But for someone just starting out, like I was 25 years ago, they’re much less investment than a house, so much easier to manage on a lower salary. Plus, if it’s a decently made building, noise isn’t much of an issue.
Having a decent balcony is an absolute requirement, though, in my opinion.
But a lot of the “negatives” people list relative to houses can actually be positives, depending on what stage of life you’re at. When I was in my 20s, with no wife or kids, I didn’t need a huge yard, and didn’t want the hassle of yard work and snow shoveling. I liked being able to walk out my front door and be at a restaurant, store or movie theater within 2 minutes (I had all three right on the corner my building was on). I liked being able to take off for a few days or few weeks and not having to worry about fires, or snow piling up.
Now I’m in my 50s and looking towards retirement, and all that is starting to look good to me again. I don’t want to be mowing the lawn in my 60s, or going out in a blizzard to plow the driveway. I could pay someone to do that, but that gets expensive. If I can downsize to a condo, I’d likely be able to buy one outright with the equity in my current house*, which frees up a lot of money for the condo fees, and then I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff.
*Three houses similar to mine on my block went up for sale this past month, and based on their asking prices, and the fact that one sold in about a week, I could probably walk away today with about $400-500k in cash, which would be enough to cover the kind of condo I’d be looking at. 5 or 10 years from now, it will probably be better.
That sounds more like a red herring, or a straw man. The toxic waste example is absurd, but living next to (or above) a bar is something some people actually would like just fine, or they’d be willing to make that tradeoff for the benefits that come with such proximity. Also, what actual harm comes from a 10 story apartment tower next to a single family home? Like for real, I don’t get that.
More to the point, how distorted is the market that such a super-adjacency would come to be in the first place? There is so much pent-up demand that it can’t be met without a high rise, but at the same time single residents can basically squat on land that’s begging for higher utilization due to a tax system that rewards speculation and depreciation while punishing development and improvement. If all the houses on a street could be divided into duplexes and/or have granny/garage flats, you could double or even quadruple the density without materially changing the built form. But if they can’t, then the big apartment complex or the high rise is the only other option beyond sprawling further and further out.
Correcting for bombed out high-crime neighborhoods where dense zoned plats may be underutilized or sitting fallow for obvious reasons, things like parking regulations and other zoning ratios may not make that feasible. In many cities the zoning laws in place do not allow what’s already there to be rebuilt as-is. There’s too many units per property, not enough parking, too small setbacks, inadequate accessibility, too small units, etc. If it’s an historic district too, good luck. At best, cities will implement zoning to make existing buildings compliant, but nothing above and beyond that. They’re very byzantine and granular in that respect, with numerous zones covering many possible lot sizes, building sizes, etc.
Another factor is that the more existing units there are, the bigger the jump in density needs to be to amortize the cost of demolition and redevelopment. A number I’ve heard batted around is that it takes roughly a 4x increase in density/units to make a redevelopment feasible without going significantly upmarket. So demolishing a single-family home into a 4-plex is relatively feasible, though that also pushes you from the residential building code to the commercial building code, which is a big hurdle in and of itself. Regardless though, a 4-plex of one or two bedroom apartments can pretty easily masquerade as a decent sized single family home.
If you want to redevelop an existing 4-plex however, now you’re looking at 16 units which will very likely run afoul of the zoning. So what happens instead is multiple multifamily buildings get demolished for an even bigger (in scale) luxury development, while the single-family homes are left alone. That happened just down the street from me about five years ago. Four 4-plexes and one larger courtyard apartment with something like 16 or 20 units, all from the 1930s or 1940s, were demolished to build a 30-unit condo. So what used to be 32-36 rentals at around $1,000/month in a hot area just two blocks from the neighborhood business district went to 30 condos that go for $1-2 million. So much for growth and walkability.
Yep. Though I think the states and maybe even the feds are going to get more involved as we move forward because the county and local governments don’t want to budge, but the higher levels of government are feeling the political pressure to do something about housing choice and prices. It’s just that the most vocal opponents to reducing land use regulations are also generally the most well-to-do and politically connected up the ladder. I thought those types didn’t like regulations?
I’m plenty familiar with Houston. It has all the parking minimums, lot coverage maximums, setbacks, floor area ratios, buffer zones, minimum unit sizes, and other trappings of typical zoning codes, just not the use-based stuff (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.). So it has about 80% of the zoning as most other places. The city also enforces privately-implemented deed restrictions (I may not have the terminology exactly right), so basically a developer implements zoning-like restrictions on a property and the city will enforce them rather than the courts. That’s the other 20% basically.
Shade is a benefit in the summer, more so because the sun is out longer. Also, if that’s so important (same with views) then maybe the homeowner should pay for those rights. Is sun/shade so much more important than people having a place to live at all? Traffic noise is also a red herring, because dense housing generates less traffic than the same number of residents in sprawl. Of course people who live in sprawl also fight more sprawl because of the “I got mine” mentality without also acknowledging that they’re the new neighbors that are causing traffic and loss of “open space” to the people who lived there before. Repeat ad nauseam. As for backyard privacy, I’ve seen plenty of suburban backyards with no privacy whatsoever. No fences allowed, to maintain a “parklike setting”. This is another example of “is it really more important than allowing people to have a place to live?” Besides, nobody cares to watch you barbecuing or having your friends over for a beer. If you like nude sunbathing then you’re needing much more land and landscaping than you find in typical suburbs anyway, or you need to actually build some privacy screening, except oh wait, you can’t because zoning.
“it is really more important” is a very different argument from “it does you no harm at all”.
I like having my little plot of land to play with. I, personally, would be happy to have the same plot of land dropped in the middle of a city. But i can’t afford that, so here i am, in the burbs, where land is cheaper.
My brother really doesn’t want to live in the city and it’s extremely cranky that his town is getting built up. Curiously, he’s looked up every conversion from single family to multi-family in the past 5 (maybe more) years, and in every single case, each new unit built sold for more than what the developer paid for the house. So, a $400k house gets turned into two or three $800k units. And a lot of what used to be retail has been turned into housing, too, so despite higher density, there’s actually less to do in town, less stuff going on, fewer places to dine or buy things.
He thinks the only people really benefiting are developers, who are making a ton of money, and fooling the citizens into thinking they are reducing housing costs when the place is actually gentrifying.
Now… Those new homes are selling to someone, and maybe there are slightly lower prices wherever they are coming from. But it’s not as simple as the pro-growth people claim it is.
If there wasn’t demand for those $800K units then they wouldn’t sell. The 400-800 conversion illustrates my point about how it takes roughly a 4x increase in units/density to prevent going upmarket. It’s entirely possible that all the $400K in value is in the land, and the zoning limitations prevent it from being utilized most efficiently.
Regardless, with two homes, that’s $200K built into the sale price of each, and with current construction costs those are probably “only” 2,400 SF homes (2,400 SF x $250/SF + $200K). If the demand for $800K 2,400 SF homes was satisfied, and the zoning allowed it, then a 4-plex could be built with 1,200 SF units for $400K each. If the existing home was just left single family (whether renovated or rebuilt), then it’d very likely be $1M or more, and no increase in density. Remember, the high-end market gets first dibs, and development doesn’t move downmarket until the high-end is satisfied.
Also I find it kind of amusing that people get huffy over developers making money, while our entire economy (if not society) is built on companies making profit. Are all companies that make profit evil?
Most of what’s being built in Portland are studios, as in under 500 sf. Every multi unit building that’s gone up in our neighborhood over the past ten years is like that.
Yeah, there was a new high rise million-dollar condo building in SF, and they had free tours and refreshments, so a couple of us went over. The units were tiny.
