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Yahoo Headline Writers Should Learn to Read

By | | Housing
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A new study finds that some “metro areas have used an urban sprawl to continue to provide ample housing stock for residents” whereas areas that have emphasized dense developments have seen rents reach an all-time high.

Yahoo! News headlined its report on this study, “How affordable housing in big cities is hurt by urban sprawl.” Yet neither the article nor the study explains how urban sprawl in affordable metro areas makes housing in dense metro areas less affordable.

“It seems that the metros most effectively meeting the demand for new housing are still primarily doing so by continuing to sprawl,” says the study, “despite an increasing demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods that prioritize sustainability.” This was supposed to have been written by an economist, but wouldn’t an economist question whether demand for dense neighborhoods is really increasing if builders, whose livelihoods depend on keep up with demand, aren’t building them in less-regulated areas? Continue reading →

Reports from the War on Homeownership

By | | Policy brief
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The latest home price data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency indicates that the most recent housing bubble has peaked and prices are now declining in expensive housing markets such as those in California, Hawaii, and Washington. This is an indication that the nation may be headed into a recession.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

In contrast, prices continue to slowly increase in more affordable housing markets such as those in Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas. This difference is a result of the amount of rural land-use regulation in these states. Continue reading →

Regulating Affordability

By | | Housing
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Two recent op-eds illustrate the dilemmas lawmakers face when dealing with unaffordable housing. The first explains to readers on Capitol Hill how Oregon is pretending to make housing more affordable when in fact almost everything it does makes it less affordable.

The article points out that in 1971 Oregon’s then-governor Tom McCall told a national group, “We want you to visit our state, but for heaven’s sake, don’t move here!” To make sure they didn’t, the Oregon legislature passed and McCall signed a 1973 land-use law that ended up limiting all urban growth to less than 1.2 percent of the land in the state. Naturally, developable land has become expensive and housing has become unaffordable, which helps keep people from moving to the state.

The article suggests, however, the state officials must be disappointed that Washington has made itself even less affordable despite not passing a similar law until 1990. As a result, many of the efforts made to provide “affordable housing” must be viewed as ways “to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon.” Rent control, which every economist agrees makes housing less affordable, is only one of the ways the state is doing that. Continue reading →

Killing the California Dream

By | | Housing
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Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City,” writes LA Times columnist George Skelton (reprinted in the Mercury-News and East Bay Times in case you run into the LA Times paywall). After reading his article, the Antiplanner has just one question: Why?

Skelton argues that California’s population has grown in the last 70 years and is still growing. But he doesn’t seem to realize that the vast majority of the state is still rural. The 2010 census found that urban areas covering just 5.3 percent of the state is urban and houses 95 percent of the state’s population.

In 2000, California conducted a housing supply study titled Raising the Roof. The full text of the study is no longer available on the California housing department’s web site, so I’ve posted it here. Chapter 3 assesses how much land in each county is available for development, data summarized in exhibit 13 (previously cited here). Continue reading →

Infill Won’t Make Housing Affordable

By | | Housing
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The Portland Planning Commission has approved a plan to rezone almost all of the city’s single-family neighborhoods to quadruple the current densities. Planners claimed that this would make housing more affordable by allowing the construction of tens of thousands of new triplexes or fourplexes in the next few years.

Internal documents, however reveal that the planners’ own projections are that this change will lead to fewer than 4,000 new housing units. Moreover, most of those units will be in poor neighborhoods, resulting in the displacement of low-income families by people who can afford to live in new, higher-cost housing.

Fourplexes won’t solve housing affordability problems because Portland’s urban-growth boundary makes land prices high. Quadrupling densities won’t help if the land itself costs four times as much as in urban areas that don’t have growth boundaries. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →

How to Sell Forced Densification to Libertarians

By | | Housing
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When cities pass zoning rules (as Missoula, Portland, and many Portland suburbs have done) mandating minimum-density zoning — so that people are forced to either build high-density housing in existing low-density neighborhoods or build nothing at all — libertarians lead the charge against such rules. But urban planners have managed to achieve the same result, and gain the support of some who consider themselves libertarian, by:

  1. Drawing an urban-growth boundary or passing similar policies forbidding development outside the existing urban footprint;
  2. Waiting a few years for the resulting supply shorting to push up housing prices;
  3. Blaming high housing prices on residents of single-family neighborhoods who object to densification of their neighborhoods;
  4. Proposing a law or ordinance that effectively eliminates zoning in those single-family neighborhoods.

Thus, we have a writer for Reason magazine supporting a law that would eliminate much of the zoning in San Francisco and other unaffordable California cities. Another Reason writer endorses a new zoning ordinance in Minneapolis that allows multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods. The Mercatus Center blames high housing prices on single-family zoning as does a report from the Cato Institute. Continue reading →

Home Sizes and Housing Affordability

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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The median number of rooms in an American home increased slightly from 5.4 in 2007 to 5.5 in 2017. Moreover, there seems to be some correlation between the median number of rooms and housing affordability.

The American Community Survey doesn’t ask people the size of their homes in square feet, probably because it assumes most people don’t know. But it does ask how many rooms are in their homes. Survey directions specify that “Rooms must be separated by built-in archways or walls that extend out at least 6 inches and go from floor to ceiling.” People are to “include bedrooms, kitchens, etc.” but “exclude bathrooms, porches, balconies, foyers, halls, or unfinished basements.”

This can be misleading because many homes built since World War II have open floorplans, which usually means the kitchen, dining room, and living room are all one big room. By census definitions, a three-bedroom, open-floorplan home would have four rooms, while a three-bedroom, traditional house would have six rooms even if both have the same number of square feet. The best we can hope for is that the ratio of open- to closed-floorplan homes is about the same in different parts of the country, which seems unlikely. Continue reading →

Maui Housing

By | | Housing
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The Antiplanner is in Maui today talking to the Grassroot Institute about housing costs. The Institute may also release a new report on this subject, and if so I’ll update this post or post a link to it tomorrow.

According to Zillow, the median home in Maui costs $519 a square foot (download the file called “Median Home Value Per Square Foot” for Metro & U.S. under “Home Values”). Honolulu is $545. A few metro areas in California are the only ones in the United States that are more expensive.

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Let’s Be as Dense as Hong Kong

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Vox‘s Johnny Harris looks at housing in Hong Kong, noting that it is rated the least-affordable housing market in the world. (At least the English-speaking world, China, Japan, and Singapore, which are the housing markets reviewed in Wendell Cox’s 14th International Housing Affordability Survey). Harris shows living conditions roughly similar to the 1890 tenements of New York City documented by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives.

Harris reveals that housing prices aren’t high because Hong Kong has run out of land. Instead, he notes, “Flying over Hong Kong, you start to see that, while yes, there’s a very dense urban landscape, but there’s also a whole lot of green space. Government land-use data says that 75 percent of the land in Hong Kong is not developed.” Continue reading →