I'm a San Francisco resident. For decades locals have struggled with rising property prices and ever higher rents. People in other parts of the country have ridiculed us for our inability to solve these problems. Now the "solution" is to export our troubles to Austin, Nashville, Boise, Phoenix, and so on as people and money migrate and drive up costs to other areas domino style. These places are no better at managing regardless of their political leanings. At a certain point the problem will switch from an economic struggle to a political resolution. Historically these are never fun...
Florida housing prices have taken a similar turn. Siesta Key Florida. $1-3 million per house last I looked this year. Plumbers and public school teachers used to live on the island. Today, no way that would happen.
In beachfront communities in California, 99 per cent of the value is in the land, so people buy the house at these prices and replace it with what they want.
I appreciated this thoughtful essay. I would value your thoughts on how this scenario may play out under different regional circumstances. In the inter mountain west we are reckoning with constrained water resources, which leads to compounding risk as growth increases. In Utah, for example, there are communities that have had to shut off all new water connections due to a lack of reliable water sources (and many communities are already over-built beyond water projections). On top of this, we are also home to some of the most desirable and fastest growing metro areas and communities in the nation. In circumstances where any growth is risky, and attempts to choose which types of growth to promote will likely lead to suboptimal outcomes, regulation feels like the "least bad" option…What is your perspective on a policy map to navigate these tradeoffs?
Mr. Del Mastro, Sorry to learn that your only off-hand ‘take’ on issue of corporate purchases of residential lots near a so-called ‘downtown’ in Montgomery County, MD - is to label them plaints from privileged “upper-middle class…legacy owners of single family homes.,etc.”. A flashy New Urbanist ‘ideological agenda’ shows through such an un-researched response. Please check factual 2020 demographics (See U.S. Census tract results) before labeling modest, majority-minority small cohesive neighborhoods-half affordable rental apartments, half single family houses cheek-by-jowl near a County Park “upper-middle class”. Please visit specific locations ‘on-the-ground’ rather than announce an absurdly biased viewpoint. Open markets are indeed better, but MOCO Planning Board tries to force through ‘absurd’ plans - based mainly on designs created by Corporate Developers backed by costly ‘land-use’ legal lobbyist with outsize influence on some elected/appointed officials. Point is that corporate developers and large land-owners desire to acquire affordable rental properties with intent to raze them to the ground and redevelop upscale denser ‘mixed use’ housing including County hand-outs of ‘windfall profit’ portions of scarce public parkland. Such large -scale over-densification should not qualify as the open and gradual process you (& I) favor. Displacing ‘naturally’ affordable & subsidized garden apartments housing large families of lower-income working people and recent war-refugee families should be anathema to You. The shibboleth of removing single-family zoning is NOT the issue here. Realistically, we face a ‘back-door’ strategy to displace many lower-income residents with higher income new residents lacking numerical growth in truly affordable housing. How does your belief system justify such patently falsifiable ‘master planning’ maneuvers under a ‘progressive’ guise?
I suggest you return to actually visiting and investigating real small neighborhoods before pontificating on house-price ‘absurdity’ without benefit of accurate information ‘on-site’.
I'm a San Francisco resident. For decades locals have struggled with rising property prices and ever higher rents. People in other parts of the country have ridiculed us for our inability to solve these problems. Now the "solution" is to export our troubles to Austin, Nashville, Boise, Phoenix, and so on as people and money migrate and drive up costs to other areas domino style. These places are no better at managing regardless of their political leanings. At a certain point the problem will switch from an economic struggle to a political resolution. Historically these are never fun...
Florida housing prices have taken a similar turn. Siesta Key Florida. $1-3 million per house last I looked this year. Plumbers and public school teachers used to live on the island. Today, no way that would happen.
In beachfront communities in California, 99 per cent of the value is in the land, so people buy the house at these prices and replace it with what they want.
I appreciated this thoughtful essay. I would value your thoughts on how this scenario may play out under different regional circumstances. In the inter mountain west we are reckoning with constrained water resources, which leads to compounding risk as growth increases. In Utah, for example, there are communities that have had to shut off all new water connections due to a lack of reliable water sources (and many communities are already over-built beyond water projections). On top of this, we are also home to some of the most desirable and fastest growing metro areas and communities in the nation. In circumstances where any growth is risky, and attempts to choose which types of growth to promote will likely lead to suboptimal outcomes, regulation feels like the "least bad" option…What is your perspective on a policy map to navigate these tradeoffs?
Mr. Del Mastro, Sorry to learn that your only off-hand ‘take’ on issue of corporate purchases of residential lots near a so-called ‘downtown’ in Montgomery County, MD - is to label them plaints from privileged “upper-middle class…legacy owners of single family homes.,etc.”. A flashy New Urbanist ‘ideological agenda’ shows through such an un-researched response. Please check factual 2020 demographics (See U.S. Census tract results) before labeling modest, majority-minority small cohesive neighborhoods-half affordable rental apartments, half single family houses cheek-by-jowl near a County Park “upper-middle class”. Please visit specific locations ‘on-the-ground’ rather than announce an absurdly biased viewpoint. Open markets are indeed better, but MOCO Planning Board tries to force through ‘absurd’ plans - based mainly on designs created by Corporate Developers backed by costly ‘land-use’ legal lobbyist with outsize influence on some elected/appointed officials. Point is that corporate developers and large land-owners desire to acquire affordable rental properties with intent to raze them to the ground and redevelop upscale denser ‘mixed use’ housing including County hand-outs of ‘windfall profit’ portions of scarce public parkland. Such large -scale over-densification should not qualify as the open and gradual process you (& I) favor. Displacing ‘naturally’ affordable & subsidized garden apartments housing large families of lower-income working people and recent war-refugee families should be anathema to You. The shibboleth of removing single-family zoning is NOT the issue here. Realistically, we face a ‘back-door’ strategy to displace many lower-income residents with higher income new residents lacking numerical growth in truly affordable housing. How does your belief system justify such patently falsifiable ‘master planning’ maneuvers under a ‘progressive’ guise?
I suggest you return to actually visiting and investigating real small neighborhoods before pontificating on house-price ‘absurdity’ without benefit of accurate information ‘on-site’.