Blog Posts by Rusty Weston

(Portable power generator | Thinkstock)

We take it on faith that more Super Bowl watchers were dismayed by the 34-minute football-viewing interruption than were alarmed by the implications of the instantly infamous power outage. Those who do stress about such matters, particularly New Orleans city officials along with Entergy, the utility company, haven’t officially identified the root cause, leading many to speculate that the power grid was overtaxed.

Yet, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and other major storms that have struck the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in recent years, it’s evident that many homeowners are waking up to the fact that once power is knocked out, it’s unlikely to be rekindled in a half hour. At what point does being prepared with a backup power supply such as a home generator begin to make sense? Has the Super Bowl blackout convinced you to invest in a portable power generator?

The case for it is clear: Anyone displaced by a storm for more than a few days knows that expenses can add up quickly and

The outcome of Super Bowl XLVII may be in doubt, but that won't keep us from pitting San Francisco vs. Baltimore in other fields of battle such as housing, TV shows (The Wire vs. The Streets of San Francisco) or crab cakes (Blue crab vs. Dungeness).

On second thought, given that this is a real estate blog, and the other two areas are entirely subjective, we'll stick with a housing comparison. Thanks to our friends at Redfin for sharing this infographic with us.

Tale of the Tape: It's significantly less expensive to buy a home in Baltimore and consequently a higher percentage of its residents own rather than rent. In San Francisco there are very few homes on the market and in many cases buyers engage in bidding wars to land a property. If your goal is affordability, it's Baltimore by a few touchdowns. If your goal is rising property values, San Francisco may beat the spread.

As to the other advantages of living on a particular coast, consider that by Sunday night only one of these towns

Benito Hernandez stands outside his desert home in Mexico's northern state of Coahuila. (Photo credit: Reuters)For many people, the idea of living under a rock might seem like the punchline of a joke. But for one Mexican couple, a hut wedged below a 130-foot boulder in Coahuila, Mexico, has been home for the past 30 years.

A reporter recently visited the couple, Benito Hernandez and Santa Martha de la Cruz Villarreal, in their primitive desert home 50 miles south of Texas. Hernandez is a farmer who plants and collects the Candelilla plant used in making Candelilla wax.

He first saw this boulder 55 years ago, when he was 8, and decided to make it a home one day. Twenty years later he was able to secure rights to the land.

Santa Martha de la Cruz Villarreal watches her husband in the home's kitchen. (Photo credit: Reuters)"I started coming here when I was 8 years old to visit the Candelilla (harvesting) fields, and I liked it here. I liked it and then I continued visiting every three to four months. I wasn't married and I didn't have a family yet, but I liked it and I had to keep coming to put my foot in (on the property) because lands here are won through claiming them," Hernandez told Reuters

In many once-distressed housing markets, home sale prices are rising by double-digit percentages, and homes are selling much faster than in recent years, often with multiple offers. Mortgage rates are extremely cheap. But before we strike up the band, you guessed it, there's a catch.

There aren't enough homes available to satisfy demand.

In these now-thriving markets, severe inventory constraints are causing consternation for buyers, Realtors and the mortgage industry. Why are so many potential sellers sitting on the sidelines?

In November, Redfin, a real-estate brokerage, predicted that sellers would gain confidence leading to “an easing of the big inventory squeeze that has made headlines throughout 2012.” To Redfin's credit, this month, it concedes that this hasn't happened. According to Redfin data, in cities such as Atlanta, Ga., there were 42% fewer new listings on the market in the first two weeks of 2013 than there were in 2012. Seattle saw a 23% dip; Los Angeles dropped by 36%

Seeking to ease New York City’s legendary housing crunch, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced the winner of the city's micro-unit apartment design competition, aimed at fostering an innovative use of limited space.

All of the units will have 10-foot-high ceilings, Juliet balconies (which don't project from the building), big windows and ample storage, according to Bloomberg. The New York Times writes that “if the rendering is any indication,” the micro-units “manage to feel roomy and inviting.” (Click here or on an image to go to a slideshow of the winning micro-apartment design.)

The winning team is composed of Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation and nARCHITECTS.

The 55 micro-apartments, on a city-owned site at 335 East 27th Street in Manhattan, are supposed to be ready for move-in by September 2015. There’s no indication yet of what the units will cost to rent, but 22 of them will be set aside for low- and middle-income renters who make 80

For the young and employed, choosing where to live is often more of a lifestyle decision than strictly a matter of cost or proximity to work. Hip neighborhood? They’ll be there.

This home is listed at $689,000 in the trendy Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Click the photo to go to the listing.Once word gets out that a neighborhood is trendy, prices shoot up as the available inventory falls through the floor. That’s the key finding in a new study that names the hottest locations of 2013, according to Redfin, a firm that calls itself a "technology-powered real estate broker."

Redfin tasked its agents with identifying up-and-coming areas, selecting “the three hottest 'hoods in each market." Then they rolled up year-over-year data changes in categories such as number of available listings; median price per square foot; sales volume and sale-to-list ratio. The neighborhoods with the most consistent gains were deemed hottest.

As you might expect, hot neighborhoods are all rising in price faster than the metro areas that contain them, says Redfin. One reason for this is constraint: There’s simply not