President Obama is set to visit the West Hollywood Area on Monday, September 26, 2011. Expect street closures and major traffic delays from 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm. As a result, San Vicente Boulevard from Melrose Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard will be closed all day on Monday.

President Obama will be in the Los Angeles area on Monday, September 26, 2011, attending two separate events. One event will be held at the House of Blues in the City of West Hollywood and the second event will be held nearby in the City of Los Angeles . Expect street closures and major traffic delays throughout the afternoon and evening in the City of West Hollywood and surrounding areas. Please plan ahead to avoid any inconvenience. The City of West Hollywood has no additional information regarding the details of President Obama’s visit for security reasons.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 metropolitan areas rose 1% from April to May when left unadjusted for seasonal variations.

Prices often rise in spring because of changes in the types of homes selling: Foreclosures make up a higher proportion of sales during the winter as families take a break from home shopping and cash-rich investors dominate the market. Higher sales volumes in spring also push up prices.

But compared with May 2010, home prices slid 4.5%, according to the index released Tuesday.

“Year-over-year, prices continue to deteriorate, although there has been a seasonal uptick over recent months,” said Stuart Gabriel, director of UCLA‘s Ziman Center for Real Estate. “This reflects a market that continues to be in search of a bottom.”

Chris G. Christopher Jr., an economist with consulting firm IHS Global Insight, said in a research note that the seasonal kick in prices will probably fade by October.

“Things do not look very favorable on the housing front since the employment situation has taken a turn for the worse in May and June,” he wrote. “The unemployment rate now stands at 9.2%, and consumer confidence is at depressed levels. Going forward, the Case-Shiller indexes are likely to post increases during the home-buying season, and then turn down again.”

The housing market began a renewed decline last year after the expiration of federal tax credits and has been limping along ever since. In March, home prices fell below their recession-era low, hit in April 2009, confirming a much-expected double-dip. Values have ticked up slightly since then.

One factor keeping housing weak is the high number of homes in foreclosure or headed into the foreclosure process. Then there’s the stalled jobs market, weak consumer confidence in the economy’s direction and the significant number of people saddled with mortgage debt that exceeds the value of their homes.

A separate report released Tuesday by Santa Ana research firm CoreLogic indicated that the nation’s housing market is hampering the broader U.S. economic recovery. The report said that while several temporary factors have contributed to a slowing recovery, including high gas prices, U.S. floods and fading stimulus programs, “fundamentally, the recent slower economic growth illustrates that as the housing market goes, so does the economy.”

Housing influences the economy directly through residential construction, which typically gives a recovery a key boost. But with stiff competition from foreclosures, sales of new homes have been very weak for more than a year.

Sales of new homes in June dropped 1%, according to data released Tuesday by the Commerce Department. That put sales at an annualized pace of 312,000.

“We see no chance that a strong rebound in new-home sales will be a key driver of broader economic growth any time soon,” Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note.

Housing also influences the U.S. economy in less direct ways because people often buy new furniture and other items when they purchase a new place to live, or even when they do home improvement projects such as adding new rooms.

In California, a recent poll for The Times and USC‘s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences shows that Californians are coping with hard times by cutting household expenses, skipping restaurant meals and forgoing home improvements.

Tiffany Suarez-Martinez, 34, and her husband, Eduardo, 32, rent a house in the Inland Empire town of Chino. The parents of three young children said that they are concerned about the future and scraping to get by because of high gasoline costs and lost work hours. Their neighborhood has been ravaged by foreclosures, bringing down property values and leaving empty homes with dead front lawns, Tiffany said.

“Everybody I know has almost lost their home or is in the process of losing their home,” she said. “I am renting, thank God, because I didn’t think we could afford a house, so we didn’t buy.”

Homeownership remains a dream for the couple, but “we are still not ready,” she said, “with a family of five and only one person working.”

The state of the housing market also influences consumer views on the economy. Consumer confidence improved slightly in July, with expectations for the economy rising slightly, although pessimism remains high, according to the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index, released Tuesday. The index now stands at 59.5, up from 57.6 in June.

The Case-Shiller index, created by economists Karl E. Case and Robert J. Shiller, is widely considered the most reliable read on home values. The housing index compares the latest sales of detached houses with previous sales and accounts for factors such as remodeling that might affect a house’s sale price over time.

Sixteen of the 20 metro areas tracked by the Case-Shiller index posted increases on a month-over-month basis, but only Washington was up from May 2010, rising 1.3%. From April to May, Los Angeles was up 0.5%, San Diego 0.2% and San Francisco 1.8%.

The index also provides seasonally adjusted data. S&P has warned that the adjusted data are unreliable because the high number of distressed properties has distorted the market.

Ennis House Foundation chairwoman Marla Felber confirmed on Saturday the exact price: $4,458,084.58, which represents the organization’s balance on a construction loan taken out to repair L.A.’s most prestigious fixer.

At more than 6,000 square feet, Ennis House is the largest of Wright’s four “textile-block” houses in Southern California, so named because their patterned concrete blocks were knitted together to serve as structure and decoration, inside and out. The Maya-influenced design, which consists of more than 27,000 blocks, deteriorated over time, sustained serious damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake and then partly collapsed during heavy rainfall in 2005.

Photos: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis house

The foundation spent about $6.5 million on structural and seismic repairs to the Los Feliz landmark, and remaining repairs will cost an estimated $6 million more.

Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, announced in June 2009 that the foundation was putting Ennis House up for sale with hopes that a private owner could better finish the job and act as the property’s steward.

The house languished on the market even as the initial $15-million asking price tumbled. By this January, when The Times published an article on Ennis House as part of a Landmark Houses series, the price had dropped to $7,495,000.

In a region where coastal mansions and hilltop estates exceed $10 million and the compound formerly owned by TV mogul Aaron Spelling recently went for $85 million, $4.5 million might seem low for a piece of Wright history. But Felber said the foundation had few options. Because the foundation’s top priority was responsible stewardship of Wright’s architecture, she said, the board of directors rejected larger offers from corporations. Felber would not divulge how large those offers were, where they came from or how many were rejected.

Preservationists have speculated whether a rich celebrity or house-collecting architecture aficionado would step forward and assume the responsibility for Ennis House, but Felber said the foundation had fielded “no serious offers.”

Felber confirmed that the Ennis House construction loan had been guaranteed by Burkle and that he had first right of refusal on any bid. But Felber disputed the notion that the foundation was the victim of a deal gone bad: $4.5 million paid for a property that has benefitted from $6.5 million in restoration work. She said that the first phase of restoration would not have happened without Burkle’s support and that no one else expressed a commitment to future repairs.

“He was the only one to step up,” she said.

The sale closed Friday. Burkle, who could not be reached for comment, is the founder of the investment firm Yucaipa Companies and a fundraiser for the Democratic Party. He lives full-time in London but also owns Greenacres, the 1920s Beverly Hills estate built for silent film star Harold Lloyd. He is on the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

As a teen living in San Bernardino County, Burkle aspired to be an architect and traveled to see the Ennis House, a spokesman said. He left a note asking to be notified if the house ever were to open for touring; the owner later called young Burkle and invited him to see Wright’s creation.

The house was built for Charles and Mabel Ennis, proprietors of a men’s clothing store and admirers of Maya art and architecture.

When The Times surveyed historians, top architects and preservationists in 2008 for their picks for Southern California’s best houses of all time, Ennis House finished No. 3. Only Rudolph Schindler’s groundbreaking Kings Road House in West Hollywood and Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs ranked higher.

Architecture critic and former Dwell magazine editor Kerrie Jacobs recalled her first tour of Ennis House.

“Usually, in Wright houses, I feel a little claustrophobic, a little trapped in the man’s tightly choreographed conception of domestic life,” she said. “But during my one visit to Ennis, I felt as if I was in a different world, someplace I’d never been before — and maybe someplace Wright had never been before either.”

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