Culture and experience. People who grew up in suburban and rural areas are used to living in detached homes with yards. They also know it as the ideal. Beyond the cities, living in an apartment or even a townhouse has generally been for young people starting out on their own or for lower-income families. Where I live, not only do people expect to live in detached houses with yards, they want their yards to be large and the houses to be far apart.
Even in cities, people see others moving out to detached housing when they have kids and/or get lots of money. Choosing to stay in cities in attached or multi-family housing is rather unusual in the US (not unheard of, mind you, but unusual) if you can afford other options.
Or perhaps the answer is Leave it to Beaver, Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, etc. Even writing this as somewhat of a joke, I realize that I can think of only a few shows that had children (older than babies) living in attached or multi-family housing - Family Affair and Everybody Loves Chris come to mind. There are a lot with single people or young couples with babies (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, etc.) but not many with older children that weren’t specifically portrayed as being poor.
That’s precisely my point. What you’re saying is that if middle class and upper middle class people (predominately white) leave the city then they’re bad because they’re abandoning the city to decaying infrastructure, low property values, and the like. But if they come back, they increase property values and improve infrastructure, which is bad for the original inhabitants because prices go up now that the area is better. Whatever realistic option they take, you’re going to complain that they are awful people destroying a way of life. All of the fancy arguments amount to ‘if you’re well-off and white, I don’t like you, and so I’m going to call whatever you do bad for the city’. You might have the idea that this would pressure people into doing something that you want, but in my experience what it does is convince people that your complaints are absolutely devoid of merit and they tune out ‘oh no, gentrification!’ cries completely.
The thing I find frustrating is that nobody actually builds a three bedroom or a four bedroom condos in apartment building. Whenever a new condo project goes up, it is always a bunch of 1 bedrooms with a few two bedrooms thrown in. For the most part, if you want a three bedroom, you wind up looking at townhouses, or single family homes.
When we were looking, we would have loved to find a three or four bedroom condo like the ones my parents owned in Brazil. I wouldn’t have to deal with lawn maintenance, and I wouldn’t have to shovel the driveway.
I found this offhand comment a bit puzzling. Having lived in Canada and the United States, I’ve never considered the desire for a single-family home to be a particularly American thing.
About half of Canadians live in low density areas, according to this article from Statistics Canada.
And of course many Canadians have a traditional ideal of the single-family cottage as a vacation home.
The problem isn’t having it or preferring it. If someone wants it and can afford it on the open market, good for them. The problem is thinking it’s owed to you, getting NIMBY and asking for the type of government distortions which lead to too many people choosing that option. The type of distortions which were partly causative of the 2008 crash.
Vacation homes are typically away from major metropolitan areas and can be located in many more places so it’s not a problem if they’re low-density.
Low density - Affordable to most people - In a major metropolitan area: Pick 2 and don’t winge.
From the Canada Census=
“The majority of occupied private dwellings in Canada in 2016 were single-detached houses. Single-detached houses represented 53.6% of all dwelling types in 2016.”
USA census:
*
The types of homes people in the United States live in have changed over the 60-year period from 1940 to 2000. However, the level of single-family detached homes has remained fairly consistent during that period, in the 60 percents. *
I’m with you there, and am personally a fan of high density housing, but I’m afraid the picture is still pretty grim in the areas I’m talking about.
Having lived on various expensive coasts most of my life, your options aren’t really “$500k home or comparable $300k condo,” because the condo will be notably smaller, and will also have $700 a month condo fees on top of the mortgage and property taxes (assuming it’s a 2 or 3 bedroom condo). So your choice is more like $2500 a month mortgage and taxes for an 1800 square foot home with basement, lawn, and good schools, vs $1500 mortgage and taxes + $700 condo fee = $2200 for a 1200 square foot condo in neighborhood with bad schools because nobody with kids owns condos. So for an extra $300 a month you get 1.5x the space and a basement and good schools, plus the greater appreciation in value that single family homes get, which is typically noticeably higher than condo appreciation.
Then you throw in all the cultural factors and Leave it to Beaver stuff mentioned above, and the single family home is the vastly preferred choice for most people, particularly if they ever intend to have kids who need an education.
Now is that skewed pricing a result of some sort of hidden subsidies or distortions of the market? It could be, I don’t really know. If so, I don’t see what those distortions may be, beyond whatever the condo board folk are smoking to come up with their fees. But that’s the reality on the ground in the areas I’m talking about - it’s less “we have a god given right to single family homes” and more “well if I can afford $2200 a month I can afford a vastly better option for $2500 a month just as well, and it’s better for the kids.”
And the larger point of the median or slightly above average person not being able to afford a home in most of these areas is still pretty true for the $300k condo, too. The $100k per year folk can probably make it in 4-8 years of saving (aided by lower annual appreciation rates), but anyone much below that will struggle - just plugging some numbers in, anything much below $70k probably can’t afford it responsibly, because the annual housing appreciation will outstrip their savings capacity.
Most towns have affordable housing requirements for new developments. It isn’t enough, and making them truly affordable is tough. But kicking middle class people out of now expensive houses wouldn’t help a lot.
I don’t think “market forces” should be the basis of one’s morality. That’s my opinion, not like anyone asked, I just thought I’d share. I have a headache, oddly enough typing has a soothing effect.
Park Slope, my neighborhood in Brooklyn, has been considered a premium living area since the early ‘80s, at least…proximity to Prospect Park, lots of subway lines converge here, beautiful old Victorian brownstone townhouses, trees, etc. It’s gotten more desirable since the Barclay’s Center (sports and entertainment arena) was built at Flatbush and Fourth Avenue several years back. Outside of the “historic district” many crappy buildings and auto glass shops are currently being torn down to build high rise apartments.
The weird thing is that the old brownstones near the park are being snapped up by multi-millionaires, who have the old carved mahogany fixtures torn out and the interiors streamlined and modernized, with track lighting and other contemporary shit. Those of us who’ve been here for decades can’t understand it…we came here for the old world charm. These new deep-pocket weirdoes are painting over Rembrandts to make Warhols.
Also, my big supermarket down on Fifth — which caters to the less affluent and more ethnic, and where I buy things like beef bones for my dogs, and veal kidneys, and honeycomb tripe to make soup — is going to be torn down and replaced by another high-rise. The grocery stores for fancy white people don’t carry things like bones or kidneys or tripe.
I don’t mind gentrification per se, but there are two things I do mind. First, a lot of these new homes are absolutely terrible designs: 30-foot ceilings, for instance, which do no good whatsoever, and just make them more expensive to heat (and this in a neighborhood which is billed as being “eco-friendly”!). Or Le Corbusier-inspired eyesores which sacrifice useability for a demented notion of aesthetics (yes, I know that’s what Le Corbusier said he was opposed to, but seriously, have you seen any of his designs?).
And second, most of these “yuppie ghettos”, as other posters have described them, are exempted from property tax. Idiot idea, there: If they can afford the places they’re buying, they can afford the tax, too, and in 15 years when the abatement runs out, they’re just going to move to some new tax abatement and leave the houses abandoned until the property values run down to nothing, and the city is still not going to get any taxes out of them.
Not necessarily; if there is corresponding labor market shortage leading to significant wage increases then prices could conceivably remain stable for a time.
Chronos @53:. I spent the first 17 years of my life in Cleveburg (1960-78), when we had the Sterling Linder Christmas tree and Ghoulardi and lunch served in the little cardboard ovens at the downtown Higbee’s. I last visited seven years ago when my nephew got married. My older sister and I drove through the city residential areas close to downtown and the lake and were depressed by the poverty and shuttered houses.
Where is this gentrification taking place? Lakewood (west side), Cleveland Heights, and Shaker Heights (east side) already have gorgeous housing, built by the rich and still occupied by them. The shittier neighborhoods still look shitty.