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BG Reads 3.18.2024

BG Reads 3.18.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - March 18, 2024

March 18, 2024

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Bingham Group Reads

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March 18, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 Once America’s hottest housing market, Austin is running in reverse

🟣 City of Austin eyes $90M purchase of 107-acre Tokyo Electron campus

🟣 Gov. Abbott wants the Texas Legislature to rein in investors behind large-scale home purchases

🟣 Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is putting together an investor group to buy TikTok

Read on!

✅ CLICK HERE for this week’s City of Austin meeting times and agendas.

[BINGHAM GROUP]

✅ BG Blog - City of Austin org chart red line (as of 2/9/2024)

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Once America’s hottest housing market, Austin is running in reverse (Wall Street Journal)

The Sunbelt city that came to symbolize the pandemic housing boom is now leading a national property cool-down.Home prices and apartment rents in Austin, Texas, have fallen more than anywhere else in the country, after a period of overbuilding and a slowdown in job and population growth.

That marks a sharp reversal from previous years when Austin’s real-estate market was sizzling. The city attracted waves of remote workers on six-figure tech salaries. Others arrived after companies such as Tesla and Oracle moved offices there, taking advantage of lower taxes and less business regulation. Austin’s economy grew at nearly double the national rate, and it became the country’s 10th-largest city.

Now, it is contending with a glut of luxury apartment buildings. Landlords are offering weeks of free rent and other concessions to fill empty units. More single-family homes are selling at a loss. Empty office space is also piling up downtown, and hundreds of Google employees who were meant to occupy an entire 35-story office tower built almost two years ago still have no move-in date.

Austin’s recent downswing is a sign that migration patterns that were turbocharged by the pandemic continue to fade. Housing markets in other Sunbelt cities, including Phoenix and Nashville, Tenn., that swelled with new residents in recent years, have also softened from overbuilding, slowing population growth and a lack of affordability.

Austin was at the forefront of the U.S. housing boom, when rock-bottom borrowing costs near the start of the pandemic fueled robust sales and sent home prices to new highs. Austin prices soared more than 60% from 2020 to the spring of 2022… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Austin eyes $90M purchase of 107-acre Tokyo Electron campus (Austin Business Journal)

Tokyo Electron Ltd. might have a buyer for its former North American headquarters that it put up for sale late last year: the city of Austin.

The city is considering a $90 million purchase of the 107-acre campus, city spokesperson Shelley Parks confirmed. Meanwhile, Tokyo Electron is in expansion mode and on the hunt for another 140,000 square feet in the metro after relocating its North American headquarters from the site in Southeast Austin to the RiverSouth office tower south of Lady Bird Lake near downtown.

If the city buys the property at 2400 Grove Blvd., Parks said two existing buildings on it would be used for a second Combined Technology and Emergency Communications Center, plus office space for future city needs. One section of the property is 46.8 acres and houses Tokyo Electron’s two-building, 189,795-square-foot campus, while the other is 60.3 acres of undeveloped land with plenty of development opportunities.

The site is about a couple of miles down East Riverside Drive from the Oracle Corp. headquarters and next to a former semiconductor factory owned by the University of Texas… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Visit Austin offers look at strategy to support hotels during convention center closure (Austin Monitor)

Staff from Visit Austin plan to aggressively market the city to new and recurring visitors in the coming years as part of a three-part strategy to support the local hotel and convention industry during the four-year closure of the Austin Convention Center.

Last week, the Tourism Commission received a presentation from the tourism organization, which is tasked with building business for the more than 15,000 hotel rooms downtown that will be directly impacted by the convention center project beginning next year.

The strategy includes widespread communication of the other meeting and presentation space available outside of the convention center, including assorted hotel meeting spaces and at facilities like the Palmer Events Center and Austin City Limits Live. Visit Austin also plans to prioritize bookings for sports business with potential to turn into annual business that will remain once the convention center reopens in 2030… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Gov. Greg Abbott wants the Texas Legislature to rein in investors behind large-scale home purchases (Texas Tribune)

Gov. Greg Abbott called on state lawmakers Friday to try to limit Wall Street’s presence in the Texas housing market.

As the nation’s housing affordability crisis continues unabated, lawmakers and housing advocates have increasingly concentrated scrutiny on so-called institutional homebuyers, meaning investors big and small as well as corporations who buy single-family homes to rent them out. They accuse corporations and hedge funds of playing an outsized role in the homebuying market and outbidding would-be first-time homebuyers, even though estimates show investors own only a small percentage of the nation’s overall housing stock.

A spike in investor activity in the housing market in the COVID-19 pandemic era has since prompted lawmakers to try to curtail or even ban it as a means to bring down home prices and give first-time homebuyers a leg up in the market.

Abbott joined the fray Friday.

“I strongly support free markets,” Abbott wrote on the social media site X on Friday afternoon. “But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home. This must be added to the legislative agenda to protect Texas families.”

Abbott didn’t detail the scope or what kind of action he would like lawmakers to take. His office did not return requests for comment Friday… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Political baggage only seems to make Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton grow stronger (Austin American-Statesman)

Sometimes getting impeached, getting indicted, being the target of a federal investigation and sundry civil litigations — and having allegations of marital infidelity aired on the public square — can be good for a politician's career. We're not talking about former President Donald Trump here, although we could be. We're talking about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who in the recent Republican primaries came out as well as or better than Gov. Greg Abbott. Attorney General Ken Paxton opposed three longtime judges in statewide races, and all were sent packing by voters.

Eight Paxton-backed House candidates won their GOP primaries, and House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Paxton nemesis, was forced into a runoff. Recall that Abbott spent millions of dollars, and an untold amount of his political capital, in the March 5 GOP primaries to help pull eight candidates for the Texas House who support his push to pass school voucher legislation across the finish line. And in the process he waged war with no fewer than 10 anti-voucher Republican incumbents, toppling five of them and sending three others into runoffs that will be decided May 28. Paxton, who like Abbott is in his third four-year term, also launched primary offensives against Republican incumbents, and not only against members of the Texas House who voted to impeach him on 20 charges, including bribery and obstruction of justice.

Three of the attorney general's targets were longtime judges who were elected in statewide races, and all were sent packing by voters.

Paxton launched what has come to be known in numerous media accounts as his "revenge tour" soon after he was acquitted by the Texas Senate, largely along party lines, of his impeachment charges. His chief targets were the Republican House impeachment managers and several rank-and-file GOP members who voted to recommend his removal from office. Some of the intended targets, including lead manager Rep. Andrew Murr of Kerrville, opted not to seek reelection. But Paxton's "white whale" was, and remains, Speaker Dade Phelan, who was adamant that Paxton's actions that prompted several of his one-time top aides to file a whistleblower lawsuit against the attorney general made him unfit for office.

The impeachment effort gained steam when Paxton would not answer a House committee's questions about the lawsuit at the same time as he was asking lawmakers to fund the $3.3 million settlement agreement that would have made the litigation go away. Eight Paxton-backed House candidates won their GOP primaries. Another one, David Covey, forced Phelan into a runoff for his Beaumont House district. If Phelan is ousted by his own primary voters, it would probably be seen as Paxton's biggest coup, perhaps even larger than the toppling of the three GOP judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US/WORLD NEWS]

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is putting together an investor group to buy TikTok (NBC News)

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that he will put together an investor group to buy TikTok after the House passed a bill that would ban the popular video app in the U.S. if its China-based owner does not sell its stake.

During an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Mnuchin, who served under President Donald Trump, said he had spoken “to a bunch of people” about creating an investor group that would purchase the popular social media company. He offered no details about who may be in the group or about TikTok’s possible valuation.

“This should be owned by U.S. businesses,” Mnuchin said. “There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.”

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

The House bill, passed by a vote of 352-65, now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear. Lawmakers in the Senate have indicated that the measure will undergo a thorough review. If it passes in the Senate, President Joe Biden has said he will sign it… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Schumer calls for ‘new election’ in Israel in scathing speech on Netanyahu (Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for the Israeli government to hold a new election in a speech warning that Israel risks becoming an international “pariah” under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States and a staunch ally of Israel, said he thinks Israelis understand “better than anybody that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world” and would choose better leaders if elections were held.

“I believe that holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the postwar future,” Schumer said Thursday in a speech on the Senate floor, in remarks that did not set an exact timeline for a new election. Schumer, who opened his speech saying he felt “immense obligation” as a Jewish American to speak, stressed that the outcome of that election would be up to the Israelis — not Americans.

The call, from one of Congress’s strongest supporters of Israel, marks the clearest signal to Israel yet that frustrations over Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza are boiling and could even threaten the future of the close relationship between Israel and the United States. President Biden has frequently expressed frustration with Netanyahu in recent months, but he has never publicly suggested that Israelis replace him.

The prime minister is deeply unpopular at home after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, and he has tangled with U.S. officials over his hampering of humanitarian aid into Gaza and his stated desire to conduct a ground invasion in the crowded city of Rafah, which the United States thinks would lead to an unacceptably high level of civilian casualties. He also has explicitly rejected U.S. entreaties to discuss a pathway to a two-state solution. U.S. officials have increasingly come to believe that Netanyahu is prioritizing his own political survival above all else and that he is more focused on placating far-right members of his coalition than on what is best for Israel. Biden told MSNBC in an interview last week that Netanyahu was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)