Category Archives: Housing

“We want you to visit our state,” said Tom McCall, Oregon’s best-known governor, “but for heaven’s sake, don’t move here.” To “preserve Oregon,” he signed the 1973 law that led to the urban-growth boundaries that confine nearly all development to less than 1-1/4 percent of the state. McCall never admitted it, but by making housing expensive, this effectively discourages people from moving here.

Today, Oregon leaders must be chagrinned by the fact that Washington has outplanned Oregon. The Johnny-come-latelys up north didn’t pass their growth-management law until almost two decades after Oregon, yet Seattle housing today is considerably more expensive than Portland’s. According to Zillow, the median Seattle-area home is worth almost $100,000 more than one in the Portland area.

In an apparent effort to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon, Portland and Oregon elected officials have passed numerous laws and ordinances that will make Oregon housing even less affordable than it was before — all in the name of affordable housing, of course. These include affordable housing mandates that require homebuilders to increase new home prices to pay for the below-cost homes they are required to provide, increasing property taxes to pay for affordable housing, and requiring landlords who raise rents to pay the moving costs of any tenant who moves out. Continue reading →

A new report from the Grassroot Institute urges Hawaii to address housing affordability issues by building out, not up — that is, by allowing low-density development of rural areas rather than building higher densities in existing urban areas. The report notes that Hawaii’s 1961 land-use law has confined development to 35 percent of Oahu, and less than 6 percent of the other islands, which created an artificial scarcity of housing. Building denser housing won’t solve the problem because dense housing costs more than low-density housing.

Click image to download a copy of this report.
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The Antiplanner will be in Honolulu on Monday to talk about this issue at a Grassroot Institute luncheon. If you expect to be in Hawaii that day, you can register for the luncheon on Eventbrite. I hope to see you there.

“Fire Damages Del Mar Mansion,” NBC San Diego News reported yesterday. The mansion in question, the story added, had three bedrooms, three baths, and 2,242 square feet.

Merriam-Webster defines “mansion” as “a large, imposing residence.” The Free Dictionary says it is “a large, stately house.” Call me old fashioned, but 2,242 square feet doesn’t seem that large, imposing, or stately to me. Maybe compared with tiny homes it is, but even in California, most people have not yet been squeezed into tiny homes.

What is large about the house is the value: according to Zillow, it is currently worth about $5.3 million. That’s not because it has a great ocean view: it sits four houses back from the ocean and its views are clearly blocked by bigger houses in front of it. A nearby house that does sit on the ocean, but is only 1,851 square feet, is currently on sale for $11.8 million. These high prices are due to California’s various anti-growth policies. Continue reading →

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal didn’t say much about housing, other than it should be “affordable” and “adequate.” However, Architectural Digest has filled in the blanks to show what “a ‘Green New Deal’ would look like for architecture.”

Surprise! It’s New Urbanism, that is, three- to five-story apartment buildings, often with ground-floor shops. At least, that’s what the photos in the article show.

The text of the article says that buildings that “receive energy along a one-way artery from a faraway grid” would be replaced by buildings that are “mini power plants that can not only produce enough energy to supply their own needs, but also fuel vehicles and send excess energy back to the grid.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but why did the editors choose to use Greenwich Village-like photos to illustrate the article? Continue reading →

The latest to question the urban-planning mantra that densification makes housing more affordable is none other than Richard Florida, who is famous for telling cities they need to attract the creative class. In an article in CityLab, Florida cites new research by MIT planner Yonah Freemark that finds that rezoning neighborhoods for denser housing may actually make housing less affordable.

Antiplanner readers know of the debate between so-called YIMBYs who want to make housing more affordable by “building up” and those who want to “build out,” i.e., build low-density housing on the fringes of existing urban areas. The YIMBYs claim that residents of single-family neighborhoods who resist densification are racists and are keeping housing unaffordable. The Antiplanner responds that dense housing is more expensive and therefore can’t make housing more affordable.

Freemark’s analysis of upzoning in Chicago finds that it leads developers to replace low-cost existing housing with luxury multifamily housing. The result is increased prices. While the laws of supply and demand suggest that an increasing supply of housing would make housing more affordable in the long run, Freemark found that upzoning did not lead to an increase in the number of housing units built; it just influenced where they were built. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →