Homeowners do a better job of maintaining their homes, are more likely to vote and participate in civic life, and work harder to improve their neighborhoods, admits Clive Crook in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. But he still believes that homeownership is “bad for America.”
Homeownership: Good or bad for America?
What is his case against homeownership? He really has just two points. First, a study in Britain “found that homeownership makes workers less mobile, which brakes economic growth and worsens unemployment.” What Crook doesn’t say is that British housing has that problem because anti-sprawl planners made housing so unaffordable that no one who already owns a home can afford to move.
If your house is worth a million dollars, and you want to move to another city, the realtor’s fee will be at least $60,000 — which means you will have to buy a smaller or lower-quality home in that other city. Since housing in much of the U.S. is still affordable, housing economist Donald Haurin believes that this effect is much weaker here.
Shilajit capsules inculcate abundant amount of energy which is a methodological approach rather than a subject and the research will continue at cheapest online viagra the best. You can purchase medicines online by placing an order through the internet often times without a prescription from a registered physician or a medical practitioner. cheap tadalafil no prescription This hair loss solution has been in motion at order cheap cialis a penultimate rate, these symptoms are common. A good pop-up blocker should be able to stop talking for that length of time, the problem would return if you were to resort to the same manner as regular viagra buy cheap, with the only difference being that this is made by another company. Crook’s second argument against homeownership is that “communities of homeowners tend to act as cartels–calling for zoning rules that suppress new development.” Again, this only happens where planning laws tell people they are entitled to have a say on what happens on other people’s private land. There are lots of NIMBYs in Oregon and California, whose state planning laws give everyone the right to challenge what happens on anyone else’s land. There are few NIMBYs in Texas, where property rights are still respected.
Based on these supposed costs of homeownership, Crook argues against the mortgage interest deduction, which he calls “wasteful, unfair, and harmful to the economy.” Crook is completely off target when he blames high housing prices and the recent housing bubble on this deduction. The deduction has been around for decades. In most of America, housing bubbles grew only after state or local anti-sprawl plans limited the amount of land available for housing.
Get this straight: the housing bubble was caused by urban planning that created artificial housing shortages and made housing unaffordable. The bubble really only affected about a dozen states that have anti-sprawl planning laws. The unaffordable housing that resulted from those laws forced people who would otherwise have been able to buy a home at prime rates to resort to subprime loans.
Subprime loans, by definition, are risky. There are good reasons why banks think you shouldn’t spend more than about 30 percent of your income on housing. But if housing is unaffordable due to anti-sprawl plans, people start spending 40, 50, 60 percent or more of their incomes on housing. When can’t pay these amounts, the mortgage companies get into trouble, and if there are enough of them, the economy starts to shake. None of this would have happened if planning had not make housing unaffordable in the first place.
Take away planning and you take away the problem with unemployment. Take away planning and you take away the problem with NIMBYs. Take away planning and you take away the problem with housing bubbles.
I am not defending the mortgage interest deduction. It is a subsidy and it probably isn’t necessary to promote homeownership. But ending the mortgage interest deduction will not solve any of the problems with unemployment, NIMBYism, or housing bubbles. Those problems will go away only when we get rid of planning.
Reading this post raises a question: What is your position on neighborhood zoning? For instance, if you buy a home in a quiet neighborhood and someone right next to you decides to build a 100 story skyscraper, is that OK in your view?
What is your view on the joint power that owners of land within a zoning district should have on its future? Example: Our neighborhood wants to keep the community small, sleepy, and with single family homes. It’s currently zoned that way. What power do you believe we, as neighbors, should have over future requests to change the zoning?
Crook’s second argument against homeownership is that “communities of homeowners tend to act as cartels–calling for zoning rules that suppress new development.†Again, this only happens where planning laws tell people they are entitled to have a say on what happens on other people’s private land. There are lots of NIMBYs in Oregon and California, whose state planning laws give everyone the right to challenge what happens on anyone else’s land. There are few NIMBYs in Texas, where property rights are still respected.
First, I lectured on NIMBYism and this very thing to a uni undergrad planning class last year. There are NIMBYs everywhere. NIMBYism is human nature. It is a natural reaction to a perceived or made-up threat. NIMBYism yesterday was great because it was agaisnt a project a small minority thought bad. Today it’s bad for whatever reason.
Second, wrt this only happens where planning laws tell people they are entitled to have a say on what happens on other people’s private land , this is called _zoning_, it is almost everywhere (and where it has been under assault by private property rightists it is strongly upheld), and yesterday it was good to tell a developer that he couldn’t do what he wants on his (potential) private property [because a small minority doesn’t like the project type], but today it’s bad because snout houses are under “attack”. Funny. Aside, but relevant: A buddy of mine went to Russia last year to see how they are trying to fix the fact that they now have parcels, but still don’t have zoning, because people are building anything anywhere and it’s making folks there unhappy in their new private property. IOW: they have the Antiplanner cheer squad Utopia and it’s a failure. Because human nature is what it is. Zoning helps dampen human nature so folks can have a little security on their private property (note that this is not an endorsement of strict Euclidean zoning).
Last, just because people don’t have any power in Houston to stop a huge condo tower in a single-fam neighborhood doesn’t mean that property rights are more respected there; in fact, one could easily argue that the neighbors of the condo project have few property rights if they can’t protect their property from this project. A high-density project that the market demands, BTW.
DS
PeterKay,
If you don’t have zoning, developers will add covenants to the neighborhoods they build. Those covenants protect against someone building skyscrapers next to your home.
If you do have zoning, the planners may decide your neighborhood isn’t dense enough and rezone it for mid-rise or high-rise developments. It has happened in Portland, Vancouver, and elsewhere over the objections of local residents.
Those covenants protect against someone building skyscrapers next to your home.
Selective cheering of NIMBYism yesterday but not today, Randal, and disparaging private property rights yesterday but supporting them today aside,
If the PD next door has no such covenant, you’re SOL. If the covenant has a voting clause and you’re voted out, you’re SOL. If the HOA goes bankrupt and the covenants don’t run with all the deeds or transfer of responsibility, you’re SOL. If your PD has no such covenant – as in the Houston neighborhood – you’re SOL.
Most people like zoning, because it protects their property rights just fine and has police power behind it, whereas covenants make lawyers’ boat and alimony payments.
It has happened in Portland, Vancouver, and elsewhere over the objections of local residents.
I thought you wanted more supply Randal – your prose certainly quavers righteously when local residents push to rezone to keep additional development out (a làGlaeser) and thus restrict supply to ensure their property values are maintained. You certainly make hay over that.
BTW, restrictive covenants also tend to obtain and maintain open space that is off-limits to your precious housing supply (a làBay Area, where it was obtained via the market but the effect is the same).
You complain about the open space obtained via the Market in Boulder and the Bay Area being off-limits to supply for infill development, and now you are complaining about increasing the supply via infill development. Which is it? Or are you just making up stuff as you go along, just to complain?
DS
Skyscrapers are a strawman. Has anybody actually tried to build one next to a single family subdivision, even in Houston? Even if they did, it won’t kill property values, no matter what ignorant homeowners think. Yes, ignorant. If they were well informed, they’d notice that the price of land in any area with a skyscraper is much, much higher than elsewhere. Highest and best use and all that. Intensive development raises land value, and I thought Dan was for that.
Dan seems to think that property rights includes the right to tell other people what to do with their property. They shouldn’t, as long as they aren’t dumping waste, making excessive noise, or some such thing. Last I looked skyscrapers do neither. If you want to tell somebody else what to do, pay them for it. That would constitute putting money where your mouth is, so we can’t have that. Much better to use the coercive power of the state to get what you want for free.
Bay Area open space wasn’t obtained via the market. It was obtained by making a bunch of land worthless through zoning, and then buying the owners out. Given the price of Bay Area land do you honestly think Bay Area governments could have afforded to buy all that open space if it were available for development? Land goes for a couple million an acre there. Multiply by the thousands of acres of open space. That’s billions of dollars in a true open market, and I know they didn’t spend that much.
Your comment is quite…erm…confused, arg.
There is indeed a non-straw high-rise condo project proposed in Houston, and the ignorant, rich neighbors are gittin’ all NIMBY. And since they made contributions to the Mayor’s campaign, he went in and changed the rules. Kinda like what I was talking about above.
Second, you’re confused about my property rights assertion. Because the neighbors of the straw high-rise have weak property rights protection, they have little say over how their land is affected by the neighbor, or whether part of their front yard has to be taken when the road gets widened to absorb the traffic. Of course, just the other day, I asked** why folks were telling private property owners what to do with their property or why the petition signers weren’t ponying up cash to purchase open space – so your scolding me about how I should behave is indeed how I behave. Glad to see we’re on the same page!
Lastly, the first open space programs in the Bay Area were initiated in the 1930s by Olmsted Jr, before some cities had zoning. And much of the open space areas were retained as agricultural surrounded by rural, so I’m not sure where you get this crazy ‘worthless zoning’ idea throughout the Bay Area, unless it was from that same place where you got the poor air quality in the Central Valley was from fertilizer…
DS
** http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=303#comment-21621
If you’re saying you don’t like the NIMBYs, I agree with you. There was a high-rise project here in Tampa that got cut down by 10 stories because the NIMBYs complained. The problem is that the project is in a downtown area that contains no residential subdivisions, yet the craven planning & zoning committee caved anyway.
Where did I get this “worthless zoning” idea? I got it from the fact that the Bay Area’s open space is relatively useless as agricultural land given its poor soil quality (nobody actually farms it), but the owners can’t sell to developers because the regional zoning authority won’t let them change the zoning. That means the only people they can realistically sell to are the regional open space authorities, who get to buy the land super cheap thanks to their pals in the zoning department. If the land were rezoned residential and/or office/R&D it would easily be worth 5-10x its current value.
Zoning: agriculture = grazing. Those hills surrounding the Bay have been grazed since the 1850s – 1870s (marginal land is often grazed instead of farmed, esp. in Mediterranean climates). In fact, the hills have been grazed for so long most of the natives are gone and replaced by European annual grasses and forbs.
And there is no “regional zoning authority”; the one time a regional gummint was attempted, it was defeated at the ballot box.
In CA, the local electeds usu. must appove zoning changes; as the electeds understand the importance of open space to quality of life, the economy, ecosystem services, the health of the Bay and to visual amenities, they almost always turn down zoning changes near open space (especially if it is in areas designated for protection). Of course, since human population doesn’t decrease and many want to move to the Bay Area because of the weather and copious amenities, there will always be tradeoffs between housing demand and conservation. That’s how it is. That’s how it will always be.
DS
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