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Home prices have NOT skyrocketed everywhere! Yes, in large cities, prices are high.....it has ALWAYS been this way! Supply and demand folks! There are plenty of towns where you can buy a decent house for $50K and not live in a crack/meth/heroin neighborhood. No, you won't be in Manhattan, but your expenses will also be significantly less. I live in the northeast and there are hundreds of homes in my area on the market for less than $100K. So I'm calling hogwash on this nonsense!
Having access to cities does not mean a better quality of life. All cities aren't great....hello Detroit! Many of us have absolutely no desire to live in San Francisco. I'm perfectly happy where I am.
No, I am not in favor in a reduction of zoning laws. Do you know what your zoning laws are? I know what they are where I live and I am very happy with them......they're part of the reason I moved to this area.
I think the laws need to be revised in many places. If your in a city with a booming economy and housing costing in the millions. Really it's in the cities best interest to allow denser development. (to keep the growth). But then you cause issues with property owners that want to stay (vs ones happy to sell to a developer) It would also be in the suburbs surrounding the cities best interest to allow the city to be more dense. A booming city is an economic driver, if you get more people moving into the city it allows the suburbs to keep their value of more space while the overall area still accommodates the new population.
San Francisco is similar to Portland, except more so. It's a landlocked city and there is no place to build more housing. San Francisco is also a high dollar city, so people have the ability to pay high prices for their homes. If zoning drives up prices, homes in Detroit, Michigan would cost a fortune. They have zoning there too.
About half or Portland is zoned single family. In the current market a developer would happily buy and knock down 4 -500,000 houses to build 10 -350,000 condos.
Zoning laws may restrict the quantity of housing in a given area, just as a HOA may restrict what color you can paint your house, how tall you may allow your grass to grow, or the style of roofing you may use.
But neither of these restrict how much housing exists in the nation.
Zoning can restrict the number of units in a city thou. I know of cities here in the North East where local zoning laws were used to block high end condos by zoning industrial. This has caused the land to be empty for a decade (at a loss of property tax income) but it's what the town wanted.
Zoning can restrict the number of units in a city thou. I know of cities here in the North East where local zoning laws were used to block high end condos by zoning industrial. This has caused the land to be empty for a decade (at a loss of property tax income) but it's what the town wanted.
City planners usually have some end game in mind.
Usually within an hour from high-density urban housing you can find something a lot lower priced with a lot more elbow room.
I live 20 minutes outside of Bangor. The town I am in is totally different from downtown Bangor.
Usually within an hour from high-density urban housing you can find something a lot lower priced with a lot more elbow room.
I live 20 minutes outside of Bangor. The town I am in is totally different from downtown Bangor.
There is truth in that, the problems come up (mostly in wealthy parts of the two coasts but it does happen everywhere) when local opposition start fighting everything from happening. A small group of people decide what's best and then change laws to make it fit their needs.
For example several towns in CT have passed zoning ordinance requiring a certain percentage of grass in a front yard and that all cars be parked on a hard surface. The idea being that local community members thought it was ugly that lots of homeowners were widening their driveway on small lots in order to park 3 cars when only 2 fit in the standard suburban driveway in these neighbor hoods. The effect was alot of families living in the less expensive neighborhoods in these towns getting into zoning battles with the town or outright moving because they had a adult child living with them or an elderly relative using a third car. Essentially a few people who were well connected made it harder for less privileged people to live in their town.
This is the classic NIMBY effect (a very over used but effective term. ) This also happens with building new housing where local homeowners will modify zoning to prevent multifamily housing when the city planners and developers think it may be a good idea.
I lived in Maine for a couple years. Yeah no worries living in the Bangor area demand isn't high enough there to have much of an effect (other then waterfront summer homes), But Portland (Me) is showing some early signs of a rapidly growing demand on urban housing. You can still find reasonable rents within a half hour commute but it's getting a bit harder.
(last paragraph ).........Why do every HOA "hater" always post the most extreme examples?
I like HOA's that prevent my arrogant neighbor from using his front lawn to store worn out appliances or non-running cars.
Those are usually the neighbors that have the attitude..........." don't tell me what I can/can't do on my 80 x 120 lot .
Those people don't want to /can 't afford 40 acres in the country so they buy a house on an 80x120 and try to live like it was out in the middle of nowhere.
"extreme examples"??
OK, here is the full text of the CCRs for the referenced development:
The other one I walked away from stated a 1 ton dually truck was a "commercial vehicle", and as such could not be parked in the driveway overnight. At the time, my truck was a 1 ton dually. Oddly enough, I could park the fifth wheel trailer beside the house, but I could not keep the truck to tow it at at home!
My "mini-farm" (just under two acres) has very few CCRs, and no HOA to enforce them. That works just fine for all of us who live here!
If it isn't disruptive or dangerous, it should not be illegal.
Unfortunately, unplanned urban development is both disruptive and dangerous. That's why states with no history of land use planning are getting into it. It may take a generation for the damage to hit, but the problems are expensive and intractable.
A town near me has 30x60 zoning. Yes you can build a house on that plot. And I see plenty of two thousand square foot houses built and two families.
You have to be four feet back on all four sides so they build 26x54 foot houses with three floors, many homes no parking and I see in the summer many a bbq on "front lawn" with grill on sidewalk. It is very walkable. But would most towns want to do that?
Dear god no! You can't build like that anywhere near me. I've lived in a few cities and nothing being built today can be on lots like that. Most towns/cities/villages here have zoning laws where all structures must be 15 or 20 feet from the property line. If I wanted to be able to borrow toilet paper form the toilet from my next door neighbor, I'd live in really old city housing. No thanks! And judging by how popular where I live is, I'm guessing I'm far from the only one with those feelings.
I think the laws need to be revised in many places. If your in a city with a booming economy and housing costing in the millions. Really it's in the cities best interest to allow denser development. (to keep the growth). But then you cause issues with property owners that want to stay (vs ones happy to sell to a developer) It would also be in the suburbs surrounding the cities best interest to allow the city to be more dense. A booming city is an economic driver, if you get more people moving into the city it allows the suburbs to keep their value of more space while the overall area still accommodates the new population.
That's what you think. That doesn't mean it's true. Just because a city is booking in the 2010's, doesn't mean in the 2020's it will be booming. Changing laws usually requires input from the residents. Many residents don't want denser development.
Booming cities can be economic drivers...look at Atlanta and Charlotte....yet they have a TON of new problems....traffic and congestion! They were overdeveloped long before the roads and interstates could catch up. I doubt I'll live long enough for Charlotte to do much about their traffic problems yet people keep moving there like there's only 5 places to live in the country. No thanks.
There's a requirement of a certain number of greenfield development that potentially could be developed. That doesn't mean it can be. A lot of it in Portland's case isn't in the right place. They had to add a bunch of land in the late 1980s, so they went and changed the zoning out in Damascus. Well, first of all, no one really wants to live out in Damascus. Secondly, even if they could, it's spent the last twenty-some years dithering this way and that way. See, Oregon also requires a growth management plan. Damascus does not have one.
It fit the needs at the time. They needed some useless land that no one expected to be developed anyway and Damascus fit the bill. Soil quality isn't good for farming so rather than take some useful farm land and put it inside the UGB, they just went off and put Damascus in it. That said, no one was really doing much development at the time anyway so no one really cared.
What's really changed much more than the UGB is preference. In the 1980s and 1990s, the demand for development was mostly exurban. Damascus would have been fine except that you can't develop anything there since there's no growth management plan. But then Vancouver and its surroundings are not in the UGB, do not require any growth management plan, and are more desirable locations anyway. Basically, the UGB during that time had no effect because people just went to Washington instead.
Now demand has shifted. There's more demand to be closer to job centers hence why all the expansions of the UGB in the last 20 years have been on the west side of the metro area. You still, however, have a huge chunk of that greenfield inventory in useless Damascus though which can't be developed and doesn't have much demand anyway. Grossly mismanaging the UGB so most of the inventory is somewhere no one wants to live where development can't occur anyway certainly hasn't helped Portland. Development also just does take time. You can't just build houses yesterday. The whole point of maintaining an inventory was to not further increase that time. Good intentions, but unfortunately Portland decided to put most of that inventory on the wrong side of the metro in an area that can't be developed so, yeah, they're now in the position of trying to expand the growth boundary for development there's been demand for for years. The UGB really shouldn't have a minimal effect on curtailing development. Unfortunately, it's still a political process. Damascus was a political decision at a time when Portland was anti-growth and farmland preservation was the driving force. Twenty years later, it's come back to bite Portland in the derriere.
You are a little confused. Damascus is not in Portland. Sunny Valley is not in Portland. Wilsonville is not in Portland. Beaverton, Tualatin and Hillsboro are not in Portland. Most of the people in the Metro area are not in Portland. Portland doesn't determine the UGB because Portland doesn't have a UGB. There are 2.4 million people in the Metro area, and only 630,000 live in Portland. When it comes to real estate development, Portland is pretty small potatoes, dominated by remodeling firms.
You are also way out of date about Vancouver. They got tired of developers making messes, and now they have zoning.
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