SAN FRANCISCO - California has a housing bubble, but it may not pop with a bang, UCLA researchers said in a quarterly economic forecast.
“There is no reason that a house should be worth 40 percent more today than it was two years ago,” UCLA Anderson Forecast economist Christopher Thornberg wrote in a report. “This is a bubble.”
Researchers predict predict mediocre economic growth at best and recession at worst next year as the market slowly cools.
The run up in home values in the Golden State in recent years — the strongest of any state — has fueled the state’s economic recovery and has left many Californians feeling flush, but its housing market has become “heated far beyond the point of sustainability,” Thornberg wrote.







The silver lining to this very dark cloud is that property tax revenue is up significantly, easing the overall budget shortfall.