Land Prices Grow Fastest in Dense Areas

Land prices are highest and appreciate more rapidly in areas with dense housing, according to a study from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). The study is accompanied by a spreadsheet that shows the prices per acre of land from 2012 to 2017 in 900 counties, more than 8,000 zip codes, and 11,000 census tracts.

Just looking at counties, it is clear that there are wide differentials across the country. An acre of residential land in Alameda County, California (which contains Oakland and Berkeley was estimated to be worth $3.0 million in 2017 and that value had grown 124 percent since 2012. Meanwhile, an acre in Harris County, Texas was worth just a quarter million in 2017 and had grown just 38 percent since 2012. Like most counties, both of these contain some rural land so the values of urban land in them may be higher.

Land in Multnomah County (Portland) was worth $1.3 million an acre in 2017, which had grown by 107 percent since 2012. Similarly, King County (Seattle but also a lot of suburban and rural land) was worth $1.3 million with an 86 percent increase since 2012.

Residential land in Dallas, Fulton (Atlanta), Hillsborough (Tampa), Marion (Indianpolis), and Mecklenburg (Charlotte) counties is worth less than $250,000 an acre, and prices tend to have grown around 30 to 40 percent in the previous five years. Yet the urban areas in all of these counties are growing much faster than those in California, Oregon, and Washington; in fact, people are fleeing states like California and Washington for more affordable states like Idaho and Texas.
Their eating patterns were also http://secretworldchronicle.com/2019/09/ep-9-40-season-of-the-witch/ cialis price taken into consideration. The best method in this kind of problem and you just viagra sans prescription canada have to deal with. That is why; all the medicines that are easily available with these online stores. tadalafil 20mg generic Nephroprotective effect of Withania somnifera: a dose-dependent secretworldchronicle.com cialis online study.
Density certainly contributes to high prices. Based on densities from the 2010 census, the highest-density zip codes were in New York City, and land prices were all multiple millions of dollars per acre. The highest-density zip codes outside of New York City were in Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco, and they too were priced well above $1 million per acre. Overall, for the 8,345 counties for which data were available, the correlation between density and land values was 0.58, which isn’t perfect but still high.

Dense housing built in dense areas can’t be affordable unless the densities are great enough to offset the higher land prices. The least-expensive zip codes in Portland are five times more expensive than most of the zip codes in Houston, and many Portland zip codes are ten to twenty times more expensive. Of course, that means Portland has to build 20 to 80 units per acre to get the land costs per unit equal to quarter-acre lots in Houston. The situation is even worse in San Francisco, where the lowest-priced zip code is 55 times more expensive than most Houston zip codes.

When combined with the fact that the per square-foot cost of constructing dense housing is a lot more than single-family homes, these data show that claims that density will make housing affordable are just hot air. The solution to affordability is low-density housing at the urban fringe, not high-density housing in already-developed areas.