Washed It!

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More of the shine of the Golden State’s real estate market lost a bit more of its luster as the total value of California’s properties fell for the second year in a row — and for the second time since records were first kept in 1933 at the depths of the Great Depression.

The value of all types of properties fell 1.8% this year to $4.4 trillion, the California Board of Equalization reported Thursday. The total value fell 2.4% last year.

Forty-eight of California’s 58 counties saw totals fall — nine by more than 5%. Only two counties, oil-rich Kern and tourist-destination San Francisco, posted expansions of their property tax rolls of 2% or more.

The negative numbers make for more bad news for county governments. They’ve had to curtail spending on basic municipal services because falling values have resulted in lower property tax revenues.

“It’s a decline that’s outside of their control” and unlikely to reverse itself until California starts creating tens of thousands of new jobs, said Board of Equalization Vice Chairman Jerome Horton.

The contraction of the last two years contrasts with California’s historic growth in its real estate value, Horton said, with “constant increases of 5% to 15% per year” for the last 77 years.

“Those numbers tell us we have a ways to go, and we have some work to do to bring balance back in our economy,” he said.

Some experts suggest that things could get even worse before they get better.

Many homeowners purchased or refinanced residences in 2005 or 2006 and could face interest rate hikes from the variable-rate mortgages, said Tracey Seslen, a real estate professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Tight financial markets and underwriting standards could make it hard for them to refinance at lower rates, she said.

“With the stricter lending measures in place, removal of the home-buyer’s tax credit and with uncertainty in the economy and the jobs picture, we have a large confluence of factors that are all going to be putting downward pressure on the housing market,” she said.

Other housing specialists, though, think that the board’s data, based on Jan. 1 figures, already may be out of date.

“In many areas of California, prices have found a floor and have even recorded three or four months of guarded recovery,” said Stuart A. Gabriel, director of the Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

“Hopefully, we have found or are close to a bottom” of the market,” Gabriel said, “and, we’ll be able to see some recovery of prices.”

The board’s data found that Los Angeles County, which accounted for about a quarter of the value of all property statewide, lost 1.8% of its property value. The steepest drops were in the high-desert cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, local officials said.

Plummeting commercial property values also are contributing to the reduction in the size of tax rolls, Los Angeles County Assessor Robert Quon said.

The county got hit with a one-two punch of “fewer changes of ownership and less new construction,” he said.

The weak market spurred Los Angeles assessors to review about 600,000 homes and condominiums. They lowered annual property tax bills on 400,000 properties purchased between July 1, 2003, and June 30, 2009, Quon said.

By getting their properties reassessed to reduce taxes, homeowners were able to save an average of $1,800 on a single-family home and $1,500 on a condominium, according to the county.

Across Southern California, property values fell 4.4% in Riverside County, 4.3% in San Bernardino County, 1.5% in San Diego County, 0.5% in Orange County and 0.3% in Ventura County.

Inland areas lost about twice as much of their property value as coastal areas did. The state’s hardest-hit counties were in the Sacramento and Northern San Joaquin valleys and the Inland Empire, the board said.

marc.lifsher@latiimes.com
Value of California’s properties falls 1.8% to $4.4 trillion

As employers struggle with rising healthcare costs and a sour economy, U.S. workers for the first time in at least a decade are being asked to shoulder the entire increase in the cost of health benefits on their own.

The average worker with a family plan was hit with 14% premium increase this year, pushing the bill to nearly $4,000 a year, according to a survey by the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust.

That is the largest annual increase since the survey began in 1999 and a marked change from previous years, when employers generally split the rise in the cost of premiums with their employees.

The average employer contribution to a family plan did not go up at all this year, meaning the entire increase was borne by workers.

At the same time, nearly a third of employers reported that they either reduced the scope of benefits they are offering this year or increased the amount that workers must pay out of pocket for their medical care.

Workers saw average copayments for routine office visits increase 10% and deductibles continue their surge upward.

In 2010, more than a quarter of American workers with employer-provided health coverage were in plans with deductibles of at least $1,000.

“It’s really bad news for everybody,” said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, an organization of large employers that provide coverage to about 50 million workers, retirees and dependents.

Overall, premium growth slowed slightly this year to 3%, with the average annual cost of a family health plan reaching $13,770. Workers picked up 30% of that bill. The average plan for an individual cost $5,049.

The squeeze, reported by employers between January and May, largely reflects the fallout of the ongoing economic slowdown and may be ameliorated in future years as the new healthcare law is implemented.

But it could further complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to rally support for the law, which is expected to do relatively little in the short term to contain rising medical bills.

“There have been times when employers have been able to absorb costs. This is not one of those times,” said James Gelfand, health policy director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a leading critic of the new law.

The law, which focused on expanding coverage for Americans who don’t get insurance through work, was designed to largely preserve the existing employer-based healthcare system.

Independent analyses of the law estimate that most Americans will continue to get insurance through their employer, as about 157 million do now.

Administration officials Thursday pointed to two new studies from the Rand Corp. and the Commonwealth Fund that predicted small businesses in particular would probably expand coverage in coming years, in part with help from billions of dollars of in new tax credits.

“We have really just begun our efforts,” said Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, emphasizing the growing number of tools government regulators have to control insurance premiums.

The Kaiser survey found that the percentage of firms offering health benefits rose to 69% from 60% this year, an unexpected increase that analysts speculate may reflect the failure of many businesses that didn’t offer benefits.

But the survey suggests that the coverage workers are being offered is becoming increasingly unattractive as employers try to control their costs in the down economy.

“We were all so focused on the reform debate that I think we took our eyes off the fact that what we call heath insurance in this country is changing,” said Kaiser foundation President Drew Altman. “What workers get looks less and less like the comprehensive coverage their parents had.”

U.S. employers push increase in cost of healthcare onto workers

It’s a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in “Monster Math.”

That’s Tan’s name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two — just to show them it’s not so different.

On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board — 7,850,437,826 x 56 — with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.

The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: “Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million….”

Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That’s Spanish for “with gusto,” a phrase she picked up from watching “Stand and Deliver,” a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has hundreds of Jaime Escalantes — teachers who preside over remarkable successes, year after year, often against incredible odds, according to a Times analysis. But nobody is making a film about them.