The virtuous cycle of moving to another city to escape high housing costs feels more like a downward spiral as that next city also becomes too expensive.
New York Times
The Next Affordable City Is Already Too Expensive
In Spokane, Wash., home prices jumped 60 percent in the past two years. The increase is fueled by buyers fleeing the boom in cities like Austin. Who will have to flee next?
By Conor Dougherty Feb. 20, 2022
Excerpt:
Mr. MacDonald works as Spokane’s director of community and economic development.
He arrives each day to tackle a familiar conundrum: how to prevent Spokane from developing the same kinds of problems that people like him are moving there to escape.
The story plays out locally but is national in scope. It is the story of people leaving high-cost cities because they’ve been priced out or become fed up with how impossible the housing problem seems. Then it becomes the story of a city trying to tame prices by building more housing, followed by the story of neighbors fighting to prevent it, followed by the story of less expensive cities being deluged with buyers from more expensive cities, followed by the less expensive cities descending into the same problems and struggling with the same solutions.
Whether it’s Boise or Reno or Portland or Austin, the American housing market is caught in a vicious cycle of broken expectations that operates like a food chain: The sharks flee New York and Los Angeles and gobble up the housing in Austin and Portland, whose priced-out home buyers swim to the cheaper feeding grounds of places like Spokane. The cycle brings bitterness and “Don’t Move Here” bumper stickers — and in Spokane it has been supercharged during the pandemic and companies’ shift to remote work.
No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many cities and states try to blunt it with recommendations to build more housing and provide subsidies for those who can’t afford the new stuff, no matter how many zoning battles are fought or homeless camps lamented, no next city, as of yet, seems better prepared than the last one was.
Just a few years ago, a Spokane household that made the median income could afford about two-thirds of the homes on the market, according to Zillow. Now home prices are up 60 percent over the past two years, pricing out broad swaths of the populace and fomenting an escalating housing crisis marked by resentment, zoning fights and tents.
Last year, [the mayor] declared a housing emergency, and her administration has put in place initiatives that mirror those of housing-troubled cities on the West Coast. The city has built new shelters, is encouraging developers to repurpose commercial buildings into apartments, is making it easier for residents to build backyard units and is rezoning the city to allow duplexes and other multiunit buildings in single-family neighborhoods.
Ms. Woodward pointed to Kendall Yards, one of the developments outside her City Hall window, as an example of what she wanted to see more of. The mixed-density project could be a postcard picture of what economists and planners say is needed to combat the nation’s housing shortage and sprawl. In defiance of the single-family zoning laws that dictate the look of most U.S. neighborhoods, Kendall Yards has houses next to townhomes next to apartments, with retail and office mixed in.
People in town seem to love it, but are leery of there being more places like it, especially in their neighborhood.
“I think it’s awesome — I have friends there, and we go down there to the farmers’ market and walk around,” said John Schram, a co-chair of the neighborhood council in Spokane’s Comstock neighborhood. “That’s just not my vision of what I want for me. My concern is that I move into a neighborhood because of the way that it was designed when I got there, and when somebody else comes in and wants to change that I’m going to be concerned.”
He added: “I have nothing against duplexes and triplexes, just not next to my house.”
Comment:
And so goes the ‘virtuous economic cycle of people coming for housing, causing businesses to come for people, causing more people to come for jobs.’ Then, with the scourge of rising prices, particularly for rent and housing, it feels more like a downward spiral.
Jenny Schuetz, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, reports on the case in Washington D.C. metro area. Recent public hearings about updating the city’s Comprehensive Plan to allow higher density development prompted pushback from residents who want to maintain “stability” and “neighborhood character” – essentially freezing the housing stock from a time when underlying land values were lower.
The District’s current zoning and politics insulate the city’s wealthy areas from change, while lower-income families struggle to afford ever-increasing rents. The District’s most affluent neighborhoods, with some of the most valuable land, simply don’t build new housing. When developers can’t build luxury housing in affluent neighborhoods, the pent-up demand for high-end homes will spill over into nearby middle-income neighborhoods. Not being allowed to build in wealthy neighborhoods pushes the frontier of gentrification into bordering lower-income areas.
“Don’t move here” is not going to bring stability to our cities; it cannot be the answer to the endless cycle of invasion and succession. Eventually we will have to come to terms with the growing lack of housing unaffordability and open our neighborhoods to higher density mixed use development.
Tom Gihring, Research Director
Common Ground OR-WA
