Condo Booms Go Bust

A couple of years ago, it seemed like every major downtown in America was experiencing a condo boom, lending support to planners’ claims that baby boomers and others were moving back to the inner cities. Now most of those booms are busting: Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Portland — all the hip places.

Condo and office towers under construction along Portland’s South Waterfront.

Of course, real estate prices are declining almost everywhere. But there was supposed to be this huge pent-up demand for downtown living. Planner Harriet Tregoning, who once held the exalted title of “Secretary of Smart Growth” in Maryland, even wrote about the “coming oversupply of single-family home” in a recent book on urban planning. (Her article is given added credibility by being preceded by one by the Antiplanner.)

Yet in city after city, developers saturated the market for high-density downtown living by building just a few condos. While I am sure the market will return, just like the market for all housing, developers should be wary of listening to planners in the future.

Here is Tregoning’s reasoning for why we are going to have a surplus of single-family homes in the future:

1. All dogs have four legs.

2. Most animals at the zoo have four legs.

3. Most animals at the zoo are dogs.

Oops, excuse me, that isn’t her reasoning, but hers is very similar. Here is her argument:

1. Most people who live in high-density developments (excuse me, “vibrant, walkable communities”) are singles or childless couples.

2. Only 32 percent of American households have children, and this is expected to decline to 28 percent by 2025.

3. Therefore far more future Americans will want to live in vibrant walkable communities and far fewer will want single-family homes with large yards.

In particular, says Tregoning, as baby boomers become empty nesters, they will want to enjoy second childhoods “in vibrant, walkable communities, enjoying all of the cultural and mental stimulation they can.” Meanwhile, most young families won’t want to buy the large homes vacated by the baby boomers as they, for the most part, won’t have children either.

I am sure all of the brilliant readers of the Antiplanner can see the flaw in her reasoning: Just because some childless households like living in vibrant walkable communities doesn’t mean they all will. In fact, the evidence indicates that only a small minority of childless people aspire to such lifestyles.

Between 1990 and 2000, the populations of virtually every demographic category — all household sizes, all age classes, all races, all incomes, all levels of education — grew far faster in the suburbs than in the cities.

After the 2000 census, some researchers were quick to proclaim a downtown rebound. They found that downtown populations in two dozen American cities had grown by almost 50,000. Wow! Almost 50,000!

Meanwhile, the suburban populations of those same two dozen cities grew by a mere 6.8 million. That’s only 137 times as much as the downtown growth. The central cities as a whole, including downtowns, had grown by less than 1.5 million, or less than a quarter as much as the suburbs. The downtown populations of four of the cities in the sample actually declined.

In addition, I can’t help but noticing that many of the condo booms were in cities (Miami, Minneapolis, Portland) where planners had used urban-growth boundaries to create artificial shortages of single-family homes, thereby increasing the demand for multi-family housing. Or in Nevada, where the shortage of single-family homes was created by government ownership of most of the land in the state. How many condo buyers could you find in those cities if residents could buy single-family homes at Houston prices?

I can’t speak for my fellow baby boomers, but I know that I find vibrant inner-city neighborhoods extremely attractive — for about an hour. Then I find myself saying, “Get me outta here!

Of course, I may just be weird. I love trains, I love cycling, and I hate driving. I don’t like yard work, and I enjoy good food. It seems like I am a perfect candidate for vibrant walkable neighborhoods — but I doubt if I will ever live in a big city again.

Maybe other baby boomers will want to return to such neighborhoods. If they do, I have no doubt developers will build them places to move to — provided government doesn’t get in their way. In the meantime, we don’t need planners to use our taxes to subsidize high-density housing, and we don’t need planners to use zoning to penalize low-density housing.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

10 Responses to Condo Booms Go Bust

  1. Tad Winiecki says:

    Some reasons I don’t want to live in a condo yet:
    1. I have read that condo owners associations are one of the most oppressive of governments.
    2. I need a place for my bikes, motorcycles, car, van, boats, trailers.
    3. My shop is really useful to keep my tools and use them to build things.
    4. My wife really likes her gardens.
    5 It is nice to have a place for my children and grandchhildren to sleep and play when they visit us.
    6. Sometimes I like to play blues music loud through my 15″ theater type speakers.
    7. My wife doesn’t like clorinated water – she likes our well water.
    8. I like the fresh eggs my ducks give me.

  2. Dan says:

    In addition, I can’t help but noticing that many of the condo booms were in cities (Miami, Minneapolis, Portland) where planners had used urban-growth boundaries to create artificial shortages of single-family homes, thereby increasing the demand for multi-family housing.

    Do we have any evidence that the reason Miami, Minneapolis, Portland et al. created UGBs was to create artificial shortages in SFDs?

    No?

    Could it be that UGBs were created for other reasons and you just don’t like them, so you make up stuff?

    DS

  3. prk166 says:

    DS –> They may not have created UGFs with the express intention of directly creating shortages but surely they’re intelligent enough to realize the implications of them. Although in the case of Minneapolis some of the boundaries are self-imposed. Some townships have purposely grown in ways so that they have no need to bring in city-water and city-sewer (how the Met Council gets it’s power since they operate those things & can attach many strings to their use) nor will the Met Council find it worth running it through them.

    Another note on downtowns I’ve found is that their definitions can seem a bit funny. IIRC @2000 MPLStown said they had @30,0000 people living downtown. But some of the areas they included as downtown to me weren’t actually part of downtown; just areas of regular neighborhoods close enough to be included.

    I love city living. But I can’t imagine why people would give up their homes and their communities to go off to some new place and start all over again. Especially when they’re homes are likely paid for. Condos are nice but the association fees are getting ridiculous. It was common for them to be $250-350 in some of the ones in downtown MPLStown. Excuse me? That’s not a fee; that’s rent!

  4. JimKarlock says:

    Dan said: Do we have any evidence that the reason Miami, Minneapolis, Portland et al. created UGBs was to create artificial shortages in SFDs? … Could it be that UGBs were created for other reasons and you just don’t like them, so you make up stuff?
    JK: Could it be that UGBs were created for other reasons We DO have evidence as to who wants to keep tight UGB in Oregon: it is all about land value – some want to buy cheap land, others want their land value to go up:
    Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Washington DC
    Club Sierra San Francisco CA
    Henry Hill & Company Napa CA
    League of Conservation Voters Washington DC
    Messinger Alida R. New York NY
    National Trust for Historic Pres
    Rockefeller Laurance New York NY
    The Partnership Project, Inc. Washington DC
    Trust Dorothy Lemelson Incline Village NV
    Wildlife Defenders of Washington DC
    This bunch of land thieves put up $547,500 to oppose property rights in Oregon.
    (from: M37-BigOutOFStateMoney.pdf)

    Then there is Lemleson, the winery owner who put up over a million to keep city riff raft out of his neighborhood.
    And the Nature Conservancy that want to buy people’s land cheap by using government to destroy its value.

    Thanks
    JK

  5. Neal Meyer says:

    I live in a fairly nice condo, 1,100 square feet, built in 1965, which I purchased 3 years ago for $80,000. My monthly maintenance fees are now $295 per month.

    I had an apartment which was a steal considering the neighborhood I was living in, (and only 12 minutes from work) but the apartment was only 600 square feet and my library of books had grown so large that it was getting quite cramped.

    I now make quite a bit more money than I did several years ago. Tad’s comments are right on the money. I like the idea of having a tool shed in a garage to do some handiwork, along with the extra space for my even larger library.

    I also live on the second floor and have to access my apartment via narrow stairwell. Last year, unbeknownst to me, I had a leak one day (for which I am liable via the association by-laws) which went through to the ceiling of my downstairs neighbor’s condo unit. She called property management and they called a locksmith, who enabled entry into my property to fix the leak, rather than call me at work. They then charged me $250 for a 60 minute job, for which I could have gone down to the nearby Home Depot and gotten the necessary parts for $20 and done it myself. I only found out about this four weeks after the break in happened when I received a letter in the mail, threatening me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay up. Oh, and by the way, you do know that you are tardy in your payment don’t you? That is why we the board find it necessary to threaten you to compel payment.

    I had lived in apartments for a number of years before this and had never experienced anything like that before.

    Needless to say, at our annual association meeting, I had a confrontation with the board. I gave them a thrashing that was so fierce that afterwards some of my neighbors told me after seeing me deal with them that they never, ever wanted to face a confrontation with me. One of my neighbors told me he was quaking in his shoes.

    Of course here in Houston, we still enjoy housing at affordable rates, though there are some that are diligently doing their damndest here to turn Houston into another Smart Growth nightmare, which of course they will try to exempt themselves from. I will probably be trading up in another few years for an SFH, but one thing I am not looking forward to is trying to sell my condo. After all, it took the previous owner about 5 1/2 months to find me, not to mention some worried pressure on the part of the realty company to get me to close on the deal.

    We have added 500,000 new residents since the 2000 Census, but only about 180,000 of those are in Houston proper. The rest are either in other satellite cities or are in unincorporated areas. Out in suburban Houston, the school districts are adding students by the thousands while the hip, inner city types counter that the inner loop is densifying just as massively when in fact only a few large new developments are getting built. So much for the myths that everyone wants to live in hip condos.

  6. johngalt says:

    “Condos are nice but the association fees are getting ridiculous. It was common for them to be $250-350 in some of the ones in downtown MPLStown. Excuse me? That’s not a fee; that’s rent!”

    If you have a single family house here in Portland your water bill might be $80-100 per month, landscaping might cost you another $100, putting away a little each month to handle gutter cleaning, roofing, painting and other maintenance might be another $50-100, insurance might cost another $75, window cleaning might run $25, etc. Would you characterize those expenses as “rent” too? These are the same things those HOA dues cover…

  7. Francis King says:

    The photograph in the main article reminds me of tower blocks built in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. It was considered to be the latest and best way of living. The first ones built were built properly, as no doubt the ones featured were. Later ones weren’t even bolted together, and one day the whole corner fell off a tower block.

    There are too many problems with tower blocks. If they are built too close together, then they cast shadows on each other. When you built them sufficiently far apart, then the density advantage disappears – and the public land around the tower blocks can be ‘indefensible’, an area used by muggers and stalkers, not the locals. Most people don’t want to live so far from the ground either – about four storeys is the most that really works.

    All over the UK, we’ve been pulling down these monstrosities, and building terraced housing instead, which has the same land density, but everyone gets their own front door key. In Bath, UK, where I live, the old terraced housing can be very dense indeed, with sometimes four storeys (one underground, and three up).

    Mr Meyer’s comments. I understand where he is coming from. I owned an apartment, and the boiler leaked, which caused water to go through the ceiling of the apartment below. I felt really bad about this, since I liked my neighbour. The locksmith costs were covered by insurance, though.

    I cannot understand why apartments are not water-proofed. The underlay should be waterproof, with a drain to the outside wall. It’s not the first time that something has leaked in an apartment, and it surely won’t be the last.

  8. pdtravis says:

    “Yet in city after city, developers saturated the market for high-density downtown living by building just a few condos.”

    JUST A FEW?! Really? Have you actually been to San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Miami, (just to name some cities I am familiar with) lately? Thousands of new condos in just the past five years. Sure, many of these markets are saturated but by vastly more than “just a few” condos. (Most of the country is housing saturated right now which has little to do with planning and A LOT to do with easy credit and a hyper-ventilating real estate industry.)

    “… I know that I find vibrant inner-city neighborhoods extremely attractive — for about an hour. Then I find myself saying, “Get me outta here!”

    To each his own. I find vibrant inner-city neighborhoods to be my first choice for living. Unfortunately, truly “vibrant” city neighborhoods are (a) fairly rare in the United States, and (b) often prohibitively expensive where they do exist.

    Really enjoy the blog, thanks.

  9. Dan says:

    So far, new urban projects weather downturn better

    Philip Langdon and Robert Steuteville

    Product diversity, closeness to transit, and the appeal of urban living help offset the biggest housing decline in years.

    Sales of new housing slowed in August to the most laggard pace in seven years, and some conventional homebuilders reported losing tens of millions of dollars per quarter. New urban projects, however, have kept chugging along — many of them marginally affected by the market’s decline.

    As higher mortgage rates and the subprime lending crisis drove many homebuyers out of the market, the number of unsold new and existing houses jumped to nearly 4.5 million nationwide — almost twice as many as in early 2005, according to The New York Times. Figures for July showed the median price of new housing had dropped 7.5 percent from a year earlier, to $225,700, the sharpest monthly price decline since December 1970.

    Some new urban developments are suffering along with the rest of the market. “The buyers are basically on strike,” said John Anderson of New Urban Builders, a developer of traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) based in Chico, California. “We’re selling one house a month in a project that should be selling four to eight. We’re not decreasing prices, but we are offering incentives like paid closing costs and landscaping the backyard for free.”

    Other new urban developments are down, but not nearly as much as their conventional competitors. “We continue to roll right along,” said David Tomes, managing director of the 600-acre Norton Commons project in Louisville, Kentucky, designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. “Builders aren’t building high-end spec houses in Norton Commons or elsewhere. That market is dead throughout Louisville. Banks aren’t loaning money for high-end specs.”

    Nonetheless, spec houses in the $300,000 to $450,000 range are “selling very well” in Norton Commons, and “we continue to roll along with contract homes at $500,000,” Tomes told New Urban News.

    Bill Gietema of Arcadia Realty Company in Dallas-Fort Worth said his firm’s two active TNDs “are outperforming their submarkets” (competing subdivisions in the same trade areas). One of the TNDs, HomeTown, in North Richland Hills, is selling at “about a 10 percent slower velocity” than before the downturn, Gietema said, but in light of the overall market, that’s considered a healthy performance. “Competitors have closed down their models,” he noted. “We’ve stolen everybody else’s share.” The other TND, Capella Park, on the south side of Dallas, is “outselling competing neighborhoods five to one,” Gietema said.

    DS

  10. elgrande says:

    I’m not surprised to see busts in Miami and Las Vegas – both of those cities are notorious for real estate scams and bubbles. The others you mention are far from busting, in fact there IS a huge demand for urban living in Minneapolis, Portland and elsewhere – for the condos and other syles.

    Please don’t equate high-rise condos with “urban living”. You can still have a home with a yard and a shed and not be 100% dependent on your car. To me, that is the essence of urbanity. I would never want to live in Manhattan, but I consider myself an urbanite. I would sooner drop dead than live among the strip malls.

    The unfortunate truth is that planning screwed our cities in the 50s and 60s, and we’ll need some semblance of it to get us back. Ideally, however, we’d just stop subsidizing the price of gas with our military and at $6 a gallon, the market would bring us back to a sensible place.

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