Affordable Housing Institute : US

Recently the Atlantic monthly published an essay in wish-fulfillment schadenfreude,

 

You mean no AHI blog posts for me?

 

“The Next Slum?” whose premise — that McMansion buyers get their bad-taste comeuppance — doubtless appealed to the editors’ sensibilities. 

 

The universal definition of a McMansion is a house noticeably larger than we’d want to live in

 

“The subprime crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.”

 

(Note the handy qualifying conditional ‘may,’ always the key to a daring prediction — “hey, I didn’t actually predict it!”)

 

Its author, Christopher Leinberger, is not unqualified, with a quarter century’s work in urban planning and real estate evaluation —

 

Leinberger, not unqualified

 

– and good enough to write something that is nevertheless provocative and timely.  And, as I’ve previously posted, living in a vast house of that type has never appealed personally to me, and I’m fully on board with New Urbanist principles of making cities walkable as a means of making them more livable — so I’d find some consolation in his apocalyptic vision.

 

But I’m all but certain Mr. Leinberger’s rose tinting has colored his scenario building, and that he’s wrong about the future.

 

What do you mean, I’m barking up the wrong tree?

 

Let’s see why.

 

Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac.

 

‘Many’ is the broadsheet writer’s word, for it connotes much more than it says.  ‘Many’ can mean five million, or it can mean five.

 

I don’t know how Manny it takes to make a trend

 

Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.

 

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

 

I have no doubt there are some such subdivisions currently experiencing a very high rate of unsold and empty homes.  The tide always goes out first where it came in last.

 

We lost all our liquidity!

 

Nearly thirty years ago, when oil and gold prices were spiking, the suburbs due north of Houston were boom towns.

 

And everybody thought stocks were vastly overpriced

 

Three years later, you could drive through block after block of empty houses and see-through office buildings.  I remember them.  Some properties got foreclosed; some went somewhere to die.  Some got recycled.  Most recovered when their prices reached clearance level.  None turned into ghost towns, and few turned into slums. 

 

In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. 

 

Clandestine occupancy always means criminal activity, and slums can become houses of crime.  But the big difference between a temporarily-vacant neighborhood and a slum is how many people are living in it, and who they are.

 

Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33%.  

 

I’m sure that’s true, and it’s a concern.

 

Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.

 

Now that Mr. Leinberger has identified two communities, he is ready to leap past the immediate cause — high short-term vacancy — and across the logic divide to a much bigger conclusion:

 

Well, I’ve got some basis for my logic

 

But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work.  It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

 

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) –

 

I don’t know where you live, but for most of America, one-sixth of an acre would not be considered a large lot. 

 

A sixth of an acre is about two basketball courts’ worth

 

My house sits on a quarter acre, and while that’s gargantuan for Cambridge, it’s tiny by normal American standards.

 

– by 2025.  That’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

 

While I’m sure Mr. Leinberger has not distorted Mr. Nelson’s conclusions, a quick Web search does not reveal the statistic, so it lies there as one person’s projection, unverifiable.  And it’s quite possible that the figure masks essentially a larger population shift — the emptying out of (say) the Upper Midwest and the Great Plains states, for we find the following statement:

 

Overall, most new growth will occur in the South and the West. There is tremendous variation in the total amount of buildings to be built between regions. In the Northeast, for example, less than 50 percent of the space in 2030 will have been built since 2000, while in the West that figure is about 87 percent, a near doubling of built space. Fast growing southern and western places—states like Nevada and Florida and metropolitan areas like Austin and Raleigh—will see the most dramatic growth.

 

I have no trouble believing that what we will call the Mississippi River drainage area — everything from eastern Colorado through western Pennsylvania — could well see a population drop, as people move south and west.  I’ve previously posted on some seminal work by the Rural Housing Service which found six factors that influence where people will move:

 

            

 

And where are people likely to move out of?  The Upper Midwest:

 

Like the Mississippi, the people will drain south and west

 

A surplus of ‘large-lot’ houses in America’s cold spots is no indicator that big houses in America’s warm spots will turn into slums.

 

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

 

There’s that ‘may’ again.

 

Now Mr. Leinberger leaps from the one Nelson statistic to an even more reliable indicator, Hollywood prejudices:

 

By the end of the 1970s, people seeking safety and good schools generally had little alternative but to move to the suburbs. In 1981, Escape From New York, starring Kurt Russell, depicted a near future in which Manhattan had been abandoned, fenced off, and turned into an unsupervised penitentiary.

 

Call me Snake.

 

Does it undermine Mr. Leinberger’s point too terribly much that we just had a blockbuster hit in I Am Legend, which imagines an entirely depopulated New York City?

 

I like being able to walk to work

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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