Friday, April 28, 2006

My House? I Got It at the Mall!

Estridge, a homebuilder that has put up some 7,000 in the Indianapolis area in the past 40 years, is developing a new way to sell their product: at the mall. HOMExperience, the company’s new store at a Clay Terrace, an upscale outdoor mall in suburban Carmel. HOMExperience will allow customers to look at house plans, customize their choices with a designer and even furnish the home with products from Estridge’s partners in the scheme, which include bath-and-kitchen maven Kohler, Masterbrand cabinets and Anderson Windows. Offering virtual tours of homes as well as art shows and cooking demonstrations, Estridge hopes the stores will lure women—specifically overscheduled soccer moms who aren’t as likely to visit a model homes at distant development—with the convenience of buying a home the way they buy coordinated back-to-school outfits at The Gap.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

House of the Week: Lexington, Mass.

Here's what $609,000 gets you in a woody suburb outside Boston: a "compact" but pristine Garrison house with oak kitchen cabinets and African ipe front steps.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

S.F. Scourge: Suburb Envy

In her "Surreal Estate" column, Carol Lloyd often examines the bargains people make with themselves to stick out the high cost of living in San Francisco. For the city dweller Lloyd profiles this week, that cost includes a $1,700 rent for a weekend pied-à-terre in suburban Menlo Park to assuage what Lloyd calls her subject's "suburb envy."

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Party On

Republicans aren’t known to be any better at managing garbage pickup than Democrats. Nonetheless, electoral campaigns in the suburbs have become infected with partisanship, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The phenomenon follows a larger national trend toward greater party identification, but the politicization of the suburbs has more to do with demographic change than red-blue divisions. As suburbs, especially middle-ring and exurban areas, grow and grow more diverse, experts say, their new residents import traditional party affiliations. Politicians begin to declare party affiliations on campaign literature to lay claim to a growing base.

A few suburban areas, of course, have been notoriously partisan. The last bona fide political machine in America may have been Al D’Amato’s Republican lock on Nassau County, which propelled him from county executive to three terms in the United States Senate, and the Democrats’ success on Long Island has only deepened the partisan divisions. But most elections below the state level remain nonpartisan, at least on paper: A 2001 survey by the National League of Cities shows 77 percent of cities still hold nonpartisan elections.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Sex Outside the City?

Single women are shaking off city life. As many as half the homeowners in some close-in suburban Atlanta towns are single women, a trend the Atlanta Business Chronicle attributes to better pay for women, the movement of jobs (and restaurants and shopping) to the burbs and the rising value of real-estate. Also, the prevalence of townhouse developments has made the suburbs more conducive to lone females, who are said to be less than keen on doing their own mowing and raking.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

This Week's Dire Prediction About Real Estate Prices

The financial newsletter Capuchinomics ("Investment Ideas Inspired by Monkeys," and not "Investment Ideas Inspired by Capuchin Monks") took the Brookings Institution,
The New York Times and a Federal Reserve board member to task this week for condoning a study suggesting single-family homes are still good investments. In a paper presented at Brookings, Pomona college professor Margaret Hwang Smith and her colleague (and husband) Gary Smith compare the cost of renting a single-family home to the cash generated by owning, a method they claim values real estate the way we value stocks. The Smiths portray real estate in Boston, Los Angeles and Dallas, markets other studies have red-flagged as risky, as undervalued. Only in San Mateo County, near San Francisco, did they find evidence of a bubble. "Most of the country is certainly not in a bubble if you define a bubble as prices far above fundamentals," said Gary Smith. "The average person in the U.S. is still better off buying than renting."

Capuchinomics editor Paul Mampilly calls the Smiths' paper the housing market's "Dow 36,000 moment," referring to James Glassman and Kevin Hassett's famously optimistic appraisal of stock prices in 1999, months before they collapsed. While some may take the Smiths' paper to mean that it's open season again for real-estate speculation (and will likely get burned), the key to their conclusions is long-term ownership. Even studies like the recent PMI Index report (pdf) that identifed Boston, L.A. and Dallas and 45 other markets as risky consider a single-family home in these places a good investment if held for five years or more. (Only in L.A. did some owners get burned after holding a house that long.) "And when you add in the intangible benefits--from the stake homeownership gives you in a stable community to the pure satisfaction you get from standing on a piece of earth and knowing it’s yours—it’s hard to beat." In other words, it's still your father's real-estate market. The full text of the Smith's paper in .pdf is here.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

And the Hispanic Club Shall Lead Them

In the New York metro area, “Greenwich” is a synonym for well-to-do white suburbia, but lately even Greenwich is dealing with its minority populations—well, everyone but the minorities. According to The New York Times, an influx of service workers from Central and South America in the last decade has doubled the number of Hispanic kids attending the Connecticut town’s high school, causing jousting between Anglos and Latinos. “You'll hear a white kid say to a Latino kid, 'Hey, when's your father coming over to mow the lawn?'” a student told the Times. “And the hard part is, it's true. It's a true statement. But nobody wants to admit it.”

After a fight broke out in the cafeteria recently, GHS principal Alan Capasso recruited student volunteers to hold homeroom discussions about how to clear the air, the article says. Posters and a class on stereotyping and racial sensitivity have also been deployed. Divisions still remain, says one of the volunteers, but friction has subsided.

One group slow to address the cafeteria fight were Hispanics themselves. The controversy highlighted a heretofore unaddressed feature of the town's Hispanic community: the lack of community. “Immigrants come to Greenwich from dozens of different Spanish-speaking countries; some leave everything behind in search of a better life, while others are transferred here by their international employers. The group is too diverse to have spokesmen,” Greenwich Latinos told the local newspaper, Greenwich Time. In the breach, the high school’s Hispanic club, Vision, became the ad hoc HQ for the community. Thanks to schoolyard fisticuffs, the high school may be the place to look for tomorrow's leaders.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Ask What Brownfields Can Do for You

A utopian “megaburb” is growing west of Salt Lake City, on the former site of a massive copper mine. Like the enormous development that replaced Stapleton International Airport in Denver, “Daybreak,” in South Jordan, Utah is being designed under strict New Urbanist principles, but unlike Stapleton, Daybreak is outside the city limits, and is conceived as a satellite to a city, neither an urban district or an independent town. The highly controlled experiment is taking place under the auspices of Kennecott Land, a subsidiary of the mammoth miming company that despoiled, then restored the soil on the 144 square mile parcel—the largest holding by a single owner in the country.

Given its history, Daybreak has been a suprisingly easy sell: of 162,800 homes planned over the next few decades, 800 retro bungalows and deep-porched two-story jobs are already sold and rising, even though buyers have to sign a statement saying they know the ground water is still tainted, and may contain pollutants powerful enough melt concrete. (Drinkning water is drawn from South Jordan's water district.) Kennecott’s attention to the ecology of their former fief, from reclaiming the ground to its push to make light rail the easiest commute into Salt Lake, has garnered the support of environmental groups and of Peter Calthorpe, the Berkeley, Calif., planner who designed Stapleton and whose New Urbanist doxology includes green features like walkability and lean energy consumption. Calthorpe has signed on as a consultant on Daybreak.

That leaves only the residents of Salt Lake’s West Side and an existing hamlet near the new community called Copperton to grumble: the former are losing bus routes even as the transit authorities redirect resources to the new TRAX rail line to Daybreak, funded by Kennecott. The latter, equally understandably, simply don’t want neighbors.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Public Safety and the Anti-Snobs

The high price of suburban homes hasn’t killed anyone—yet. But as home prices have soared beyond the reach of the average family in many communities, firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel are being forced to live out of town, depleting forces or extending response times. The cost of housing has chased other essential, if not emergency, workers out of many communities: in New York’s Westchester, the New York Times reports, snow days have increased as teachers move up to 50 miles away to find homes that suit their civil salaries. As the problem has grown, "affordable housing" is trading in its connotation of government-imposed blight for a welcome sound of salvation for affluent communities.

The media loves tales of such communities buying priced-out teachers fixer-upper ranches on the edge of town. In Massachussets, a 1969 regulation known as Chapter 40B has gotten more wide-ranging results. Chapter 40B allows a local zoning board to fast-track a development that dedicates 25 percent of its units to affordable housing. The “anti-snob” law’s heydey was in the 1980s, as housing prices took off due to the strong economy and as locals came to see that “the housing can blend in with the surroundings, and doesn't get inhabited by people who don't take care of their property,” says a report on the law’s effectiveness. Today, more than 175 Massachusetts towns have accommodated more than 25,000 homes under Chapter 40B.

Such is the success of Chapter 40B that attempts are underway to profit from its good name. This round of high real-estate prices has prompted developers to lobby Massachusetts legislators to modify the definition of "affordable housing" to shoehorn more upscale units into affluent communities under 40B.

Heart Trouble

The Katonah (N.Y.) Museum’s “I [Heart] the Suburbs,” which closed yesterday, claimed that its portrait of the suburbs was "a rich and nuanced tapestry.” But if the show presented the suburbs in a way that wasn’t dripping with sarcasm and Special Sauce, we couldn’t find it in the coverage. The show included Robert Selwyn’s melting portrait of a Victorian house—“a sendup of picture-book planned communities,” according to a review of the show in The New York Times. The Times also cited a photograph of a man standing amid piles of debris in his backyard (“a piercing look at psychoburbia”) and Lee Stoetzel's installation, "McMansion 5," a house sided with Chicken McNuggets, with cup-lid windows and a roof of Quarter Pounder boxes.

The interest in the ironies in the works described seems strange for a museum located deep in the burbs north of Manhattan. The local paper, the Westchester Journal-News, found more ambiguity in the show than The Times did, but also ended up asking, in effect: If the suburban tapestry is so nuanced, why isn’t our view equally nuanced?

Friday, April 07, 2006

House of the Week: Quad Cities

Here's what you get for $299,900 in Muscatine, Iowa, just outside the Quad Cities: Brazilian cherry floors and a tray ceiling in the master.