Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The Upside of a Down Market

With each new day, we get another article bemoaning the end of the housing boom. Last weekend The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald explained why there are plenty of reasons to welcome a kinder, gentler, if slower, real-estate market. Writing about the nation's seeming allergy to affordable housing, Grunwald cites the 200,000 units of affordable rentals that are lost to the stampeding market every year. A slowdown in home prices should also slow the conversion of affordable homes to high-end rates.

It won't change deeper policy problems, however. While much of the affordable housing is evaporating from our cities, many of those who would fill it are headed for the suburbs, where the bulk of new jobs are being created. And most suburbs are not rising to the occasion. As Grunwald points out, zoning regulations in many locales are designed to preserve single-family homes. "Minimum lot requirements, minimum parking requirements, density restrictions and other controls," he writes, "go well beyond the traditional mission of the building code and end up artificially reducing the development of safe, affordable housing." Instead, the new suburban population either crams into unsuitable spaces in numbers breaking both fire codes and zoning laws, or commutes unconscionably long distances to affordable communities.

Grunwald commends Fairfax County, Va., for its "Penny for Housing" tax that takes a cent from each dollar of property taxes to fund affordable housing. The county has also built housing for emergency workers like firefighters and nurses. But these measures are a drop in the bucket. It's time, says Grunwald, for localities to ease zoning regulations so that the market can direct higher-density, cheaper housing to the places that make the most sense for everyone. This can only happen if politicians, says Grunwald, "rediscover housing—not as an urban poverty issue, but as a middle-class quality-of-life issue, like gas prices or health care."

Monday, August 21, 2006

Love Your Neighbor(hood)


At the heart of many critiques of suburban life is a critique of the suburbs' soul--or the lack one. So books like "The Suburban Christian" by Albert Hsu, an editor at Intervarsity Press, are more pertinent than its parochial title may suggest. Devout Christians are particularly out of sorts in the suburbs; the emphasis on prosperity and acquisitiveness is the opposite of the Christian ideal of service and sacrifice. But suburban values concern faithful and secular suburbanites alike. And Hsu, who grew up in Bloomington, Minn., has a native son's affection for malls and megachurches that moves him to look for real, and sometimes surprising solutions.

Hsu's respect for the suburbs sets him apart from other Christian takes on the burbs, like Dave Goetz's fizzy "Death By Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul," published earlier this year, which seemed to draw its moral situations from soap-opera suburbs. Hsu also distinguishes himself from heavy-hitting academic and media prognosticators by having a little, well, faith in the suburbs.

The suburbs, in Hsu's vision, ought to be more than neatly arranged nodes of convenience. "Instead of the job being the lead factor [in where you live], how about having community be the decisive factor. ... Choose your community, live there, work there, worship there and minister there." Hsu wants us to be intentional about where we live, and not abstractly. Investing ourselves in the physical place, in Hsu's vision, can be a route to spiritual investment. He is tempted by the idea of ditching single family homes, with their impractical land use and outsized mortgages, in favor of suburban-futurist ideas about "sixplexes," where one house holds six families with a common kitchen and living areas (New Urbanists: how's that for density?), or private homes surrounded by communal land.

Hsu presents the shortcomings of his own Christian community too, warning that megachurches—Christian mallls that entice suburban parishioners with shopping, entertainment and worship—risk becoming the culture they seek to change. Worried that suburban Christians are too comfortable, he wants them to turn back to the cities they have left to experience hardship and suffering and help heal it.

At times, Hsu allows the suburbs to stand for too many of the ills of our current culture, overemphasizing the racial and economic homogeneity or portraying materialism too strictly as a suburban phenomenon. And too much of the book is taken up with statistics and trends any newspaper reader (or pew denizen) will have already absorbed. Both these sins are available in nearly any current treatise on the suburbs. What you won't always find are Hsu's optimism and exhortation to positive action.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Speaking of High Gas Prices, and the Best Outside of Phillly

A discussion on PhillyBlog.com's thriving "Burbs" forum is a good starting point for exploring how oil and gas hikes do affect surbubanites. Some on the forum say they have saved as much as $900 a month by moving back onto city transit lines, but one contributor writes, "I drove 300 miles today. This trip cost me $3.50 more than it would have cost months ago, and my car is a gas hog which runs on premium." Still another cites urban planner Joel Kotkin's op-ed from May, suggesting that, whatever the real cost of car commuting, suburbanites won't likely move into the city to be closer to their jobs, since their jobs, for the most part, are in the suburbs.

Another thread on the same forum asks: Which is the best—and worst—Philadelphia suburbs? In 15 pages of responses, the favorites, by our informal count, are Media, in Pennsylvania, and Collingswood on the New Jersey side, with Jenkintown, Pa. a close runner-up. Bensalem gets roundly booed.

Interestingly, many upscale towns like Wayne, Pa., are dissed and many lower-class places are given high marks. What earned a suburb high marks? One poster sums it up: "City shopping and density for a couple blocks, suburban homes for the rest."

Oh Well! Suburbs Were Great While They Lasted

In a piece so mercilessly grim and certain of its premises that it's worth a read, Paul Harris of England's newspaper The Observer explains that the jig is up for "America's Eden." Harris leans heavily on doomsayer James Howard Kunstler, author of the "Long Emergency," who, Harris points out, "postulates the end of suburbia." In drawing up his schedule of catastrophy, Harris exhibits a natural way with hyperbole, suggesting that the bump in oil prices "threatens a way of life where pavements [sidewalks] are rare and everyone moves by car." This, and the much-prognosticated collapse of home prices, inspire language once reserved for nuclear holocaust and Soviet world domination. "Those warning of a coming crisis believe suburbia's economic collapse would force a rethink of the fundamentals of the American way of life."

Near the end of his piece, Harris hedges his bets. Before introducing "Sprawl" author and suburb defender Robert Bruegmann, Harris sportingly admits, "Most Americans have still chosen to live [in the suburbs], which leads some to believe predictions of a crisis are overblown." But that's not half as fun a story as postulating the end of suburbia.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Share the Bliss

It's difficult to find homegrown websites about the suburbs that don't present them as existential wastelands full of bad restaurants, kidney-shaped coffee tables and Twister parties, then proceed to savage the suburban lifestyle. An exception is Suburban Bliss, a blog by a homemaker and mother of two in Indiana named Melissa Summers. Sarcastic, honest, and more than occasionally profane, Summers covets the houses and swim clubs of others, alternately idolizes and detests her husband and generally kvetches about life in a way we can relate to. "I swear to you I have gotten better about spending money," she wrote a few months ago. "I'm so careful now. I watch every cent and I now realize there is no such thing as 'just $20' and I realize going to Target is a dangerous endeavor I should try to avoid." Share the addiction here.

Friday, August 11, 2006

A Gay Revolution the Suburban Way


The Nutbush, a gay bar in Forest Park, Ill., outside Chicago, celebrated its 30th anniversary last month. The bar is as revolutionary for its unremarkable anonymity as other urban gay bars, like Manhattan's Stonewall, once were for their scenes of intolerant violence. Even as the Nutbush has become accepted, with its own dart team in the local bar league, it continues to serve as an oasis for newly "out" men and women as well as, in the words of one patron, much more: "This is where I get a mortgage. This is where we buy a house or a car. Somebody wants to take a trip to Honduras or Cancun, we've got guys who are travel agents. This is family. We keep it in the family."

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

This Week's Dire Prediction About Home Prices

Time magazine this week finds house sellers in denial, refusing to drop prices despite the media's insistence that the bubble has popped. "The nation's median home price is still up 0.9% this year, to $231,000," Time says. "But that stat is misleading. There's a stalemate between buyers and sellers: property owners are reluctant to cut prices, and buyers are patrolling from the sidelines, hoping for fire sales."

What the piece doesn't point out is that stable median home price means that, by and large, the sellers are winning. The story also offers tolerable-to-good stats: David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors is quoted as saying "he'll probably cut his forecast for price growth from 5 percent to 4 percent this year"—hardly a bust, but the story puts this figure in its litany of bad news.

The story also deploys puzzingly bright anecdotes to illustrate the agony of today's seller. "Some sellers figure they're lucky to be getting out," Time says, telling the tale of a Navy officer who sold a four-bedroom home in San Diego for $476,000 after spending $7,000 on the kitchen and dropping the price by $18,000. But a little math shows that even with the improvements, the poor guy cleared nearly $200,000 on a house he owned for four years. This kind of bubble we can live with.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Towns Take Their Cut of the Real-Estate Boom

Seeming ever on the watch for reasons to bemoan the fate of the suburbs, The New York Times prospected a story from property-tax data showing that taxes have outpaced incomes for most of the decade, nowhere more than in the Times own tri-state region. The story explains that income and property taxes are related issues, since one or the other must provide revenues to pay for schools and other local costs. In the financial capital of New York, the stock market slowdown of 2000 robbed brokers and other traders of income taxed by the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Without those revenues, the states cuts school aid, leaving local municipalities no choice but to raise taxes. The biggest tax bulge was 41 percent in Somerset County, N.J., where income went up only 5 percent from 2000 to 2004.


There are some subtleties the Times misses. School costs, whether paid by the state or towns, have been rising precipitously during the period the story examines, due to higher healthcare costs for teachers, unpolled immigrants and the price of special education. Politics have also played a part: during a 40-year reign by Republicans in Long Island's Nassau County, where the story cites a 29 percent jump in property taxes from 2000 to 2004, tax hikes were blasphemy. Only when the state stepped in to end the county's financial crisis did legislators finally order a new property-tax assessment, which raised taxes countywide.

Accompanying the Times tax story was this tale of a poor little rich rapper.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Strawberry Fields Forever?


The story is an old one, common to many onetime rural communities, but in Carlsbad, Calif., the decision over whether to turn over farmland to developers is particularly wrenching. The citizens of Carlsbad could face a choice this November between two ballot initiatives, each of which will determine the fate of more than 300 acres of land traditionally planted with strawberries and wildflowers. The Flower Fields in particular are considered an institution in Carlsbad and their Spring blooms are listed alongside Legoland as one of the town’s nearby attractions.

Much of the land is owned by the local utility company, SDG&E, which had planned to allow developers to build a hotel complex on part of the land until members of the city council put forward a plan to rezone the fields to prevent it. A competing plan has proposed a city takeover that would allow the fields to be developed as public space. But an economic study requested by the council released last week said that stopping development would force Carlsbad to pay the current owners for the land, and would cost the city $30 million, including lost tax revenues, each year. The backers of the original initiative say rezoning the land as agricultural would not require the city buy a single acre. The city council votes tonight on whether to put the second initiative on the ballot.