You are trying to figure it out and by "it" I mean all of it—relationships, family, career, friends, clothes, food, being cute, and why you're still renting.
You make $186,600 a year—the current Area Median Income for San Francisco County. Solid job, decent credit, and money in the bank yet, you're still paying $4,000 a month for a place with no garage and pet [...]
Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood), the bill's author, framed it plainly: "A working stove and a working refrigerator are not luxuries—they are a necessary part of modern life." In an ever-evolving landscape of affordability issues, habitability, and human rights, California is finding it necessary to level the playing field. AB 628 doesn't represent a philosophical shift—it codifies what many jurisdictions already recognize: functional cooking and food storage are non-negotiable components of habitable housing, not amenities to be negotiated away or deferred.
Approximately 64% of estates contain real property, and a lot of that real property leaves something to be desired. Deferred maintenance, title defects, tenant issues, “lots of stuff,” or simply a property nobody wants to keep—real estate in probate creates work outside an attorney’s primary wheelhouse and pulls focus from higher‑order priorities in the administration. Layer that on top of everything else already on your desk, and the file gets heavy quickly.
Insurance coverage is such an issue that the California purchase agreement forms have an insurance contingency in place since June of 2024. Buyers walk into open houses thinking about quartz counters and school scores not hip to the fact that insurance is now another hurdle to homeownership.
Real estate has a lot of moving parts and one of the reasons I began to write about the process was to cement some of the basics that I learned over the years. One of the basics recently got a big update. [...]
The title of this piece, 'the Affordability Enigma' part reminds me of an 80's band, one from Massachusetts that would cover "Life in a Northern Town" by Dream Academy—don't judge—dreamy and hardworking and astute—kind of like people I [...]
Prop 19 is a 2020 California law that does a couple of completely different things. If you're 55 and older it can be an amazing tool to make moving on a fixed income a lot less expensive—it lets you keep your last home's tax basis and move it to a new place anywhere in California. It also lets your heir benefit by transferring your property basis on an inherited property to them after you make your final move.
