% from a $632-million valuation just four years ago, according to CoStar. The 777 Tower at 777 S. Figueroa St. was sold last year for $120 million, a 70% drop from its 2013 sale. EY Plaza at 725 S. Figueroa St., once valued at $446 million, is now worth about $150 million, a 66% decline.
One of downtown Los Angeles’ familar tenants is pulling up stakes as the office rental market continues to contract from shrinking occupancy stoked by the pandemic.
Financial services firm Wedbush Securities has begun its move from a prominent office tower to Pasadena, where it will occupy much smaller offices meant to accommodate employees who now work remotely much of the time.
The firm is leaving behind Wedbush Center, which overlooks the Harbor Freeway and sports two signs on top bearing the company name. Wedbush has been headquartered in the Wilshire Boulevard building since 2001 and its lease expires next year.
“It’s a big deal, a very big decision for the firm,” President Gary Wedbush said of the move. “The pandemic and COVID created a different kind of office for us.”
With most employees required to be in the office only a third of the time, Wedbush is creating an office oriented toward shared workspaces that can be used as needed by various employees instead of assigned desks, he said.
The move was also influenced by the changed nature of downtown’s financial district since thousands of office workers departed during the COVID-related shutdown and probably won’t return again in pre-pandemic numbers. Many shops and restaurants remain closed and office tenants have said the streets feel less safe than they used to.
Although Wedbush said “downtown has been fantastic for us,” other locations have become more attractive. “There are places like Pasadena that seem to have recovered more fully from the pandemic than downtown Los Angeles has. That was a part of the decision-making” to move.
The firm leases more than 100,000 square feet at Wedbush Center but will occupy about 20,000 square feet in an office complex on Lake Avenue in one of Pasadena’s leading commercial districts.
“The amenities on Lake Avenue are fantastic,” Wedbush said. “Casual restaurants to really fine dining, fitness centers — it just had everything.”
Wedbush’s move, which will take place formally in the first half of 2025, reflects a trend that has been affecting downtown and much of Los Angeles County for the last few years, real estate brokerage CBRE said in a recent report on office leasing.
“The Greater Los Angeles office market continued its search for the bottom” in the third quarter, CBRE said, as both tenants and landlords “navigate the ongoing supply and demand imbalance exacerbated by the shift to hybrid and remote work.”
Companies adapting to new work models are leaving behind large chunks of office space, and the change is particularly noticeable downtown, where CBRE said overall vacancy is more than 30%, triple the amount considered to be a healthy balance between tenant and landlord interests.
Wedbush Securities’ shift to hybrid work, with people in the office some days and not others, created the chance to make a different kind of office with a smaller footprint and more shared spaces to collaborate or work away from a traditional desk, Wedbush said.
About 70% of the office will be considered “hotel” space where employees can choose a workstation on days they are present while the remaining 30% will be offices for financial advisors and others who need privacy to meet with clients.
A stark difference will be that the shared workstations will be around the windows with views of the city and the offices will be in the center of the building. In the old arrangement, individual offices were much larger and occupied the prime space along the windows, Wedbush said.
One of the two floors Wedbush Securities leased in Pasadena has a rooftop deck that Wedbush plans to make into an outdoor office space with conference tables, workstations where people can plug in their computers and places to unwind.
“It’s not just going to be a couple of tables and umbrellas,” he said. “The opportunity to build out this new space was a big driver in us moving out of our building that we’ve loved for so, so many years.”
Wedbush’s decision to dramatically shrink its headquarters underscores not only the continued struggles of the office rental market in the wake of the pandemic but broader vulnerabilities in commercial real estate throughout L.A. County.
A report released by real estate services firm NAI Capital said that in the third quarter of 2024, Los Angeles County’s commercial real estate market experienced a sharp 18.4% year-to-date decline in sales volume and a rise in real estate cap rates, a metric used to estimate an investor’s rate of return based on the income that the property is expected to generate.
It may be a low point in the real estate cycle for property sales, NAI Capital Chief Executive Chris Jackson said.
“With cap rates on the rise, California regulations, and high interest rates throughout 2024, the commercial real estate market took a bit of a dip” with office properties “hit particularly hard,” Jackson said. “However, with interest rates expected to decline more substantially in 2025, we anticipate a significant rebound in real estate sales.”
Sales are being further limited by taxes and government fees, particularly Measure ULA, the property transfer tax in Los Angeles that took effect in 2023, the report said. Dubbed the “mansion tax,” Measure ULA imposed a 4% tax on real estate transactions over $5 million and a 5.5% tax on those exceeding $10 million. In June, those thresholds increased to $5.15 million and $10.3 million.
The tax has contributed to a nearly 40% year-over-year drop in sales of office, retail, industrial and multifamily properties, or $1.9 billion below last year’s total, the report said.
No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.
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The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”
But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.
Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.
All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.
It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).
And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.
Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.
But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.
Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!
Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.
The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)
But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.
Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.
Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.
The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.
In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.
Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.
However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.
And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.
The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.
After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.
Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.
This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.
None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.
Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?
The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.
This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
