Affordable Housing Institute : US

Yesterday we were introduced to Christopher Leinberger’s anticipatory obituary of McMansions in his Atlantic essay in wish-fulfillment schadenfreude, “The Next Slum?” with its harrowing subtitle:

 

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

 

Man, and I thought the suburbs were dangerous

 

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

 

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

 

Cities, of course, have made a long climb back since then. Just nine years after Russell escaped from the wreck of New York, Seinfeld—followed by Friends, then Sex and the City—began advertising the city’s renewed urban allure to Gen-Xers and Millennials.

 

“Not that there’s anything wrong with urban allure!”

 

Yes, before then nobody had any idea cities might be good places to live!

 

Many Americans, meanwhile, became disillusioned with the sprawl and stupor that sometimes characterize suburban life.  

 

More guilt-by-asseveration.  ‘Stupor’?

 

That certainly disillusions me

 

These days, when Hollywood wants to portray soullessness, despair, or moral decay, it often looks to the suburbs—as The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives attest—for inspiration.

 

O, the horror — a laundromat

 

On similar reasoning, what do we make of Homicide (Baltimore), Law and Order (New York), Without a Trace (New York), NYPD Blue (New York), or Numb3rs (Los Angeles)?  Do they show city life as peaches and cream?

 

Everything’s safe in the Big Apple

 

Next, Mr. Leinberger shifts back from his claim that Americans are disillusioned with suburban living, instead showing that they are embracing it in record numbers:

 

In the past decade, as cities have gentrified, the suburbs have continued to grow at a breakneck pace. Atlanta’s sprawl has extended nearly to Chattanooga; Fort Worth and Dallas have merged; and Los Angeles has swung a leg over the 10,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains into the Mojave Desert. Some experts expect conventional suburbs to continue to sprawl ever outward.

 

Actually, most experts, but that doesn’t read as well.

 

Pent-up demand for urban living is evident in housing prices. Twenty years ago [Sic: thirty to thirty-five — Ed.], urban housing was a bargain in most central cities. Today, it carries an enormous price premium. Per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 percent to 200 percent more than traditional suburban space in areas as diverse as New York City; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

 

Because Mr. Leinberger loves walkable urban cores — as do I — he presumes that everyone else does too, and that they can be conjured into being merely by wishing:

 

I want a walkable urban core, and I want it now!

 

In most metropolitan areas, only 5 to 10 percent of the housing stock is located in walkable urban places (including places like downtown White Plains and Belmar). Yet recent consumer research by Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan and Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia suggests that roughly one in three homeowners would prefer to live in these types of places.

 

That’s what people say when the question is presented as a benefit without cost.  When you ask them whether they would surrender one of the family cars and take the subway or bus to work, you get a different answer.

 

In one study, for instance, Levine and his colleagues asked more than 1,600 mostly suburban residents of the Atlanta and Boston metro areas to hypothetically trade off typical suburban amenities (such as large living spaces) against typical urban ones (like living within walking distance of retail districts).

 

That’s not the tradeoff, money is.  As Jeff Lubell has shown, what you gain in shorter commute times and costs you spend in higher housing costs.  

 

The final third wanted to live in mixed-use, walkable urban areas—but most had no way to do so at an affordable price.  Over time, as urban and faux-urban building continues, that will change.

 

Sorry, Mr. Leinberger, higher demand for walkable areas won’t mean affordable prices — quite the reverse.  Land value is a residual.  Find ways to increase density and you raise the value of urban land, you don’t magically conjure up affordability. 

 

Demographic changes in the United States also are working against conventional suburban growth, and are likely to further weaken preferences for car-based suburban living.

 

By 2025, the U.S. will contain about as many single-person households as families with children.

 

This will change the composition and configuration of many housing units, and may well lead to more of a migration back to the cities … but markets always clear.  If really large homes with large yards are available in the suburbs, people with children will buy them.

 

And as more Americans, particularly affluent Americans, move into urban communities, families may find that some of the suburbs’ other big advantages—better schools and safer communities—have eroded.  Schooling and safety are likely to improve in urban areas, as those areas continue to gentrify.

 

“10 violent crimes you can live with”

 

We can but hope, although current trends are discouraging.  A Cambridge city councilor told me that half of Cambridge’s public high school students live in Cambridge public housing, and that’s not because richer people don’t have children — they send them away — nor because Cambridge can’t afford to spend on schools — it does.

 

They may worsen in many suburbs if the tax base—often highly dependent on house values and new development—deteriorates.

 

Another very big if.  Why will house values decline long term if the United States‘ population continues to rise, as it has been even excluding immigration legal or illegal?

 

The U.S. grows its total stock of housing and commercial space by, at most, 3 percent each year, so the imbalance between the supply of urban living options and the demand for them is not going to disappear overnight. But over the next 20 years, developers will likely produce many, many millions of new and newly renovated town houses, condos, and small-lot houses in and around both new and traditional downtowns.

 

With housing demand being elastic, we can easily imagine the growth of two-home couples and multi-housing extended families, with a flat in the city and a home in the suburbs.

 

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare.

 

Some things are fairly rare

 

Yes, really rare.

 

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

 

Except that the spaces don’t convert well to multi-family use.

 

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls.

 

Mr. Leinberger conveniently overlooks Tyvek, plastic plumbing (better than lead), energy conservation setback thermostats, and composite building materials.

 

Of course, not all suburbs will suffer this fate.

 

I was worried there

 

But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some of the country’s more recently developed areas—and not only those inhabited by subprime-mortgage borrowers.

 

‘Some’ is irrefutable, but I am much more concerned about east Cleveland and upstate New York than I am about the latest new off-ramp subdivision on Phoenix’s I-10. 

 

The environment, of course, will also benefit: if New York City were its own state, it would be the most energy-efficient state in the union; most Manhattanites not only walk or take public transit to get around, they unintentionally share heat with their upstairs neighbors.

 

That’s an interesting detail.

 

By the estimate of Virginia Tech’s Arthur Nelson, as much as half of all real-estate development on the ground in 2025 will not have existed in 2000. It’s exciting to imagine what the country will look like then. Building and residential migration seem to progress slowly from year to year, yet then one day, in retrospect, the landscape seems to have been transformed in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, the next transformation, like the ones before it, will leave some places diminished. About 25 years ago, Escape From New York perfectly captured the zeitgeist of its moment.

 

Movies about vampiric New Yorkers are so yesterday, dude

 

Two or three decades from now, the next Kurt Russell may find his breakout role in Escape From the Suburban Fringe.

 

Unfortunately for Mr. Leinberger’s thesis, Escape from New York is being remade … now.

 

So much for the New Urbanism

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