“Home ownership is a part of the American dream that is increasingly unattainable, but thanks to your work, the lives of two families are changing today,” said Terre Haute City Council President Curtis DeBaun IV at Habitat for Humanity’s twin housewarming ceremonies in North Terre Haute on Wednesday.
Zy’Lynn Rogers, center, plays with her aunt, Odie Lawson, as they and sister, Kendall Rogers, left, explore the Rogers family’s new Habitat for Humanity home Wednesday on Third Avenue.
/Joseph C. Garza
Those families were Bailey Rogers and her daughters Kendall, 5, Zy’Lynn, 3 and Ralieigh, 1, and Michelle Dowell and her children, Lucy and Lincoln Childress, 10 and 7, respectively.
They were given the keys to side-by-side homes on Third Avenue with spacious living room and kitchen areas, three bedrooms and one and a half baths and new appliances including a washer and dryer.
“I’m actually truly grateful,” Rogers said. “I never thought I would make this happen as a single mom, and I did.”
Dowell echoed Rogers’ sentiments.
“It’s amazing — I’m just so grateful,” she said. “It’s something I thought I’d never have the opportunity to do. Habitat for Humanity is so amazing.”
Habitat board member Valerie Craig said that housewarmings are “always this emotional. It makes me feel like we’re doing something worthwhile for this community, and especially on the north side of Terre Haute — we’re rebuilding neighborhoods by doing this.”
She lauded all of the volunteers who provided materials and help to construct the houses.
“All these people are pushing up their sleeves and saying, ‘Hey, we’ll help get somebody in something they don’t have to worry about slipping out from beneath them,’” Craig said. “This is a wonderful thing that we do. I’m am so glad to be a part of this.”
At the ceremony preceding the housewarming parties presided over by Wabash Valley Habitat for Humanity’s board president Chuck Norman, both families were given Christmas gift baskets from Century 21.
The Vigo County Public Library provided bags of books for each woman’s children. Habitat board members and those who assisted in constructing the homes were also in attendance, and Norman thanked them all profusely.
Norman called the cherry cabinets in the homes “the best cabinets in Terre Haute.” They were built by inmates at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, who cannot sell them but donates them to Habitat, along with coffee tables with concrete countertops.
Todd Hart, vocational instructor at the federal prison, said Habitat provides the prison with the materials and the inmates build the finished products.
“It gives them a sense of accomplishment,” he said of the inmates building the cabinets. “They know it’s being donated.”
Phil Kesner, the Terre Haute Department of Redevelopment’s grants and planning administrator, said his department donated the land to Habitat and used Department of Housing and Urban Development money to shave $40,000 off the cost of building each home.
Norman’s daughter Donna, who’s on Habitat’s advisory board and serves as the organization’s attorney, said she enjoys watching her father immerse himself in nonprofit work.
“It’s such an opportunity for him to be part of the community in a way that’s meaningful to him,” she said. “It allows him to give back. He knows half of the people in this town and he knows how much need there is in this town and it just means the world to pay that forward.”
Donna said Habitat has put six families in homes in the past 12 months, alleviating Terre Haute’s housing crisis one house — or in this case, two houses — at a time.
“That’s how you do it,” she said.
After the housewarming ceremony, Rogers’ daughters gleefully tumbled around in their new front yard.
The St. Helena City Council has designated the former City Hall sites on Main Street and Railroad Avenue as surplus land, starting a process that could end with the sale of both properties.
Past councils have talked about pursuing a hotel at the Main Street site and affordable housing at the Railroad Avenue location. The current council didn’t identify potential uses on Tuesday. Instead its members focused on the state’s Surplus Land Act, which gives affordable housing developers first crack at both sites.
Before moving ahead with a sale, the Surplus Land Act requires the city to send a Notice of Availability to qualified affordable housing developers, which would have 60 days to indicate interest. Then the city and the developers would have 90 days to negotiate a deal. (The city couldn’t be forced to sell the land for less than fair market value.)
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If no agreement is reached, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development could authorize the city to sell the land.
That whole process could last until next July, or sooner if no affordable housing developers show interest.
Selling one or both properties could raise much-needed money for a city that faces an operational gap of about $6.9 million per year and a long list of unfunded capital projects.
The former City Hall/police station at 1480 Main St. was abandoned at the end of 2019 due to smoke damage. The property was appraised at $4.9 million.
The second surplus parcel is at 1572/1574 Railroad Ave. 1572 was used as a temporary City Hall until city employees moved to the Napa Valley College Upper Valley Campus. 1574 is occupied by the Parks & Recreation Department, which could move to the Carnegie Building or Crane Park to free up the space.
The Railroad Avenue property was appraised at $3.1 million, and rezoning it would drive up its value.
Mayor Paul Dohring said he’s “committed to getting some housing on one of our properties.”
“I don’t want this to be focused totally on revenue,” he said. “We have to make a compromise there.”
The Surplus Land Act process could give the city a better idea of what’s possible on both sites. For example, developers could get creative by proposing commercial development on one site to finance affordable housing on the other.
Aside from the Surplus Land Act, there are other options to consider before the city sells the land.
The firehouse sits on the Main Street property, but City Manager Anil Comelo proposed a lot split that would allow for the sale of the City Hall/police station site without affecting the firehouse.
The city could also partially vacate the area of Pine Street known as Britton Way to enhance the property’s functionality.
As early as Dec. 12, the council could consider demolishing the old City Hall/police station and soliciting proposals for short-term use of the property.
Homes aren’t cheap, and that’s why you need to know as much about a house as you can, before you buy. Not all states force homeowners to disclose those details. Dale has three tips that will help you be an informed home buyer.
Metros with the biggest housing shortages
Metros with the biggest housing shortages
Remote work, COVID-19 pandemic migrations, and more investors are causing a housing shortage that’s stopping potential homebuyers from accessing the American dream.
The nation has a shortage of 6.5 million homes, according to a Realtor.com analysis—the result of a nearly decadeslong construction slowdown following the Great Recession. Still, this year, home sales are on track to be at the lowest level since 2008, when the housing bubble burst, according to Redfin.
“It’s an affordability issue,” Haydar Kurban, Ph.D., director of Howard University’s Center of Excellence in Housing and Urban Research, told Stacker. “People cannot find housing with the prices that they can afford.”
The pandemic ushered in more Americans working from home, creating the need for employees to have homes with enough space to function as offices. These workers expanded their home searches beyond pricey urban centers and settled in more affordable cities with attractive amenities—the leading reason for home prices increasing 24% between November 2019 and 2021.
Not only are home prices at record levels, but mortgage rates currently hover near 8% after rising two full points in 2023. Even 1 percentage point can increase a monthly payment by hundreds of dollars. Most American homeowners (63%) need mortgages to purchase homes.
Also adding to the housing shortage and competitive market is the influx of investors looking for potential Airbnbs, flips, and rental properties. Investors bought a record high of “18.4% of the U.S. homes that were purchased in the fourth quarter” of 2021, according to a Redfin study.
Belong crunched Labor Department and Census data to find out which metros are having the biggest housing shortages.
Shortages were determined by calculating the number of new homes being built for every new job added. Generally, one new housing unit should be built per new job to maintain a balanced housing market. Ratios were determined by dividing the number of jobs added between August 2022 and August 2023 by the number of building permits issued from January to August 2023.
Where shortages are happening
While the housing shortage is a national issue, the reason for the crisis is often a regional or even local issue. For instance, major cities such as New York and San Francisco have stricter regulatory requirements, making it harder for developers to build new homes.
Places plagued with the most acute housing shortages had been experiencing population loss leading up to the pandemic; therefore, builders were not putting up new properties. But most people who moved during the height of the pandemic found refuge in these smaller counties.
These migratory patterns made housing in the new locations more competitive.
To combat the affordability problem, federal and local governments are making moves to increase home construction. The Biden administration announced a plan in October 2023 to encourage the conversion of office space to housing; the month before, New York City proposed making it easier to build by lifting zoning restrictions and easing mandates.
Below are the 15 metropolitan areas with the most severe housing shortages. Metros needed at least 50 housing units under construction to be ranked.
#15. Williamsport, Pennsylvania
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 16.4
— 61 permits issued
— 1,000 jobs added
#14. Youngstown, Ohio
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 16.8
— 191 permits issued
— 3,200 jobs added
#13. Trenton, New Jersey
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 17.1
— 755 permits issued
— 12,900 jobs added
#12. Manhattan, Kansas
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 17.1
— 187 permits issued
— 3,200 jobs added
#11. Salinas, California
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 17.7
— 356 permits issued
— 6,300 jobs added
#10. Syracuse, New York
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 18.0
— 350 permits issued
— 6,300 jobs added
#9. Lawrence, Kansas
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 18.2
— 132 permits issued
— 2,400 jobs added
#8. Springfield, Illinois
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 19.3
— 114 permits issued
— 2,200 jobs added
#7. Jefferson City, Missouri
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 24.0
— 125 permits issued
— 3,000 jobs added
#6. St. Joseph, Missouri
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 24.1
— 54 permits issued
— 1,300 jobs added
#5. Huntington, West Virginia
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 24.3
— 177 permits issued
— 4,300 jobs added
#4. Vineland, New Jersey
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 24.4
— 78 permits issued
— 1,900 jobs added
#3. Cape Girardeau, Missouri
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 25.5
— 51 permits issued
— 1,300 jobs added
#2. Anchorage, Alaska
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 26.1
— 276 permits issued
— 7,200 jobs added
#1. Scranton, Pennsylvania
– Job-to-housing permit ratio: 26.9
— 346 permits issued
— 9,300 jobs added
Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Clarese Moller.
You can reach Jesse Duarte at (707) 967-6803 or jduarte@sthelenastar.com.
Home sales in six Forsyth County residential markets included in U.S. Treasury-certified “opportunity zones” continue to produce mixed results, according to a third-quarter report released by Attom Data Solutions.
Opportunity zones, launched in May 2018, are economically-distressed census tracts qualified to receive private investments.
The program was created by Congress and is designed to connect those tracts with investors, offering tax credits and other incentives.
All but one of the 11 Forsyth tracts are in the central part of Winston-Salem. They account for more than 25,000 residents. They are among 47 in the Triad and 252 statewide.
The Forsyth tracts reviewed by Attom for the third quarter are:
Tract 1 in the central business district. The average sales price was $413,750, compared with $268,000 in the second quarter and $190,000 a year ago.
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Tract 3.02 in the Kimberly Park neighborhood. The average sales price was $71,000, compared with $81,000 in the second quarter and $75,000 a year ago.
Tract 14, which contains Whitaker Park, a 1.7-million-square-foot former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. plant. The average home sale price was $107,500, compared with $150,000 in the second quarter and a year ago.
The campus is part of a high-profile renovation project being undertaken by Whitaker Park Development Authority Inc. and Cavalier Winston Development, an affiliate of Frye Properties of Norfolk, Va.
Tract 16.02, Smith Reynolds Airport and neighborhoods south of the airport. The average home sale price was $62,500, compared with $50,000 in the second quarter. There was no sales during the third quarter of 2022.
Tract 17, which contains Lakeside Villas multifamily housing development. The average home sale price when the opportunity zone program began was $143,000. It has since fluctuated from a low of $55,000 in the third quarter of 2020 to $214,000 in the third quarter of 2022. It was $167,000 in the second quarter and $210,000 a year ago.
Tract 33.13, which contains Horneytown Road. The average home sale price was $235,000, compared with $277,500 in the second quarter and $296,500 a year ago.
Not reviewed for the third quarter were: Tract 2 in the central business district; Tract 3.01 in the Boston-Thurmond neighborhood; Tract 7 contains Innovation Quarter in downtown Winston-Salem; Tract 8.01, which encompasses Winston-Salem State University, the UNC School of the Arts and Happy Hill neighborhood; and Tract 8.02 covers the Atkins Community Development Corp.
Winston-Salem city officials consider opportunity zones as another “tool in the economic and community development toolbox that can be used to help spur private development and redevelopment in some of the areas in our community that have not seen the growth.”
There are 12 tracts in Guilford County, along with four in Alamance, three each in Randolph, Rockingham, Surry and Wilkes, two in Davidson and one each in Alleghany, Ashe, Davie, Stokes, Watauga and Yadkin.
The certified “opportunity zones” list for North Carolina has at least one low-income census tract in each of the state’s 100 counties.
There’s never a Black Friday discount when a piece of Nebraska farmland hits the market in 2023, be it a fertile Platte River Valley field or a vast swath of Sandhills pastureland.
The market’s hot. And corporate farms, both in-state and out, are dipping into their deep pockets to claim increasingly pricey agricultural land.
The nine buyers who spent the most on Nebraska farmland in the past five years are all corporate farming operations, real estate developers or investment firms, a Flatwater Free Press analysis found.
Jeff Burnett runs one of them. His Wyoming-based operation recently paid $20 million for nearly 28,000 acres of ground on the Sandhills’ southern edge. That purchase made his company the second-largest buyer of Nebraska land, by acre, in the past five years.
Ranch hand Mike Goodman, left, and ranch manager Frank Thompson ride through the prairie grass on a ranch located north of Keystone, Nebraska. The ranch is owned by Jeff Burnett of Wyoming, whose operation recently paid $20 million for nearly 28,000 acres on the Sandhills’ southern edge.
And, increasingly, small farmers like Bill Alward strike out. Alward moved to his wife’s native Nebraska a few years ago and started a small operation raising cattle and hogs near Fort Calhoun.
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He’s trying to expand. He can’t afford it.
“There were some tracts that were available when we first moved here, and I kind of regret not pursuing those because now it’s completely off the table,” Alward says. “I mean, the price per acre … it’s insanity.”
The average price of Nebraska farmland has shot up 41% since 2018, to a record $3,835 per acre, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln annual survey.
The buyers of that land — especially the biggest chunks — include multinational corporations, out-of-state corporate farms and out-of-state investors, according to five years of land sales gathered by a UNL journalism class and analyzed by the Flatwater Free Press.
Seven of the top 10 buyers of land are located outside Nebraska, the analysis shows.
Together, those seven out-of-state buyers spent $246 million.
Investor-driven purchases, to some degree, contribute to the overall price increase, said Adam Pavelka, a Hastings broker and farm manager for farm real estate agency Agri Affiliates.
The Flatwater Free Press spent months analyzing 12,700 sales of Nebraska ag land made in the open market between 2018 and 2022, then navigating a maze of limited liability companies that often hide the actual buyer. Among the findings:
The single biggest buyer of ag land by acre in Nebraska is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, through a nonprofit tied to a P.O. box in Utah.
North Carolina-based Great Plains Farms spent the most money — $65 million — on land. Belltown Farms, No. 2 in money spent, is an organic farming company with operations in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas.
Gov. Jim Pillen’s company Platte Center West was among the top spenders after acquiring hog farms. The sale amount included buildings and other infrastructure in addition to the land.
Some farmland purchased is no longer farmland. The sales show real estate developers buying ag land to build homes and apartments, and companies like Facebook and Google spending millions to build data centers.
Oft-rumored foreign buyers like China did not appear in the data, but buyers from Canada and subsidiaries of several multinational corporations, including shipping behemoth ULINE, are among the top buyers of Nebraska land.
There are caveats to these findings. The sales data, compiled from county records and provided by the Nebraska Department of Revenue, contains errors. The records sometimes list the incorrect sale amount and are sometimes duplicated. Flatwater Free Press reporters manually corrected data entry errors when possible.
But the data still offers insight into where these buyers are from.
Four of the five biggest buyers who acquired the most acres in open-market sales are giant, multistate operations headquartered in Utah, Wyoming, Wisconsin and North Dakota.
Out-of-state individuals and companies make up less than 10% of the total number of buyers of Nebraska land in the past five years. But out-of-state buyers are prominent at the highest levels: Nearly a third of the 100 buyers who bought the most land were people or companies from outside Nebraska.
This series, “Who’s Buying Nebraska?” will dive into massive farmland purchases by churches, foreign companies and notable buyers like billionaires Bill Gates and Ted Turner. It will seek to answer who’s buying land and why — and how these purchases shape the reality of modern Nebraska agriculture.
Spiraling land prices are, of course, good for sellers. But the reality is that many buyers who can afford to pay the highest farmland prices don’t themselves plant soybeans, brand cattle or harvest corn.
“Most people can get pretty much the same price for grain, but where competition plays out is who can bid most aggressively for land,” said Chuck Hassebrook, former director of the Center for Rural Affairs. “So it is the price of land that keeps ordinary folks out.”
For as long as there has been Nebraska farmland for sale, there have been land barons scooping it up.
William Scully, an Irishman and one of the original foreign owners of Nebraska land, bought up more than 65,000 acres of farmland in Gage and Nuckolls Counties in the 1880s. Starting in 1888, cattleman Bartlett Richards claimed, bought and, in some cases, illegally fenced an estimated 500,000 acres of Sandhills ranch land while co-founding the iconic Spade Ranch.
But for much of Nebraska’s history, it remained possible for residents to make a living on small plots of land that they owned and passed through generations.
Hooper-area farmer Sharon Thernes, 85, remembers her father raising a family of four children on 80 acres, growing crops and raising cows, chickens and pigs.
Today, she says, it would take 10 times as many acres to support a family that size. And the land would be lined exclusively with row crops, she said.
Technology spurred this transition to specialized monocropping and concentrated livestock production, says Bruce Johnson, retired UNL agricultural economics professor who started and ran the Nebraska Farm Real Estate Report survey for nearly 40 years. It’s one reason, he said, why farm and ranch operations are expanding in size while dwindling in number.
Johnson started noticing this trend toward bigger and fewer ag operations in the 1970s.
It accelerated during the 1980s farm crisis, as more and more farmers sold land amid plummeting crop prices. In the aftermath, some financial management companies began to specialize in farmland investment, wrote sociologist Madeleine Fairbairn in her book “Fields of Gold,” a history of farmland financialization.
Federal government reforms in the next decade provided a cushion for ag producers. It also reduced the risk of farmland as an investment, Johnson said.
Buying up farmland as an investment vehicle picked up steam after the 2008 financial crisis, Fairbairn wrote. Many investors now see it as a hedge against inflation.
In 1982, Nebraska voters passed a law that reined in corporations’ ability to own ag land. But in 2007, a federal circuit court struck down that law, known as Initiative 300. Nebraska now has virtually no restrictions on corporate ownership of land — fewer restrictions than the seven other states that at one point passed an Initiative 300-like law, said Anthony Schutz, a UNL professor specializing in agricultural law.
“Absent some legislative change or something of that nature, I think the investor pool is gonna continue,” said Pavelka.
These investors often hire local helpers — sometimes farm managers like Pavelka — or rent out the ground.
It’s common for beginning farmers to start by renting land. But for Alward, it’s proven a challenge to find the 150 acres he’s looking to lease next year for his cattle and pigs. Having pastures next to each other would save him serious time. Owning those pastures would over the long haul save him money.
Bill Alward, 37, feeds his hogs earlier this month at his farm near Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. Alward thinks his operation could run smoother and ultimately be more profitable if he had more land but can’t afford it.
His dilemma is one understood by many younger American farmers.
About 10,000 young farmers and ranchers surveyed nationwide reported owning slightly more than 80 acres on average, according to a 2022 survey. Nearly half don’t own any land, instead working as managers or hired hands.
Owning land is key, largely because it helps agricultural producers withstand market turbulence, said Hassebrook.
“Even if you’re not super wealthy, that ownership of land … becomes an enormous value to you in weathering the dry years and low price years,” he said.
It can pay for a lifetime, or several. Ranch land is often bought in large chunks and added to existing ranches, Johnson said. That land may stay in a family for generations.
“As you have larger-sized holdings, the … available land to buy and the ownership transition becomes less and less,” Johnson said.
Burnett isn’t looking to sell anytime soon.
His Wyoming-based operation uses the 28,000 acres in Keith and Arthur Counties to graze cattle from spring until fall. The Sandhills is in a different weather belt than other land, and thus offers him drought protection.
A ranch road cuts through the grass of a Nebraska Sandhills ranch owned and run by a Wyoming-based ranching operation.
Technology is another big reason buying large amounts of Nebraska land makes sense for his business, he said. Forty years ago, hauling animals hundreds of miles would have been unimaginable. Now he receives iPhone alerts when his livestock water tanks at the Nebraska ranch run dry.
He wants to make sure he’s building an enterprise with opportunities for the next generation of ranchers in his family.
“We’re long-term players,” said Burnett. “For the cards that I can see today, I would say we’d be more apt to be on the buyer side than on the seller side.”
He doesn’t see himself as an absentee owner, living just across the Wyoming border and visiting often.
The change in Nebraska’s farmland ownership structure, experts say, can have a long-lasting impact on the environment, food production, local economies and the lives and livelihoods of rural residents.
In some eastern Nebraska counties, more than half the farmland is titled to an absentee owner, Johnson said. The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture landownership survey shows that a third of Nebraska agricultural landlords have never farmed.
In neighboring Iowa, 27% of agricultural land purchases last year were connected to an investor buyer, up from 21% in 2019, according to an Iowa State University survey.
These absentee owners do contribute to the local property tax base. But they don’t live in the community, shop at the grocery store or send their children to the local school.
Instead, they extract value from the land and send the profits elsewhere, which can “impair the health of rural communities,” said Jessica Shoemaker, a UNL law professor.
“When an owner is instead an investor making decisions in a boardroom in Chicago or New York, we worry that … (they) may not care as much about local impacts,” Shoemaker said.
A higher rate of absent ag landowners in an area corresponds to lower local employment rate, a 2021 USDA report found.
It’s often hard — but not impossible — for midsized Nebraska farmers to buy land.
In 2020, Hooper farmer Sharon Thernes took out loans to buy 230 acres of land she had rented for more than 50 years.
Sharon Thernes, 85, farms with her family near Hooper, Nebraska. Thernes and her late husband, Louie Thernes, started farming here in the late 1950s.
Thernes’ grandson Tyler now runs the day-to-day operations on her farm. He also recently bought 74 acres himself.
Thernes has spent a lifetime heading out on the family farm “at two o’clock in the morning to see if the cow is having her calf and carry it to the house to warm it up.”
She’s not optimistic that her family will retain that full control for many more generations to come.
“Eventually … it will be huge conglomerates that are owning the farm,” Thernes said. “And our grandchildren will be employees.”
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.
Our best Omaha staff photos & videos of November 2023
Jaye’real Coppage 12, dibbles a basketball in the gym at the Salvation Army Omaha North Worship & Service Center located at 2424 Pratt St, on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. Paint from the mural on the wall is peeling.
Atlas Swan, 3, helps his mother, Eryn Swan’s plants on the porch of their Bemis Park home on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023.
Kids play basketball in the gym at the Salvation Army’s North Corps Community Center, 2424 Pratt St., on Nov. 9.
North Dakota State’s Ryan Sletten (24) tries to stop a Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner (11) dunk at CHI Health Center on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023.
Police escort a truck carrying the Durham Museum Christmas heads north on I480 toward Woolworth Avenue on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023.
A Union Pacific climbs out of a tree after securing it to a crane on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023.
A sign warning motorists about lane restrictions on Dodge Street at 76th Street on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023.
Creighton’s Steven Ashworth (1) celebrates a three-point basket against North Dakota State at CHI Health Center on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023.
North Dakota State’s Ryan Sletten (24) tries to stop a Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner (11) dunk at CHI Health Center on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023.
Nebraska’s Ty Robinson (9) walks off the filed following the college football game at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023. Maryland won the game 13-10.
Nebraska’s Blaise Gunnerson (97) stretches out to try an block a pass from Maryland’s Taulia Tagovailoa (3) to Maryland’s Roman Hemby (24) during the first half of a college football game at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023.
Nebraska’s Harper Murray (27) watches as Nebraska’s Merritt Beason (13) misses the ball in the Northwestern vs. Nebraska college volleyball match at the Devaney Center in Lincoln on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023.
Brooke Holloway, Matthew McMullen Bill Holloway and Cindy Holloway cross the Red Cedar river on their way to Spartan Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Michigan State Spartans in East Lansing, Mich. on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023.
Nebraska and Michigan State fans react differently on a penalty call against Michigan State during the first half of a college football game at Spartan in East Lansing, Mich. on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023.
Nebraska’s Omar Brown (12) sits in a hall before playing Michigan State in a college football game at Spartan in East Lansing, Mich. on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023.
Nebraska’s Heinrich Haarberg (10), Nebraska’s Jeff Sims (7) and Nebraska’s Chubba Purdy (12) have a moment in a hall before playing Michigan State in a college football game at Spartan in East Lansing, Mich. on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023.
A member of the Michigan State marching band drums upside down during the second half of a college football game at Spartan in East Lansing, Mich. on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023.
Omaha Skutt raises their trophy following the Norris vs. Omaha Skutt Nebraska State Volleyball Class B Championship match at the Devaney Center in Lincoln on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023. Omaha Skutt won the title in three sets.
Sumner-Eddyville-Miller’s Katelynn Reiter (6) serves the ball in the O’Neill St. Mary’s vs. Sumner-Eddyville-Miller NSAA Class D-1 volleyball state quarterfinal match at the Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023.
Renewable energy developers are actively preparing for a potential change in planning policy which would ease the path for more on-shore wind projects to get the green light.
The constraints of the National Planning Policy Framework have made landowners’ applications for turbines almost impossible to pass for nearly a decade.
General election
But if there is a change in government at the next general election – due to take place within 14 months – a fresh outlook on the viability of these projects is expected.
Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband confirmed last month that he would double onshore wind if Labour came to power.
As a result, renewable energy developers were looking for suitable sites again, and this is leading to more farmers being offered exclusivity agreements, according to national property consultancy Carter Jonas.
See also: Defra criticised for delays over Tenant Farming Commissioner
Carter Jonas surveyor Alex Ireton said: “An exclusivity agreement is essentially a restriction on the landowner at the beginning of the process while the developer puts their money down and makes a commitment to explore the grid.
“For a set period of time, and in exchange for the developer investing their resources in exploring the grid, the landowner will not enter into discussions or negotiations on renewable energy development with any other developer.”
Mr Ireton advises landowners approached by renewable energy developers to pay attention to the detail of an agreement.
“Landowners should be comfortable with the duration of the agreement and receive a fair payment in return for signing,” he said.
Wind farms
“The developer is effectively cutting out the competition while they explore the possibility of a project being brought forward, so there is a value to that. I have seen fees as low as £500 and as high as £10,000 paid to landowners.”
The scope of the agreement should also be closely scrutinised, Mr Ireton added, with some developers wanting to include more than just renewable energy or want to have the scope of exclusivity over all the land.
See also: Defra job must be given the respect it deserves
“Some developers may want to include more than just renewable energy or have the scope
Before selecting a developer and signing an agreement, Mr Ireton advised due diligence and seeking expert advice.
He said farmers should check if the developer has the ability to deliver, if they had high-level understanding of the offer and whether it was in line with the market.
“You should also insist on a commitment to investigating the grid and a termination provision if that does not happen. Be aware of what you are prepared to sign off on.”
URBANA — Urbana officials are proposing a plan to recoup part of the city’s $5.5 million investment in the under-construction Hotel Royer — an extra tax on the hotel’s room rentals.
The incentive will be paid when the hotel, a Hilton Tapestry Collection property, is fully operational. And if the city council agrees, part of that incentive will be recovered through a new 4 percent “boutique” hotel tax levied on room rentals at only that hotel.
That would be in addition to the regular hotel/motel tax.
When exactly the hotel under renovation next to Lincoln Square will be open for business has been a moving target, but “the developer has indicated that a mid-December opening date is possible,” according to a memo to the council by Elizabeht Hannan, the city’s human resources and finance director.
As of Friday, the Hilton website still indicated reservations were being accepted for Hotel Royer for March 15 and beyond.
Hannan said it would be the only hotel in the city that the new tax would apply to, because it’s the only one that meets the definition of a boutique hotel.
The tax, which would be 4 percent of the rental or leasing charge, would be imposed on each room rental per 24 hours, or any portion of that time.
Imposing an additional tax to help recoup the city’s $5.5 million incentive for the hotel was part of its agreement with the developers, Hannan said.
The boutique hotel tax, if approved, would be just one revenue source used to repay the city for the development incentive, with others including the regular hotel/motel tax, the food and beverage tax and an increase in property-tax revenue for the tax-increment-financing district it’s located in resulting from the development, she said.
The council is set to meet as a committee of the whole on Monday, so final action on the tax proposal will come at a future regular session.
The United States and the Philippines have signed a nuclear cooperation pact under which U.S. investment and technologies are to help the Southeast Asian nation transition to cleaner energy and bolster its power supply
MANILA, Philippines — The United States and the Philippines have signed a nuclear cooperation pact under which U.S. investment and technologies are to help the Southeast Asian nation transition to cleaner energy and bolster its power supply.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. witnessed the signing of the deal by his energy secretary and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.
“We see nuclear energy becoming a part of the Philippines’ energy mix by 2032 and we are more than happy to pursue this path with the United States as one of our partners,” Marcos said at the signing ceremony.
He said the pact, known as a Section 123 agreement, would support the development of reliable, affordable and sustainable power in the Philippines. It will also open doors for U.S. companies to invest and participate in nuclear power projects, he said.
Blinken said negotiations with the Philippines were completed within a year, the fastest for a Section 123 agreement, which is required under the U.S. Atomic Energy Act to allow the transfer of nuclear equipment and material for peaceful uses.
He noted that the Philippines has set an ambitious target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030. With its peak energy demand expected to quadruple by 2040, nuclear energy will help it meet its needs in a sustainable way, he said.
“With access to U.S. material and equipment, the U.S. and the Philippines will be able to work together to deploy advanced new technologies, including small modular reactors, to support climate goals as well as critical energy security and baseload power needs within the Philippines,” he said.
“In a nation of more than 7,000 islands, small modular reactors -– some just the size of a city bus -– can generate energy locally and conveniently,” he added.
The Philippines began building a nuclear generating plant, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, in the 1970s but it was never completed after questions were raised about its cost and safety, including its location near a major fault and the Pinatubo volcano.
The United States has 23 Section 123 agreements in force that govern peaceful nuclear cooperation with 47 countries, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Taiwan.
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Ng reported from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Police are looking for a man believed to have murdered a commercial sex worker in a lodging along Kirinyaga Road, Nairobi.
The woman’s body was found in a lodging she and a man had booked on Saturday night. The man was missing, police said.
According to security guards at the building, the woman booked the room and was accompanied by the man who is believed to have killed her.
They spent the night there but the man left alone at about 5 am alone and told receptionists the woman was sleeping and would leave later.
Come midday, almost seven hours later the cleaners went to the room seeking to clean it when they stumbled on the body of the woman.
She lay naked with her legs and hands tied with a piece of clothing.
Police who visited the scene said she had been strangled with a bed sheet tied around her neck.
The motive of the murder is yet to be unravelled, police said. The body of the woman was moved to the mortuary pending autopsy and further probe.
Nairobi police boss Adamson Bungei said they are investigating the murder.
He said they are pursuing the suspected killer and a team of detectives is already on the ground handling the matter.
In the Kabete area, police said they are also investigating the murder of a man whose body was found on the roadside with visible injuries.
The body had visible injuries at the back of the head at the time it was found.
Police said they are investigating murder in the incident and no arrest had been made so far.
Elsewhere in the Zimmerman area, police are investigating the death of a man whose body was found lying on the roadside.
The body had vomit on the mouth and had no visible injuries at the time of the discovery.
The cause of the death was not immediately known, police said adding the body was moved to the mortuary pending autopsy.
Police say they are concerned with the discovery of bodies at various places. Some of the deaths are natural while others are out of murder which are pending probe.
According to police reports, at least two bodies are recovered daily in the city alone.
Don't Mind the Geopolitics. The Case for International Investing Is Strong.
About the author: Alexander Torrens is the head of Walter Scott North America, a global equity portfolio manager and an investment firm of BNY Mellon Investment Management.
With the clock ticking down on 2023, U.S. equities look set to further extend the decade-long period of dominance they have enjoyed over their international peers. Mix in considerable geopolitical uncertainty in various parts of the globe and U.S. investors could be forgiven for leaving their passports at home and sticking exclusively with their home market. I think this could be a missed opportunity.
The case for investing globally is often framed in terms of “why now?” Proponents point to shifting macro conditions or other cyclical reasons to look beyond U.S. shores at a given point in time. Today, the argument might focus on the likely persistence of many of the drivers of U.S. outperformance over the past decade, whether valuation expansion, the epic run of the “magnificent seven” group of tech stocks, or the strength of the dollar. Advocates of mean reversion, meanwhile, tell us that the stark outperformance of U.S. equities is unlikely to last.
But while these are all legitimate, interesting, and important questions to ask, relative calls between markets are notoriously difficult to get right on a consistent basis, let alone time well consistently too. In our view, investors should consider exposure to both the U.S. and international equity markets at all times for two separate, but closely connected, reasons.
The first of these, diversification, is well-understood. Or at least it should be. In the 70 years since Harry Markowitz introduced the world to modern portfolio theory, diversification has with good reason become a bedrock of investor thinking. Done correctly, diversification can potentially allow investors to increase the expected return of a portfolio for the same level of risk.
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Of course, when Markowitz labelled diversification “the only free lunch in finance,” he was speaking to the risk/return benefits that accrue from buying uncorrelated assets. Today, the correlation between the U.S. and other developed equity markets is relatively high, so the benefits of diversification are certainly not what they were prior to our globalized era. Only when investors venture into emerging and more esoteric geographies do we see a more material benefit emerge. That said, there is a residual diversification benefit to investing globally that allocators should want to harness: The serving might not be as big, but you’re still getting your sides for free.
The second and most compelling argument for investing globally is the freedom to pursue the very best investment opportunities regardless of where they happen to be listed. Put bluntly, why would you not want access to the broadest possible opportunity set? To be solely exposed to the U.S. is to leave some outstanding opportunities on the table. No country has a monopoly on corporate excellence.
Many of the most interesting companies identified by our fundamental company analysis don’t have U.S. peers, or if they do, they are a rather pale imitation. Just as there are no international equivalents of the Silicon Valley behemoths, there are no U.S. analogues of the storied French and Italian luxury houses. Asian savings and protection? Industrial automation? Fashion and beauty? All long-term opportunities with market-leading exponents domiciled outside the U.S.
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Nor are these businesses narrow plays on domestic economies. Overwhelmingly, they are global multinationals deriving a significant proportion of their sales and earnings from countries other than where they are listed. You’re unlikely to be investing in a Japanese automation business for exposure to the Japanese economy or a Danish pharmaceutical firm solely for the domestic healthcare opportunities.
It goes without saying that this bottom-up approach to global equity investing demands rigorous analysis of all stock-specific opportunities and risks. This includes paying due consideration to the impact of geopolitics, an issue very much front of mind for U.S. skeptics of global investing.
At a portfolio level, rather than look at events such as Ukraine or the Middle East through the prism of geography or sector, we think it more relevant to consider risk exposure by the potential for value impairment across stocks, and then aggregate this up. To think of China-Taiwan risk, for example, only as an Asian phenomenon is to overlook the severe ramifications for those U.S. tech companies entirely dependent on Taiwanese chip manufacturers. Better to understand how risk is expressed across real-world businesses, then stocks, then the portfolio. Globalization may be in retreat, but the world is still incredibly interconnected.
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The myriad links and chains in the global economy are an inconvenient truth for those who question the wisdom of straying from U.S. shores in an uncertain and volatile world. Ultimately, no amount of U.S. exposure can offer immunity from geopolitical risk. What it can guarantee you, however, is a sizable chunk of country-specific risk, whether you’re 100% invested, overweight or even just at “market” weight. Risk, just like opportunity, can be found anywhere.
Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron’s and MarketWatch newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit commentary proposals and other feedback to ideas@barrons.com.
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