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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   27345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not.

O'Toole says the opposite.

People like single-family homes because of privacy, yards, and other amenities, but these are reinforced by another factor: cost. Density advocates often portray multifamily housing as affordable housing, but it is only affordable because the housing units are so much smaller than single-family housing.

According to Zillow, as of March 31, 2022, the typical single-family home in the United States was worth $338,000, while the typical condominium was worth $332,000. In places that use growth boundaries or similar policies to restrict development at the urban fringe, the differences are much greater: single-family homes in the San Francisco metro area are 57 percent more expensive than condos, while in Seattle they are 63 percent more expensive.

Condos may be less expensive, but that’s because they are smaller. Zillow once published costs per square foot of single-family homes and condominiums, but no longer does so. However, data I downloaded from 2016 indicate that the average price per square foot of condominiums was 33 percent greater than the average for single-family homes.

According to California developer Nicholas Arenson, the higher cost is due to multi-story construction, which requires elevators and more concrete and structural steel. Two-story multifamily housing costs about the same, per square foot, as single-family homes. But a third story adds 30 to 50 percent, a fourth story doubles per-square-foot costs, and five or more stories are even more expensive. Since urban planners favor four- to six-story mid-rises, units have to be very small to be priced lower than single-family homes.

And:

Beyer [a promoter of densification] cited “costs of sprawl” research by Rutgers University’s Robert Burchell and Sahan Mukherji that found that “conventional development” imposed greater costs on urban service providers than “managed development.” This research was largely hypothetical and compared the costs of low-density development vs. high-density development on vacant lands.

They found that low-density development would cost $13,000 more per housing unit than high-density development. That’s a small amount compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars added to the costs of housing when urban-growth boundaries are in place.

Beyer and density-loving planners, however, aren’t talking about building dense developments on vacant lands. Instead, they want to rebuild low-density neighborhoods to higher densities. Improving the infrastructure needed to support those higher densities will be much more costly than simply building on vacant land.

A webcast audience member asked whether “low-density housing bankrupts communities through higher infrastructure, service, and transportation costs.” I know of no communities that have gone bankrupt due to low-density housing costs. I do know of cities that have defaulted on bonds they sold to support the high-density housing for which there was supposed to be a pent-up demand, but that demand didn’t materialize.

Claims that development doesn’t pay for itself simply aren’t supported by history. This nation has been developing for hundreds of years. Who paid for the urban services if not the residents and businesses that used those services? At the local level, most deficit spending and default risk today is due to generous public employee pension and health-care plans, not to the infrastructure needed to support new development.

The mistake you are making is not differentiating the value of a sq ft of housing from a sq ft of land. You have to compare apples to apples and mind the counterfactuals of supply and demand, with consideration of land use policy constraints.

The price of housing is a function of supply and demand, and dense/vertical construction is the only way to increase supply in most cases, where empty land is gone and artificial land isn’t an option. So dense housing is cheaper than the alternative of lower supply in that high-demand area.

When land is valuable and in short supply, building vertically becomes economical. Arbitrarily building skyscrapers is not typically a good idea. Generally, developers and investors work really hard to figure out where it makes sense to build however high, and when they’re lucky the zoning lets them actually build the best thing feasible.

Manhattan real estate is so valuable in large part because it is so dense and it is so dense because it is so valuable, in proximity to employment and amenities creating high demand. San Francisco is so much less dense than NYC because SF zoning laws and planning decisions prohibit density increases to match what the market would call for, given the high demand.

An empty lot or a house in say North Dakota or rural Texas is way cheaper. Until perhaps oil is discovered nearby, and then demand surges.

If you average out those high- and low- demand areas nationwide then, yeah, you’re going to get to nonsensical conclusions like “dense housing isn’t cheaper.”

Cities mismanaging land use policy and infrastructure spending (and pensions) is a tale as old as … the last 60 years or so in the US.

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