Tons of news to report today. Let’s start with a quick legal update and then see why poor Johnny and Shawn are so very sad today.
Judge Meeting Legal Update
The only thing interesting on Monday (10/26) WebEx with the Judge was the Raleigh’s lawyer continued incompetence and not taking this seriously - she wasn’t able to figure out how to join a WebEX so had to conference call a young colleague that figured it out so she got on the WebEX and had to hold up a speaker phone to the lawyer that nobody could really hear and she couldn’t hear the judge. Great look for the opposing side 🤣
Live look at Raleigh’s lawyer (she’s the one on the right)→
Anyway after 20mins of that fun, it was largely a scheduling meeting - Looks like “sometime maybe in mid-January” there will be a 1-2 day session to hear all of the city’s motions to dismiss.
Summary: The can has been kicked down to 2027, hopefully that gives the Raleigh legal team time to get their WebEx working.
Axios Reports: Raleigh’s townhome market drops 7.1% y/y - the worst in the US’s largest 40 markets.
Many readers sent me this article that just came out (thanks everyone!) The article is here and this is the highlight (blue highlight is ours, not Axios)→
Is the Missing Middle Plan Winning Yet?
Despite whatever intentions the ‘missing middle’ strategy of the Raleigh City Government had, it’s clearly not working.
This chart from the Homes.com (costar) data tells a similar story
Single family (which Raleigh now hates and the missing middle has all but abandoned) is down 2.1% (because who wants to live in single family neighborhoods that are now going to be ruined by Missing Middle?) - the rest of the US is up 2.1% and Raleigh’s policies have given us a down 2.1%.
Raleigh’s Condo market is also dramatically underperforming the country - dwn 5.8% vs. down 1.4% - 414% worse
Raleigh’s townhomes are dramatically underperforming the country down 7.1% for Raleigh vs. basically flat for the US average. There’s no math that can describe how bad this is.
The only silver lining - I’m sure the city will lower our property taxes to reflect the value destruction they have delivered to the citizens. (that’s sarcasm).
Missing Middle’s Results
Swirl that together and here’s how we’re doing against the top 40 markets→
If you missed Raleigh, you can look right at the bottom there.
And here’s how we rank out of the top 40 markets:
One more silver lining, we can’t go down further, and there’s nowhere else to go, but up. The only way out of this, is if we continue to fight Missing Middle on both fronts and get this pernicious policy overturned that’s destroying our single family neighborhoods that catapulted Raleigh to the top of every ‘best places to live’ list.
Support the effort, this clearly is impacting all of us financially by destroying the value of our homes: