Category: housing

Gary Painter and Zhou Yu on Immigrants and home ownership

Lisa Schweitzer

One of my favorite colleague, Gary Painter, has a new manuscript on home ownership and immigrants that you may access from the Lusk Center website.

From the abstract:

The recent trend of immigrants arriving in mid-size metropolitan areas has received
growing attention in the literature. This study examines the success of immigrants in the
housing markets of a sample 60 metropolitan areas using Census microdata in both 2000
and 2005. The results suggest that immigrants are less successful in achieving
homeownership and more likely to live in overcrowded conditions than native-born
whites of non-Hispanic origin. The immigrant effect on homeownership differs by
geography and by immigrant group. Finally, we find evidence that immigrant networks
increase the likelihood of becoming a homeowner.

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Who gets the foreclosure bail-out money?

Lisa Schweitzer

NYTimes.com has a story on the tough choices ahead to figure out how to disperse homeowner relief in Arizona. Here’s the story: Microcosm of the Housing Crisis on an Arizona Street

I am trying to be convinced that foreclosure relief is a good idea. I have enormous respect for the real estate economists in my school, and in general, they support foreclosure relief based on the externality argument: ie, that foreclosures cause home values to fall in the neighborhood, and thus are an externality. There is some empirical work out there measuring the externality, but I am often unconvinced by externality arguments that don’t actually involve physical environmental problems. External costs and benefits get bandied around too often in the public sphere as code for “this is something I want/don’t want, so it will benefit/cost everybody” instead of really reflecting the downstream phenomenon the concept should.

Here’s why I can’t get on board.

1. People tell me that the reason I shouldn’t fret about poor people is that housing filters down to them as houses age and prices fall. But if we are keeping people in their houses and making housing a can’t-lose investment, which will increase or at least stabilize house prices, how does that filtering happen?

2. Nobody was complaining about externalities when their neighbor’s inappropriately high housing sale value was inflating their own home prices. Is this really a market failure, or is this just a painful reversal of neighborhood effects?

3. How is it that we are in housing crisis now but not when housing prices were higher?

It seems to me that the means test for justice here is that we can and should help out struggling homeowners, but that the program should be more like guaranteed student loans than operating subsidies to households. I mean, hell, Section 8 housing doesn’t get this kind of love. The government ponies up the money to help out the owner and keep them in their house, but that money has to be paid back. Just like student loans, you can apply for a forbearance on the repayment if you remain unemployed or fall ill. But it’s to be at a subsidized rate after a certain amount of time.

Why isn’t that enough?

The one place I don’t see such a plan working is for elder housing. There I can see a rationale for a straight compensation.


Dowell Myers: Demographic Imperatives and Urban Change

Lisa Schweitzer

Dowell Myers has been working on three major research projects on forecasting urban change, future homeownership, and Prop 13 taxes. These he has summarized in a presentation on the Demographic Imperatives.

Contents:
Neglected contributions of demographics
Demographics and housing market trends
The two main drivers of urban change
Understanding turning points and how the future is different
Focus on housing and land use

The Demographic Imperatives can be found here.


Court smackdown for LA slumlord

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Monica Hujazi has been ordered to pay more than $40K per occupant–for some families over $250,000, for failing to improve conditions in her rentals properties. The settlement amounts to more than $3.3 million, and it’s the second time at the rodeo for Ms. Hujazi, as she settled a $7 million suit in 2006.

Ouch.

One problem: Ms Cuevas is now going to buy a place in Bakersfield. From downtown to Bakersfield. Depending on where she works, that could be quite a switchup in commutes.


Sheltering Homeless Saves Money

Lisa Schweitzer

From the USC press release:

Placing four chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing in Los Angeles resulted in more than $80,000 per year in savings to taxpayers and improved quality of life for the individuals, according to a recent study led by Michael R. Cousineau, associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Heather Lander, project specialist at the USC Center for Community Health Studies.


Kelo (0), the State (0) Pfizer (0) and the Recession (1)

Lisa Schweitzer

The New York Times today ran this story about Pfizer leaving New London, which used its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy housing for an “urban village” development. Now that Pfizer is leaving without delivering the development, people are understandably bitter.

I have to say it out loud: I really hate eminent domain. I know we need it for land assembly, but…states that do not respect property rights past a certain, reasonable point are bad regimes.


Will seniors downsize and relocate?

Lisa Schweitzer

My colleague Richard Green noted that he saw a good presentation from Irina Telyukova on whether elderly households will downsize for the sake of downsizing. I’d like to get a copy of Telyukova’s paper, as this is a particularly thorny problem for transportation.

There is a great deal of faith in the planning world that the aging of America (and western Europe/Australia) will boost up public transit, as eventually seniors give up driving. Sandi Rosenbloom has a couple of nice papers which discuss this issue [1,2]. The news is not good. Past trends suggests that as we get older, we stay put. We age in place, until we can no longer manage on our own, at which point the decline comes quickly. Part of this has to do with a discussion that Richard and I had: he and his wife have worked very hard; they are both professionals; they are very successful, they have raised their children, and yet they bought a house they really really really love even though it’s technically too big for them. I am reminded (as I am often) of my friend David Forkenbrock, who built his dream home–a fantastic place he loved so much that outside offers couldn’t blast him out of the University of Iowa despite the ghastly winters.

These seem reasonable enough things to want to enjoy into your latter life. Why not? A place for the grandkids to stay, for the kids to use for long visits.

Are there any reasons to assume that the boomers will buck trends? There is part of me that says “perhaps” but I suspect the change will be marginal. However, I’ll skylark a bit about why they might differ:

1. Boomers have to date been the most mobile and global generation; they’ve had money and comfort and a great deal of political power due to their numbers. They may have less need to rely on their housing for equity than previous generations of seniors due to their wealth, and they may have less concern over the transactions costs of moving, again due to wealth. However, these are all factors that may, in fact, allow them to age in place more readily as they may be able to afford homecare and lawncare and all sorts of services that make single-family home living easier when you get older.

2. Because of their wealth and their lower demand for services like schools, it may be that the TOD trend becomes more focused on retirement and lifestyle communities. Trust me; if my experience as a professional planner means anything, it’s that developers love residential density and neighbors hate it. If you can convince the neighbors that you’re moving in a bunch of old dears who won’t drive, park, party or take up room in their kids’ classroom, density gets easier to build. See above comment about political economy.

3. Seniors may be particularly responsive to new taxes, which I think we will see, that make suburban living relatively costlier. They may not be, but they may be.

All that said, I think I’m stretching. It’s easier to drive than it is to take transit; if it weren’t, then all of these “transit and walking fight obesity” people can’t be right. As Rosenbloom points out, this generation of women, in particular, were far more mobile than their mothers. The numbers on transport side do not suggest that seniors are going do much different than they have before.

[1] S. Rosenbloom, C. Katz, and J. Monk. Women’s travel at various stages of their lives. In Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course, pages 208–242. Routledge, London, 1993. Book, Section

[2] S. Rosenbloom. Sustainability and automobility among the elderly: An international assessment. Transportation, 28(4):375–408, 2001. Journal Article.


Formosa 1140

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

One of my gripes about the New Urbanism is that the architects who promote it are long on social mission and short on actual, well, design. There are an awful lot of Calthorpe developments that are very well-intended but in another 10 years are going to wind up looking like rather a shabby and cookie-cutter set of multi-family units, painted in pastels, around what will be a nice streetscape of then-mature trees.

However, the paradigm-shifting nature of the New Urbanism has led those with more edge and gusto to thinking about density–which brings me to Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. Take some time to play around their website–it’s very nice. You’ll maybe remember Lorcan O’Herlily as the architect who built this structure next to Schindler’s iconic house in WeHo.

1140 Formosa has gotten a lot of ink. It’s in Dwell this month, for example.


This is four stories with 11 units of lofts than run about 1,500 square feet. There is a park provided on the property, and the exoskeleton of red metal is meant to absorb heat. Behind that are walkways meant into increase social interaction.

Some writeups and descriptions:

dezeen
stylecrave
arch daily

The architect suggested it was “like living in a dorm.”

What do you all think? Lovely? Heinous? They almost had me until the dorm comment. Did other people enjoy living in dorms? I live in a very expensive building now, and we smell pot way too much from the trust fund kids down the hall. And then there was the time Andy encountered a loud fight between the pot-smoking trust funder (I think his dad was an NFL player) and his girlfriend about whether he wanted to allow her to video them…you know… what Paris Hilton got famous for videotaping. I repeat: this argument occurred in the hallway. Isn’t that a discussion one has inside? Like in hoarse, outraged whispers so the neighbors don’t hear you? (To the young man’s credit, he was the one saying ‘no’ to the exercise; but I think we can say this is the sort of thing one doesn’t necessarily want one’s pudgy, middle-aged professor neighbors knowing about one, right? Right?)

However, as I said to a group of real estate developers last week, density and infill are here to stay in LA, which caused a loud round of complaints about how government needs to use eminent domain to assemble property for them; I strongly suspect they would rapidly grow uncomfortable under such a loose property rights regime because it would eventually affect what they could sell for, at the very least. Governments that do not respect private property tend not to be ones that behave all that well; there are a few examples of good middle ground between individually held and collectively held rights. The major questions to me seem how do you make design something we can afford in housing, given that something like Formosa 1140 goes for luxury prices already, and given that we do have problems with land assembly.


Mohamed Atta, Urban Planner/Philosopher King

Lisa Schweitzer

Slate has a set of pieces by Daniel Brook on Mohamed Atta’s urban planning thesis. Except for the self-conscious throat-clearing at the beginning where Brook spends way too much time blithering on about how he knew the thesis was important when others overlooked it, this is a nice, insightful look at the ideological ramifications of urban planning. It is an unavoidably normative profession. Think about “Smart Growth.” Nobody is in this because they want “Dumb Growth.” The same is true of policy. People don’t study because they want to help foster bad government. Those of us in the policy/planning/management and, perhaps to a lesser degree, development, are here because we think those things can be done better.

The window into Atta’s thesis that Brooks provides helps us understand the terrorist’s worldview. There is a fundamentalism present in his work on Aleppo, though few contemporary urban planners would see much to fault in his grand vision to tear down freeways and high-rises to restore the Islamic vernacular. This is the danger of grand plans that planners can not cover with any amount of New Urbanist gloss: major social change is hurtful. It takes time and healing, even when it is ultimately for the good. It was wrong to build highways on communities, as French planners did, and chances are just as good that Atta’s grand vision of demolishing high-rises would also hurt in ways other than just the bricks, mortar, and glass and Westernism he intended to. In urban planning, like everything else, two wrongs seldom make a right.

This is a cautionary tale. I’m about ready to go to ACSP where I will be regaled with would-be philosopher kings explaining to me how high-speed rail will save the planet and make fat people, like me, walk more so we will be thin. I doubt any one will tell me about the significance of bus benches. We do not think small, we philosopher-kings, and as a result we miss those kinds of details and, depending on the context, can cause enormous hurt.