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Category Archives: Housing

The War on the Working Class

By | | Housekeeping, Housing
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It is always a thrill for an author to receive the dust jacket for a new book, so I’ll indulge myself by presenting the complete jacket for the Antiplanner’s latest buying that generic cialis She is not comfortable doing the things he likes to do in bed. It educates cialis online uk mouthsofthesouth.com teens about traffic rules, regulations and codes. This will lead to serious consequences and it may effect your mental discount pharmacy viagra mouthsofthesouth.com well being. It may give you an hour of pleasure but will keep you in bed for the next 24 hours or cheapest cialis professional more in an ill state. book, American Nightmare (click on the image for a full-sized, 1.5 megabyte, view). Here is a brief preview of the book, which is scheduled for publication on May 16.

Forthcoming Book: American Nightmare

By | | Housing, Mission
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The American dream of families owning their own homes has become a victim of class warfare, with the middle class attempting to suppress homeownership among the working class and other people they view as undesirable neighbors. That, at least, is one of the major themes of American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Home Ownership, which the Cato Institute will publish next May.

The Antiplanner’s work on this book is the major reason why I haven’t posted as regularly this year as in previous years. I began research for the book in January, started writing in July, and submitted the final manuscript to Cato on November 4. Though this was my third book since starting this blog, it was the most time-consuming because it required so much new research and analyses.

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Sorry Smart Growthers, Baby Boomers Aren’t Interested

By | | Housing
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One of the articles of faith among smart-growth advocates is that retiring baby boomers will want to move into downtown or suburban high-density, mixed-use developments. In 2009, “Chris” Nelson himself came to Damascus, a very low-density suburb of Portland, to tell residents how wonderful it would be if they rezoned their city for high-density housing. (Nelson is the University of Utah planning professor who claims the United States will have 22 million “surplus” single-family homes by 2025 because so many Americans will prefer to live in multifamily housing.)

A recent survey of affluent baby boomers tossed some water on this theory. The survey found that 65 percent of baby boomers plan to stay in their current homes when they return (down from 80 percent of their parents). Of the remaining 35 percent, only 4 percent say they want to move to a downtown condominium and just 3 percent say they want to live in a suburban condo. By comparison, 14 percent say they hope to move to a resort community.
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This suggests that twice as many want to move to lower densities as those who aspire to higher densities. While this survey was only of high-income baby boomers, I suspect the answers of other baby boomers wouldn’t be much different. Any investors who put money into downtown or suburban condos based on Nelson’s ideas are likely to lose that money.

Now, This Is Ridiculous

By | | City planning, Housing
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What’s the most ridiculous zoning rule or decision you’ve ever heard of? Here’s a candidate: Alexandria, Virginia (which wants a Portland-like streetcar) has told property owners in one neighborhood that replacement of rusty chain-link fences violates the city’s historic preservation ordinance.

“While many feel that [chain-link] fences have negative connotations, this material has played an important role in the development of mid-century vernacular housing and their cultural landscape,” the city’s historic preservation staff noted. “By eradicating this ‘simple fencing solution,’ the applicant would be removing an important contextual clue to the original occupants of this neighborhood.”

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Why Did Homeownership Rates Grow?

By | | Housing
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Between 1890 and 1940, U.S. homeownership rates hovered between 44 and 48 percent. Then they suddenly grew to 62 percent by 1960. What happened to cause the rates to rise so much?

The conventional answer is government intervention. Kenneth Jackson, author of Crabgrass Frontier, argues that legislation passed during the New Deal would “revolutionize the home finance industry” by introducing amortizing mortgages, reducing downpayments to as little as 7 percent, and reducing interest rates. He adds that, “One reason that long-term mortgage arrangements were not typical prior to the 1930s was that an 1864 amendment to the 1863 National Bank Act prohibited nationally chartered banks from making direct loans for real estate transactions.”

However, Jackson has many of his facts wrong. As early as the 1880s, at least some homebuilders offered homes with down payments as low as 7 percent. Amortizing mortgages were invented in the 1890s and became popular in the 1920s. And Congress amended the law to allow national banks to make real estate loans in 1913.

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The History of Home Ownership

By | | Book reviews, Housing
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An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership.

The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can only be guessed at by the fact that the vast majority of American lived in rural areas and most–roughly two-thirds in 1890–American farmers owned their farms and, by extension, their homes. Between 1890 and 1940, census data found that about 40 to 45 percent of Americans owned their own homes. Then there was a sudden increase to 62 percent in 1960, after which it slowly crept up to 65 percent.

The Antiplanner has always assumed that the 40 to 45 percent of households that owned their homes represented middle-class (white-collar) families, and the 20 percent growth after 1940 represented working-class (blue-collar) families. But as Margaret Garb shows in City of American Dreams, reality is a bit more complicated.

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Building Micro-Homes in Portland

By | | Housing, News commentary, Urban areas
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Okay, it is one thing for someone who wants to live within a block of Central Park to pay $700 a month for a 90-square-foot “apartment.” But now a major homebuilder, D.R. Horton, is building 364- to 687-square-foot micro-homes in Portland.

“You can’t just keep going farther from the city and acquiring farm land,” says Portland advertiser Jim Beriault. Well, actually, you could if it weren’t for that pesky urban-growth boundary. Oregon (which is 98-percent rural) has plenty of land, and there are plenty of urban areas that are much bigger than Portland.

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Ending the Mortgage Interest Deduction

By | | Housing
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Realtors and home builders strongly defend the mortgage interest deduction as a way of increasing homeownership, which is supposed to be a good thing. But does it really work that well?

Edward Glaeser doesn’t think so. While he agrees that there are social benefits to increasing homeownership, he notes that the mortgage-interest deduction mainly benefits the wealthy, who are almost always homeowners anyway. He also finds that, while the subsidy has changed significantly over the years, those changes have not been reflected by changes in homeownership.

Charging taxes on interest is double taxation because the people who earn the interest also have to pay taxes on it. So, as Wikipedia notes, when Congress created the income tax in 1913, it allowed people to deduct the interest from all personal loans, not just mortgages. But in 1986, Congress (no longer worried about double taxation) repealed that deduction for all loans other than home loans. The stated reason for leaving that deduction was to promote homeownership.

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