In a master-planned community called Tartesso, homebuilder D.B. Horton is building and selling homes for as little as $82 a square foot. Considering that the city of Portland, which is hardly the nation’s least-affordable housing market, thinks that $651 a square foot is “affordable housing,” how does D.B. Horton manage to build homes for less than one-seventh of that cost?
Tartesso is located in the Phoenix suburb of Buckeye, which is the biggest city in America you’ve probably never heard of: at 392 square miles, it’s has the fifteenth-largest area of any city in America. But many of the bigger ones are more counties than cities; really, only Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix itself occupy more land.
Most of the land in Buckeye is vacant: with around 70,000 residents, the population density was just 165 per square mile in 2017. But it is on an interstate freeway connecting it to one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing urban areas, allowing for rapid growth. The above map of Buckeye reveals that it’s about 50 miles long, north to south, and includes several pieces that are either totally disconnected from the rest of the city or are connected only by the width of a single street. This is a clear sign of opportunistic annexation with the aim of building a major city.
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Development ground to a halt after the 2008 financial crash. In 2010, the original planner of Tartesso sold more than 10,000 acres to a California developer for $80 million, or less than $8,000 an acre. D.R. Horton in turn purchased lots with infrastructure for $24,000 apiece. These lots are small — many look to be around 40’x120′ — so the homes D.B. Horton is building tend to be long and narrow (though more than twice as wide as a Portland skinny house). That probably saves a little on infrastructure costs, but you can get homes with bigger lots for not much more money. For example, here’s a 3,700-square-foot house, albeit one built in 2006, on an acre lot for around $98 a square foot.
Buckeye has a general plan and zoning code, but unlike some cities that write their plans for 20 years or more, Buckeye reviews and amends its plan almost every year. In between amendments, rezoning is easy, requiring only a three-page application and two public hearings that are probably perfunctory (after all, hardly anyone lives in the city to protest). Buckeye’s permit schedules seem to be aimed at developers more than individuals, but the total permit costs per home would have to be low for new homes to sell at these prices.
In any case, Buckeye shows that the recipe for housing affordability is clear. Start with cheap land (and nearly all rural land in America is cheap if there aren’t government constraints), add a municipal government interested in promoting rather than obstructing single-family home construction, and mix in utility bonds to pay for infrastructure. The result is housing affordable to people with a wide range of incomes.
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, it’s has the fifteenth-largest area of any city in America. But many of the bigger ones are more counties than cities; really, only Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix itself occupy more land.
” ~anti-planner
I’m not sure what you’re getting here. There are official definitions for what is a city and a county that you’re ignoring. The “…more counties than cities” hints at that you have an idea – maybe well-formed, maybe not – of what a city or county really should be. But you don’t share that with the readers.
Jacksonville, FL is the largest city by area in the US. Does it have rural areas that are undeveloped? Sure. But all of the city is really part of the same community focused around the same dense, core area. People living off in a rural area off Plummer Rd. in West Jacksonville are just as plugged into the same economy, the same jobs and the same city as someone in Brooklyn or Arlington or Arrowhead or Tallyrand.
While I find the idea of giant county-city government impractical, I wouldn’t say they’re not a city. If anything, at least in large metro areas like Phoenix, St. Louis, or Minneapolis, the greater city spans multiple counties. If anything the county is the weird contraption in all of it in those situations. The county is more city than county, to play with the same wording.
Somebody somewhere is already planning an extension of Valley Metro to Buckeye.
prk166,
Some cities such as Jacksonville and Nashville have done city-county consolidations. According to the Census Bureau, only half of Duval County is urban, but it is all counted as part of Jacksonville. Similarly, the large sizes of Sitka, Juneau, Wrangell, and Anchorage are due to the fact that they are boroughs, not cities, and only 6 percent of Anchorage and less than 1 percent of the rest of them are urban. Wikipedia’s list of cities by land area even shows the city-county consolidations in bold face. The only cities bigger than Buckeye that aren’t consolidations are the ones I listed above. Political boundaries respond to local political conditions and don’t necessarily really indicate what it means to be an economic city.
Buckeye’s boundary may be considered political too. The difference between it and Jacksonville is that the city of Buckeye is actively promoting development of all the land within its borders, while Jacksonville is not actively promoting development of all the land in Duval County.
82 per square foot…. Only the finest chicken wire and spackle……
All the large “cities” in Alaska are combined Borough-City governments, and while Anchorage is a “small city” the other cities would be towns in any other state. For purposes of comparison like this are certainly much more like counties.
I do think there is a place for zoning to avoid large disaster developments, like thousands of tiny houses far from the urban area. But promoting low cost housing that is safe and decent, especially if done over time so that problems can be corrected as they show up, is what any country that wants immigrants must have.
Are the residents of Tartesso going to pay for the inevitable expansion of I-10? Or an eventual Loop 404 freeway? You don’t need to despoil the desert 20 miles in the middle of nowhere to find affordable housing in Phoenix; on Zillow.com just now I saw almost 2,000 single family homes currently for sale within the city limits of Phoenix for less than $200,000. You could also probably claim that some exurban township near Detroit has cheap homes; it doesn’t mean anything for cities where demand significantly outstrips even the potential of supply.
You don’t need to despoil the desert 20 miles in the middle of nowhere to find affordable housing in Phoenix;
Those new houses are certainly much more energy efficient than the old ones in Phoenix. So the solution might be to de-despoil Phoenix by moving everyone to the new suburb and bulldozing it and restoring it to its natural state. Do the same for Manhattan. Make it a national park by returning it to its natural, pre-human state. Then this guy can stop crying.