Tuesday, October 1, 2019

"Housing Situation": Problem in 1919 and in 2019

"Build! Build! Build!" (October 1st, 1919)
An interesting chart came across the twitter the other day. It shows that a little before the Great Recession - but also clearly a precursor of it - in 2005 housing starts fell off the table and we haven't caught up.

New housing still hasn't caught up to 2005 levels
(Housing was Undersupplied
during the Great Housing Bubble)
On FB in discussion of the City's proposal to create single-lot or other micro-Urban Renewal Zones as a way to use tax increment funding to spur more affordable housing, some people remarked that there were already a lot of large multi-family and single-family developments in the works, and we should wait to see if this new funding concept was actually necessary.

Housing deficit of "207 acres...for multi-family housing"
(Housing Needs Analysis)
The Housing Needs Analysis suggested we needed another 200 acres for multi-family housing and that we had a surplus of land zoned for single-family housing. There's been a flurry of approvals and aren't we nearly caught up, they seemed to ask.

Statewide deficit of 10,000 homes per year since 2000
(Housing Underproduction in Oregon)
This may not be concrete enough. It may be that we need a number, a count, on the shortage of homes, a count of new homes, and a ratio of new homes to population here. Acres might be too abstract.*

And, anyway, what matters is not rezoning, or new developments approved. What matters is houses built. The Fairview project is large and has many approvals, but still in absolute numbers there are few homes there.

And even if it were all built out, it might be equivalent to only one year's deficit.

We have many years of deficit to catch up! A modest boom for two or three years might seem like a lot, but given the magnitude of the historical deficit, it's nowhere near enough.

Housing slowing down (City Manager's Update)
And if things seem to be slowing again, this is not something to be complacent about.

Housing policy is not a central thing here, and you may be able to refine or correct details here. But in Our Salem and in debates over development, there's too much "do you want an apartment complex next door to you?!?!?!" and not enough, "here's how many new homes, at a broad range of prices, we need to build annually if we want homes for everybody who wants one."

The streetcar-era grid in 1917
And because concentrating on single-family housing on greenfields near the urban growth boundary at the edges of the city just digs in on mid-century autoism and all its ills, including more greenhouse gas pollution, we have give stronger consideration to infill and redevelopment on the streetcar grid and close-in neighborhoods. It's just not going to be possible to "preserve neighborhood character" unchanged.


* The Housing Needs Analysis does say the 207 acres is equivalent to 2,897 homes - but in light of the national chart and the state-level claim in "Housing Underproduction," 2,897 just seems to small. So there are two observations here: We need to talk more about housing starts and the historical deficits in counts of homes, not in acres or other analogues. Then, with those counts, we might start to look more critically at our housing affordability problems and question whether 2,897 more homes in multi-family buildings gets us where we want to be.

5 comments:

Susann Kaltwasser said...

On the old mushroom land at the corner of State and Cordon Road there is a Planned Unit Development that will add 690 houses and apartment units on about 100 acres. That sounds like a lot of housing units, but the project is spread out over 6 phases that can take up to 10 years to build out. Even if the plan is sped up to 6 years that is still not many houses per year. If we have a turn down in the economy as some predict then it might even take longer to build out.

Ricardo Salem said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Salem Breakfast on Bikes said...

Comment moderation note: This is a post about the recent history of housing starts, not about city revenue sources or city budgets. Please keep comments on topic!

Ricardo Salem said...

This is a post about the recent history of housing starts, not about city revenue sources or city budgets. Please keep comments on topic!
++++

-OK but how can we exclude "city revenue sources or city budgets" from policy affecting housing starts?

Let's drill down a bit.

“2005 housing starts fell off the table and we haven't caught up.”

-Right. so what can we learn about the probable causes of changes in the housing market?



“The Housing Needs Analysis suggested we needed another 200 acres for multi-family housing and that we had a surplus of land zoned for single-family housing.”

-Right but since land cannot be "produced" how how can there be a “land surplus”?



“What matters is houses built.“

-Sure but don't we need both “houses built” and the infrastructure financing required to provide services to the houses?



“We have many years of deficit to catch up!”

-Agreed so let's look at what factors might be causing “many years” of deficits and see if any are related to the housing market.



We must “give stronger consideration to infill and redevelopment on the streetcar grid and close-in neighborhoods.”

-Exactly, so how do we accomplish this goal without mentioning "city revenue sources or city budgets"?

Won't we benefit from more discussion of "city revenue sources or city budgets"?

Salem Breakfast on Bikes said...

Ricardo, the solution here is that you need to start you own blog! You clearly have things to say - like long comments here and here. But these comments are a kind of thread hijack, where you leverage one point here to go off and make different point on a marginally related topic with the ideological slant you prefer. I will read your blog and even discuss it here as seems useful! But if you want to comment here, please keep your comments on the post and in a constructive way to advance the conversation.

Of course it's useful to discuss city revenue sources and city budgets - on posts that discuss them. (Mostly, though, the city revenue source that is of interest here is a gas tax.)

Thanks for reading!