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Urban areas see revival in housing construction
Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
A substantial amount of housing built this decade has shifted from open fields on the edges of suburbia to dense central cities and their nearby suburbs, a new government study suggests.
The change suggests that a much-publicized urban renaissance in the past 15 years is more than an isolated trend, some urban analysts say.
(10 March 2009)
Outside buyers drawn to Detroit’s foreclosed homes
Jeff Karoub and Corey Williams, Associated Press
Welcome to Landlord Nation, where foreclosure notices are plentiful and for-sale signs offer at least 1,800 homes for under $10,000 that once were worth at least 10 times more.
In extreme cases, homes are on sale for $1 or less, which has enticed investors to Detroit from as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia.
“In the past few months, I’ve picked up 10 new clients from out of state that are buying in bulk,” said Mike Shannon, a suburban Detroit real estate agent. His office specializes in foreclosures in a city that’s among the national leaders.
“They’re coming to us, saying `Look, I want to buy 50, 100, 1,000.’ They want to own every decent and cheap house they can find.”
Despite a stagnant retail housing market, real estate sales of foreclosed homes are booming. Shannon regularly fields calls from eager prospects, and recently sold 30 homes in one day to one buyer. A trio of U.K. investors has bought a half-dozen and plans many more.
“I thought it would be quite good fun to have a look,” said Darren Veness, who lives near Brighton, England.
Outside buyers are the latest in a long line of landlords taking over the deteriorating housing stock of a city that because of its once mighty auto industry boasted one of the highest owner-occupied housing rates in the U.S. And unlike many large cities, Detroit’s single-family homes dominate its landscape, not high-rise apartment buildings.
(9 March 2009)
EB contributor Carl Etnier writes:
Dramatic economic downturns create opportunities for rich people to become richer by buying up assets at for cents on the dollar. Behind each foreclosed home purchased by a foreign landlord lies a personal financial tragedy. James Howard Kunstler might argue that the new landlords are setting themselves up for failure as the suburbs are abandoned. Maybe, but the landlord needn’t be troubled by even a medium-term abandonment. The economic calculations in the article make it seem that as long as the property is rented for 3-4 years, the landlord will at least have recouped the initial investment. That’s a better investment than the stock market has been, by a long shot!
Small, Green And Good
Catherine Tumber, CounterCurrents
Growing up in a small town, I regularly took bus trips with my mom and little sister into “the city”: Syracuse. Like most middle-class families in the 1960s, we had only one car, which my dad drove to work. So we would buy our tickets at the village pharmacy, board the Big Dog, and barrel though miles of farms and sparsely developed land until we reached the highway.
Nearing the final stretch, we had to endure the stench of the Solvay chemical works to our right, and the creepy mint green of polluted Onondaga Lake on our left. But we would disembark in Syracuse’s vibrant downtown, all glittering lights and vertical planes, filled with department stores, jewelry and candy shops, theaters and movie palaces, “ethnic” food, and people who were interestingly not like us.
Smaller American cities, places like Syracuse—and Decatur, New Bedford, Kalamazoo, Buffalo, Trenton, Erie, and Youngstown—were once bustling centers of industry and downtown commerce, with wealthy local patrons committed to civic improvements and the arts. In the ’70s they began a decline from which they have not recovered.
Today, most are scanted as doleful sites of low–paying service jobs, with shrinking tax bases and little appeal to young professionals or to what urban theorist Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” In Syracuse itself the center of gravity has shifted northward, toward Carousel Mall, leaving a ghostly downtown where Rite–Aid, now the largest store, presides over parking lots and abandoned buildings.
Historians and economic demographers generally attribute the decline of small–to–mid–size cities of 50,000 to 500,000 souls to deindustrialization, since many sit in the Midwestern Rust Belt or the Northeast. But the history of smaller–city decline is more complex than that. Smaller cities were also victims of post–war development policies better suited to large cities—or rather, that were painful, but less disastrous, for large metropolitan areas.
Extraordinary mid–twentieth century changes in transportation, zoning, housing construction, mortgage financing, and domestic taste facilitated the creation of wide swathes of “bourgeois utopias” that now ring our cities far out into the exurbs. They are the products of a radical transformation of land–use policy that extended supply chains with vast highway systems, further separating people from their workplaces, energy producers from consumers, and farmers from their markets.
Large cities survived the changes and the resulting onslaught of suburban shopping malls—itself a reaction to extended supply–chains—in the late ’70s. In smaller cities, malls decimated what was left of retail districts already damaged by massive downtown highway systems that choked off commercial centers from surrounding urban neighborhoods.
Neglect of the smaller city, as both place and idea, continued through the rest of the century.
… Sustainability advocates could be missing the large, strategic, regional and economic advantages smaller cities can offer a national policy over the long term.
The Portland, Oregon–based Post Carbon Cities project offers one bold way to start thinking about national policy, with its call for the “relocalization” of cities, a form of decentralization grounded in local food systems and energy resources. An alternative to the traditional idea of “balancing” economic and environmental needs, relocalization aims to maximize both by dramatically reducing reliance on costly and environmentally damaging supply chains—long transportation routes geared to truck or air transportation—while increasing sustainable agriculture and energy security and creating local jobs that cannot be outsourced.
Taking energy security first, the smaller cities of the United States, with their large parcels of vacant, relatively low–value property and proximate surrounding land, could serve the alternative energy industry well. Smaller cities are not only more likely to be located near sources of clean energy—such as waterways, forests, and fields—but they can also generate more energy proportionate to their size.
(14 March 2009)
