Which Housing Is "Housing Crisis Housing"?
Remembering that some small communities grow on their own terms
Sometimes I spot a scene out my car window that would make a perfect photograph. On my drive to Winchester a few months ago, I passed a new subdivision a bit east of the small Virginia city. In front of it was a pasture full of cows. If there had been a wide shoulder to pull over, that would be the cover image for this piece.
I don’t know where exactly that was, but it was definitely closer to Winchester than any place you think of as being part of the D.C. suburbs (unless you think of Winchester that way, which apparently some people do.) And yet, all the way out here, there’s this new housing going up.
“How far away is the D.C.-area housing crisis pushing new construction?” I always think when I see this. Townhouses and faux downtowns in Gaithersburg, Maryland and even further out. Mixed-use development in Gainesville, Virginia. That’s pretty much without question a symptom of a housing crunch emanating from the urban core and inner suburbs.
Some people dispute this, arguing that this construction is occurring out there because people want to live there, maybe with some elements of urban life but with more privacy and peace and quiet. Yes—some people affirmatively choose this exurban development. But many are effectively pushed into it: the old “drive till you qualify.”
We do not permit our older neighborhoods to grow enough to actually let people vote with their feet and show us what a natural settlement pattern would look like. High prices indicate high demand. It may be an inference rather than an absolute fact that this exurban housing results from the housing crisis, but it is a pretty direct and simple one.
You hear it from people, too. For example:
At a recent Sunday afternoon YIMBY meetup at Eden Center—I wrote about that here—we talked a lot about housing. (Yes, and the sky is blue.) But “housing” is not some arcane, theoretical issue. We weren’t talking about this stuff the way economists might talk about interest rate hikes.
One member told us about a couple his family is friends with. They had to leave Northern Virginia and ended up all the way in Southern Maryland. (That’s not a generic term with malleable borders, like North Jersey; it’s the southernmost mainland region of the state, out along the Chesapeake.) It probably shouldn’t be part of the D.C. area, but our housing crunch has pulled it into that orbit. You pretty much have to drive everywhere there. There’s not all that much to do. Local old-timers don’t like the influx of urbanites. Urbanites don’t want to get pushed all the way out there. Local housing policy closer to the core forces these outcomes nobody wants.
But I’ve had another thought, observing new housing developments outside Winchester, or outside Charlotte Hall, Maryland. Maybe this is housing for these places. The pervasive fact of a housing shortage in my own metro area, perhaps, has led me to see all housing as symptomatic of that crisis, to the point where it hasn’t occurred to me that other places, without a housing crunch per se, might also be growing naturally, for themselves, on their own terms.
This is a subtle point. I’m so used to observing older neighborhoods frozen by outdated zoning codes, forcing “their” development out into the countryside, that I’ve started to view new housing outside of cities or established neighborhoods as artificial, in the sense that it would not exist in the absence of regulatory constraints against development. I view it, in a sense, as a necessary evil: the necessary part being the housing itself, the evil part being the location.
But this overlooks the fact that towns and less settled areas outside of the big metro areas are still “places” which might be growing apart from the urban and suburban housing crises. The fact that it often takes the form of greenfield suburban development is simply because it’s happening now, at a time when we build like that.
I’m still thinking through this. What is your impression, if you’re familiar with any of this, as to how far you have to go from the urban core before the housing market returns to ”normal,” and where you can assume you’re not seeing far-flung bedroom communities effectively transposed from their “proper” place closer to the city? This is an economic question, but also a sociological one.
Are the cows in front of tract houses a symptom of the housing crisis? Or not?
Leave a comment!
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Talk Notes: Traffic and Crowding
Not-Pennsylvania Amish Country
The problem is as much about (perceived) quality as quantity.
What people want isn't just cheap housing; they want cheap housing, with at least 3 bedrooms, in a "good neighborhood" with "good schools", with at least a small yard or garden, fee-simple rather than a condo, conveniently located to cultural amenities, outdoor activities, shopping/recreation, and job centers. If all of those boxes are checked and we still have fiscal headroom, then let's start sorting the options by aesthetics or urbanistic details, and so on ad infinitum.
The "housing crisis" occurs because the USA, while possessing of a stunningly vast and beautiful natural environment, is grotesquely deficient in providing built environments which meet all of the above requirements, which is to say "nice places to live". The two-lawyer couple making $600k per year sets the benchmark price in Georgetown, and the family earning merely $200k now gets to choose between a one-acre plot in Culpeper or a one-bedroom near the Navy Yard.
Stated differently, mass-producing five-over-ones next to a highway in Sterling (as proposed by corporate developers and their astroturf groups) doesn't necessarily get you anywhere, because many people don't want to live in a five-over-one next to the highway. So they end up in Winchester or Southern Maryland.
My feeling is that it's mostly a sign of crisis. It's still sprawl, and it still contributes to totally unmanageable distribution of infrastructure and services in metro areas. It leads to individuals spending more - time and money - to do things that would have been easy and cheap in the heart of an urban area. It has all the knock-on effects of long commutes, sedentary lifestyles, and increasing social isolation. I think some people do want it, in a very informed-opinion kind of way, but most people don't know what they want and then they suddenly have a kid that they have to think about, and urban roommate share situations ain't cutting it in that situation.