Reply to More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.[/quote]

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices. [/quote]

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

[/quote]
This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind. [/quote]

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.[/quote]

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government. [/quote]

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