“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.
As a recent op-ed in the Orange County Register observes, the “fundamental cause” of California’s high housing prices is “regulations that block expansion of housing on the urban fringe.” The op-ed, by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, notes that the densification solutions pushed by urban planners and “the green left” won’t make housing more affordable, but it will have all kinds of negative social impacts.
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While members of the California legislature have proposed to address housing affordability by banning zoning in transit corridors, Oregon’s Speaker of the House has gone even further by proposing a bill that would ban single-family zoning throughout the state. Of course, there’s no evidence that single-family zoning makes housing unaffordable: median home prices in Dallas (which has it) are about the same and the same multiples of median family incomes as in Houston (which doesn’t have it).
The Oregon legislature is also working hard to pass the nation’s first statewide rent control law. As proposed, the law would be more generous than most rent-control rules, allowing landlords to raise rents by inflation plus 7 percent. But it would also limit a landlord’s ability to evict tenants. The only possible impact of such laws on housing will be to reduce long-term supply.
Long-term housing supply and collectivist ideologies are probably less important to politicians than to be seen doing something, anything at all, about expensive housing — anything, that is, except to actually abolish the growth boundaries and other rules that limit low-density development on the urban fringe. As a result, no matter what laws the California and Oregon legislatures pass, housing in those states is going to remain unaffordable for the foreseeable future.
“These high prices are due to California’s various anti-growth policies.”
Riiiight. That price has nothing to do with being a block from the beach (or in the second case, actually being on the beach) in an exclusive San Diego neighborhood.
A mansion is an established estate of a given individual. Typically mansions are very large, but mansions in cities built in the heyday of industrial giants are no bigger than houses today.
Of course, Frank is right and these houses would not be so outrageously priced if they weren’t near the ocean in a very upmarket neighborhood. However, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and my house is a 2000 square foot 1970s vintage ranch home in a nice but in no way extraordinary suburban neighborhood in the East Bay. It’s would probably bring around a million bucks if I were to sell it. There is no way this price could be sustained without tremendous limitations on the supply of houses.
California has enough of a coast line that close to a million people could live within a block of the ocean (1100 miles times 300-foot block equals 40,000 acres or room for 320,000 homes). But it also has a coastal commission that keeps most land undeveloped and other laws that keep well over 90 percent of the state undeveloped. Without these laws, beachfront homes would be more expensive than other homes, but not by this amount.
“California has enough of a coast line that close to a million people could live within a block of the ocean (1100 miles times 300-foot block equals 40,000 acres or room for 320,000 homes). But it also has a coastal commission that keeps most land undeveloped and other laws that keep well over 90 percent of the state undeveloped. Without these laws, beachfront homes would be more expensive than other homes, but not by this amount.”
I’m not sorry, but The Antiplanner has lost it on this one. Only a small fraction of California’s coast is actually buildable due to bays and other openings, way less than 25%. Most of the California coastline is steep cliffs and mountains. Sheesh, Randal, get your brain in operation.
Speaking of coastlines, the points made by the French marxist Andre Gorz in his 1973 essay are still very valid and underlie the fundamental problem of cars in cities.
http://web.net/~lukmar/gorz.pdf“
BTW, shitheads, quoting a marxist who makes a correct point doesn’t make one a marxist. You know, like broken clocks are right twice per day. Jarrett Walker makes the same basic points about the problems of excessive auto use in cities, and he’s a hardcore, successful small businessman.
Calling those who disagree with you shitheads is not a good way to convince them you are correct or even worth listening to.
Msetty is just pissed off because Moonbeam 2.0 just canceled most of the high speed choo choo boondoggle. Oh horrors!
And a mansion is obviously a house that is 1sqft larger than whatever the local government planner lives in.
Certain states and cities have mansion taxes – a mansion is usually defined as a house/condo/coop valued at above $1,000,000.00 (less in some areas.) Meaning a lot of places under 1,000 square feet pay a mansion tax in some cities.
So anything that forces house values to rise is ok with them as they get more taxes.
Thank you, MSetty, for the comedic break:
You’ll never have socialism with that kind of people,” an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic.
[Hooray for traffic!]
…
The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle.
[You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.—Walter Duranty]
Reading the article about abolishing single family zoning in OR its interesting to note the narratives which for the most part are the same old tired ones the planner have been using for 20 years. In particular, “people don’t want to “blow open” the UGB” or “the American Dream is Changing” (to favor density and frankly sub par housing of course). Although we have seen the changing of the rhetoric on another level to get rid of zoning to pack people into transit areas, which might appeal to free market types, I don’t think this will last. What they are proposing is ultimately the same ole, same ole. It might confuse people and delay them for a while but ultimately their plans will fail.