The crusade against the single-family home (cont.)

Geographer and commentator Joel Kotkin is back with a hard-hitting look at the state's efforts to combine land-use and transportation planning in its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emisions.

SB 375, enacted by the Legislature in 2008, gives responsibility for this planning work to the metropolitan planning organizations around the state - the Southern California Assn. of Governments in our region. As we noted the other day, SCAG is in the process of holding public workshops to gather input as it crafts a draft Sustainable Communities Strategy, due for release late this year.

Kotkin takes a dim view of what he sees as the state's crusade against single-family homes.

In recent years, homeowners have been made to feel a bit like villains rather than the victims of hard times, Wall Street shenanigans and inept regulators. Instead of being praised for braving the elements, suburban homeowners have been made to feel responsible for everything from the Great Recession to obesity to global warming.

In California, the assault on the house has gained official sanction. Once the heartland of the American dream, the Golden State has begun implementing new planning laws designed to combat global warming. These draconian measures could lead to a ban on the construction of private residences, particularly on the suburban fringe. The new legislation’s goal is to cram future generations of Californians into multi-family apartment buildings, turning them from car-driving suburbanites into strap-hanging urbanistas.

As we've noted before, polling and market research clearly shows that the vast majority of Californians still prefer to live in single-family homes, and the same is true of prospective Generation Y homebuyers once they start to form families. Kotkin cites research confirming that view, but says too many policy-makers are simply ignoring the facts.

But who needs facts when you have religion? Take the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and Metropolitan Transit Commission’s (MTC) new “sustainable communities strategy,” a document designed to meet the requirements of the state’s draconian anti-greenhouse gas legislation.

This “strategy” seeks to all but reduce growth in the region’s lower-density outer fringe – eastern Contra Costa County as well as the Napa, Vallejo and Santa Rosa metropolitan areas — which grew more than twice as fast as the core and inner suburbs. Instead the ABAG-MTC projects a soaring increase in demand for high-density housing and its latest “vision” report calls for 97% of all the region’s future housing be built in urban areas, virtually all of it multi-family apartments, to accommodate an estimated 2 million residents.

It's troubling that SCAG presents a "scenario" in its ongoing workshops that calls for the same strategy throughout Southern California in the next 25 years.

Finally, Kotkin points out there's a simple technology that would allow people to live where they want in the kind of homes they want and still reduce the amount of miles they put on their cars and thus the amount of GHGs they produce.

The (Bay Area) report also studiously avoids mentioning the potential greenhouse gas reductions to be had by expanding telecommuting, which is growing six times faster than the fervently pushed transit commuting in the region. The Silicon Valley already has 25% more telecommuters than transit users. Clearly, by pushing telecommuting, you could get big reductions in GHG without a “cramming” agenda.

The BIA will continue to work hard in the months to come to promote regional plans that will accommodate the broad mix of new housing that will be needed in our region - apartments, condos, mixed use developments and, yes, single-family homes in the suburbs.

June Housing starts retreat in L.A., Ventura counties

Builders pulled fewer building permits in L.A. and Ventura counties in June, in part because of a sharp drop in volatile apartment unit permits following a surge of new multifamily projects in May. But despite the drop, housing starts for the first six months of the year are up a robust 41 percent in L.A. County, according to data compiled by the Construction Industry Research Board and released today by the L.A./Ventura Chapter of the BIA of Southern California.

There were 178 single-family permits pulled in L.A. County along with permits for 363 multifamily units. That brought the year-to-date total to 5,042, a 41.7 percent increase compared to the first six months of 2010. In Ventura County, just 10 single-family and 43 multifamily permits were issued in June. Twenty permits were issued in both Oxnard and Santa Paula. For the year, production countywide is down 25 percent compared to 2010.

Chapter CEO Holly Schroeder said that even with competition from foreclosed homes there is still a demand for new homes that are priced right.

Homes being built this year are greener than ever and designed for 21^st century lifestyles. But fees charged by local cities, counties and school districts that average $50,000 or more per home make it extremely difficult to make projects pencil out in today’s market. We continue to ask local governments to work with our members to reduce and defer fees to help us build more and help get the state’s economy moving again.

You can read the full BIA press release here, and review data for the most active jurisdictions in the two counties here.

Long-Running Chandler Ranch Project Heads Back to City Council

The lengthy effort to convert a rock quarry in tony Rolling Hills Estates into a luxury residential community and golf course heads back to the City Council on Tuesday, the Daily Breeze reported today.

The 228-acre Chandler Ranch would include 114 homes as currently proposed. While local officials and activists are generally supportive of the proposal, because of inevitable delays and market conditions the developers are asking for a 10-year development agreement, with a five-year extension possible.

And there's at least one more bureaucratic issue to be determined, writes reporter Melissa Pamer: the development would be part of three different school districts. While the cities of Torrance and Rolling Hills Estates have agreed to swap 32 acres to ensure the entire property is within Rolling Hills Estates, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, and L.A. unified school districts have yet to begin discussion about similar district boundary adjustments.

You can read the entire article here.

Should feds rent out foreclosed homes?

There's an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal that says there's a growing sentiment in Washington, D.C., to have Freddie and Fannie rent out some of the nation's backlogged foreclosed homes in an effort to stabilize the housing market. Writes Nick Timiraos in the paper's Developments blog:

These firms and U.S. banks currently own more than 500,000 foreclosed homes, and there’s another 2 million loans in some stage of foreclosure. The high share of distressed sales in many struggling markets is contributing to continued declines in home prices.

“Can we find a way to try and reduce that overhang or to try to provide incentives for investors to covert them?” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in testimony to Congress last week.

Supporters say while the government isn’t set up to be a landlord, neither is it any better prepared to sell thousands of foreclosed properties — something it’s already doing anyway.

Putting these homes in the hands of people who can take care of them and rent them out” would save taxpayer money, says John Burns, who runs a home-building consulting firm in Irvine.

Guess what? Study shows people continue moving to the 'burbs as they form families

After participating in three workshops during the past two days sponsored by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, it's refreshing to see a study that presents the world as it is, not as urban planners would like it to be.

SCAG is in the process of developing plans that will help shape the region's future housing development patterns as part of the state's efforts to combat global warming. The group is presenting alternative growth scenarios that in one extreme case argues that condos, apartments and townhomes should account for 97% of all new housing between now and 2030.

But those scenarios are based on assumptions that most people in the millennial generation and aging baby boomers will flock to high-density urban developments and turn their back on single-family homes in the suburbs.

Market research by John Burns and others flatly disputes that notion, finding that millennials may like city living when they're young but want to buy in suburbia when they start having families and start thinking about schools, crime and other factors. And boomers want to age in place in 2,000-square-foot homes, not 1,000-square-foot lofts.

Comes now demographer Wendell Cox, who looked at 2000 and 2010 Census data to see where the 20-somethings from a decade ago were living today. Guess what: they're increasingingly moving out to the 'burbs.

Said Chapman University's Joel Kotkin in Forbes.com:

Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44. The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1. 8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.

He continues:

More intriguing, and perhaps counter-intuitive, “hip and cool” core cities like San Francisco, New York and Boston have also suffered double-digit percent losses among this generation. New York City, for example, saw its 25 to 34 population of 2000 drop by over 15% — a net loss of over 200,000 people — a decade later. San Francisco and Oakland, the core cities of the Bay Area, lost more than 20% of this cohort over the decade, and the city of Boston lost nearly 40%.

In contrast, the largest growth among this peer group took place in metropolitan areas largely suburban in form, with a strong domination by automobiles and single-family houses. The most popular cities among this group — with increases of over 10% — were Las Vegas; Raleigh, N.C.; Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Charlotte, N.C.; Orlando, Fla.; San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, in Texas; and Sacramento, Calif.

The BIA continues to advocate for expanded housing opportunities to meet all market needs. Urban and mixed-use projects are important and should be encouraged, but to say that only 3 percent of future housing should be single-family detached doesn't reflect what the markets - and the demographic trends - are telling us.