Weekly News (January 10, 2024)

Mortgage Interest Rates Review

United Mortgage Nation  1/10/2024

 Federal Fund Rate: 5.25% -5.50%        Prime Rate: 8.25%-8.50%  

Willets Point redevelopment groundbreaking

WSJ   12/22/23 

• The 1st Phase of the redevelopment began on 12/20/23 including 880 low-income units among the planned total 2500 residential units, which will be 100% low-income units and it is the first time for 40 year’s apartment construction history.
• The 2nd Phase will include NYC FC Stadium with 25,000 seats, 1400 low-income units and a hotel which will be completed by 2030.
• The redevelopment projects will create $6.1B economic effect for the next 30 years in the region, and 1,550 permanent jobs along with 14,200 construction jobs.  The development area was junk yard. 

Owner of Manhattan Property Files for Bankruptcy

WSJ   1/10/24

• The owner of mixed-use building Bloom on 45th in Manhattan has filed for bankruptcy, saying fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic as well as interest-rate increases have made it unable to meet its debt obligations of $79.8M. 
• The property, at 500 W. 45th St., was built in 2020. Roughly 60 residential units of the 92-unit luxury condo property in Hell’s Kitchen are unsold.  “As a result of the pandemic restrictions in place for more than two years, residential sales of the project did not meet the projections” of the owner and original lenders, Hudson 888 Chief Executive Sheng Zhang said in a filing.

San Francisco Exodos

Korea Times  1/10/24 

• For last 3 years, well-known brands, Nordstrom, Whole Food, Office Depot, Starbucks (7 Stores) have left the town. It is called Doom Loop when they used to express the fall of Auto industry in Detroit in 1950s. 
• Accumulated urban problems such homeless(7,750), crimes rates, piled garbage, extreme high home prices and rents, etc. were piled up even before the pandemic and the pandemic has explored the problem. 
• Office vacancy rate was 4% in 1st Qt in 2020 and now it hit 23.8% in 1st Qt in 2022.  Also the city’s population dropped 7.5% from 2020 to 2022 which is the largest decrease among U.S. cities of which population is more than 50,000.   

Nearly a Fifth of Office Space Sits Vacant, Highest on Record

WSJ   1/9/24 

• U.S. offices are emptier than at any point in at least four decades, reflecting years of overbuilding and shifting work habits that were accelerated by the pandemic.
• A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data go.
• That surge in office vacancies in the 1980s and early 1990s followed years of overbuilding. Easy lending fueled a construction boom, particularly in the South where land was cheap and red tape sparse.

U.S. office vacancy rate

WSJ  1/9/24

Data-Center Developer Gets Infusion

WSJ   1/10/24

데이터 센타 개발에 자금 확충  

• One of the world’s largest data-center developers is getting a $6.4 billion equity infusion, the latest sign that this property sector is booming alongside the rise in AI. 
• Vantage Data Centers plans to use the capital from digital infrastructure investor Digital Bridge Group and Silver Lake, a technology investment firm, to add more than 3 gigawatts of capacity globally, which is enough to power more than 2.5 million homes.
• The data-center industry, which provides the buildings that house the internet, went into full throttle mode last year. Because of its complexity, AI computing such as OpenAI ’s ChatGPT puts much higher demands on data-center power and cooling compared with other technology.

Data center leasing in North America

Last Year’s Global Temperature Set a Record

WSJ  1/10/24 

지구온도는 계속 상승

• Global temperature for 2023 were the hottest since record-keeping began in the mid-1800s, the EU said, confirming months of speculations, and will likely continue in 2024. 
• 2023’s global average temperature, the study found, was 14.98 degrees Celsius, or 58.96 degrees Fahrenheit.  That average was 1.48 degrees C, or 2.66 degrees F, hotter than the preindustrial baseline, creeping ever closer to the 1.5 degrees C threshold the world’s nations have agreed to keep warming below to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
• Not every storm or heat wave is caused by climate change, and not every city, state or country hit record temperatures in 2023. However, climate scientists say that rising global temperatures increase more periods of heavy rainfall, more heat waves more droughts and more wildfire.

Global average temperature anomalies

Sports/Concert Stadium named as ‘KIA Center”

Korea Daily  12/26/23

올랜도메직 홈구장 ‘기아 센터‘ 로 개명       

• The MBA “Magic” team’s home stadium in Orlando, FL is named as “KIA Center’, announced KIA U.S. on 12/20/23, which was used to call “AMWAY Center”.
• Inside the Stadium, KIA Terrace is placed for providing convenience to sports and music fans. 
• The head of KIA U.S. said KIA Center will a very important center along with KIA Forum in California to bring up the brand name and power in U.S. interconnecting West and East.   

Climate/Temperature/Fuel Sources