Reply to Arlington "missing middle"

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Arlington "missing middle""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How about as a thought experiment we see if the net effect of this is to raise or lower the price of houses in Arlington? My bet is on raising. Tearing down a 900K house and building three 1.1 million townhomes does not solve an affordability crisis. Plus the price of land just jumped considerably.

Also for fun, will this make Arlington more or less diverse? My bet is on less.[/quote]

Oh sure, it is well known that when you increase the supply of something, the price goes up.

Wait, what?[/quote]

What you are missing is the old Arlington real estate market is now dead. Every single lot in Arlington just got a lot more $$$. Before you could build one house. Now you can build 6. Some lots will now be worth double what they were before. Wait and see. This is not going to make the market more affordable.[/quote]
So the number of housing units that can be put on a lot will increase sixfold, while the price of the lot only doubles, but that won't make more units more affordable for more people? Huh.[/quote]

Listen. Anything 4 and above is likely to be an apartment. The money to be made here is duplexes and townhomes which will sell on a unit basis. I did the math for you before, but I'll try again. Right now there is a lot in Lyon Park that sold for $900K. A developer is going to build three townhomes on it for $1.1 million each. (And make a killing, by the way, but that same lot will now sell for $1.5.) So you replace one unit that cost $900K with three units that cost $1.1 million. Cost per unit goes up. That's the math.[/quote]

No, the math is the cost of a single McMansion on the lot, times the odds that the existing house would be turned into a McMansion under previous zoning. I don’t know why NIMBYs keep ignoring this. The status quo isn’t that every older house gets bought by a family who wants to live there. It’s that a hundred seventy older houses that could be candidates for missing middle, get turned into McMansions instead. [/quote]

Exactly.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics