Robert David Sullivan 2

A bad-climate discount on housing in Massachusetts?

Matthew Yglesias points us to an interesting map at Gene Expression that shows housing values in relation to median income (though the data is a couple of years old). For creative class aficionados who won't consider living in flyover country, the most striking thing about the map is how expensive the entire West Coast is. Yglesias speculates:

There’s a fascinating difference here between the west coast and the northeast. The areas right around New York and Boston got very pricey, but pretty quickly the counties turn red [i.e., relatively affordable] again. On the west coast, by contrast, the blue extends quite far into the hinterlands.

That said, the weather is clearly much better on the west coast than on the east coast, so arguably it makes sense that west coast housing should be more expensive relative to economic opportunities.

For quite a long time, one of the most frustrating things about Massachusetts is how expensive it is to live here despite a climate that makes backyards and decks unusable for much of the year. Maybe we've reached a tipping point, and our friends on the West Coast will have to pay a penalty for their damned beautiful days.

May foreclosure rate highest in Plymouth County, lowest in the Happy Valley

Another source of cool county-by-county maps: RealtyTrac, which tabulates home foreclosures per month. In May, the highest rate within the Bay State was in Plymouth County (732 foreclosures, or one for every 261 residential properties), followed by Essex County (997 foreclosures, or one per 296 properties). Foreclosures were less frequent in the western part of the state, and Hampshire County was the lowest (48, or one per 1266 properties).

Foreclosures seem to be hitting suburbs the worst: Also see Bucks County in Pennsylvania, Putnam County in New York, and Prince William County in Virginia.

Weston gets a whack from the Globe

Boston Globe metro columnist Yvonne Abraham recently called out residents of the "idyllic" town of Weston for opposing an elderly housing complex -- which financially strapped Regis College wants to build and manage in order to build up its endowment. Abraham smells NIMBYism:

Weston people are practiced at batting away proposals that threaten their bucolic paradise. After all, this is the same town that killed the Wayside bike trail, a proposal to turn an unused rail bed into a 25-mile bike path that would run from Belmont to Central Massachusetts. Every community on the proposed trail signed on, except Weston. So it foundered.

Last year CommonWealth magazine's Ray Hainer wrote about the Regis project, giving opponents a bit more space to make their argument:

Residents and town officials, who were well aware of the school’s financial troubles, also began to question whether Regis had the resources and expertise to oversee such a massive project, and worried about various nightmare scenarios, such as a half-finished project or a bankrupt college—and perhaps even a private developer carving up a vacated campus. And though some residents saw the merits of a campus-based retirement community, they were astonished by the scale. ... They were also skeptical that such a mammoth project was driven solely by the school’s educational mission.

Maps: Home values by Massachusetts city and town

The new issue of City & Town features a chart showing average home values and property tax bills for single-family homes in Massachusetts for fiscal year 2008. (Get the PDF here, or go to the Department of Revenue for community-by-community data.)

Statewide, assessed values fell by 0.73 percent this past fiscal year. As the map below shows, values dropped in most of suburban Boston but rose in the western half of the state. (Boston and several other communities are not counted by the DOR because they have different tax rates depending on whether a property is a primary or secondary residence.) The biggest decline was in Peabody (down 9.7 percent, from $390,000 to $352,000). Sharon, Dedham, Middleborough, and Danvers were the only other communities that fell by more than 6 percent. Amesbury and Franklin were among the biggest places that fell more than 5 percent.

The biggest jump was in Aquinnah, on Martha's Vineyard (up 29.7 percent, from $990,000 to $1.29 million). Tyringham, Alford, Peru, Hawley, and Gill -- all in Berkshire or Franklin counties -- registered the only other increases above 20 percent. Among cities, the largest increase was in Pittsfield, up 13.2 percent to $189,000.

Despite last year's changes, housing is still more expensive in the eastern half of the state, as the map below indicates, but there's an ever-shrinking area where the average value of a single-family home is under a quarter-million dollars. The town of Monroe is the least expensive ($92,000), but Fitchburg, Lawrence, New Bedford, and Worcester are islands of relative affordability in the east. Chilmark is the most expensive community (average value: $1.73 million), followed by Weston and Dover.

What the heck IS a suburb, anyway?

From the West Coast, there's more evidence that the definition of "suburbia" has been stretched so much that it's practically useless. The blog at the California Planning and Development Report summarizes a fight between the Brookings Institute's Christopher Leinberger, an advocate of what he calls "walkable urban places," or WUPs (you can get the idea from his piece in the Atlantic), and self-styled suburban champion Joel Kotkin (interviewed in CommonWealth magazine in 2006). In fact, both Leinberger and Kotkin seem to favor the same kind of development, which is most common in older, inner-ring suburbs. As the CPDR's Bill Fulton explains:

Leinberger, like practically every other advocate of urbanism in America, agrees with [Kotkin]. In a Brookings paper last year – admittedly qualitative in its approach – Leinberger took a stab at identifying WUPs in the nation’s 30 largest metropolitan areas. He came up with 15 existing or emerging WUPs in the Los Angeles area, including … Burbank, Glendale, Century City, Westwood, Culver City, and Beverly Hills. In other words, he included all the “suburbs” that Kotkin is always defending against the “city”.

The trouble is that the strict definition of suburb -- which is any community outside a major city -- is obsolete and useless. It encompasses both densely populated, mass-transit-heavy communities and sprawling towns that prohibit homes on less than an acre of land. Leinberger argues that many places in the latter category will become the "new slums," as people abandon them for places with more affordable housing and shorter commutes. Kotkin argues that Americans don't like the "urban core" and won't move back there, but urbanists such as Leinberger have never taken a "high-rise or nothing" attitude, instead saying that many older suburbs are fit perfectly into the New Urbanism model. (Check out the two-panel illustration with Kotkin's piece in the Los Angeles Times. Metropolitan Boston is full of places that have the greenery and single-family homes of the second image, but in orderly rows like the skyscrapers of the first image.)

So are we all going to agree that "suburbs" and "exurbs" are completely different animals? Or do we still need another word to describe city-like communities that happen to fall just outside the boundaries of Boston, Los Angeles, etc.?

(See my recent Boston Globe column for an example of how the word "suburban" has lost its meaning in politics as well.)

Worcester gets impatient on foreclosure law

The city of Worcester, tired of waiting for the Legislature to do something about the home foreclosure crisis, is asking for permission to act on its own, reports Shaun Sutner of the Worcester Telegram. If a home-rule petition passes on Beacon Hill, the city would "halt sub-prime foreclosures for six months, protect tenants in foreclosed buildings and force judicial review of foreclosures."

Colleges get a pass on zoning

The Dover Amendment, which exempts religious and educational institutions from local zoning laws in Massachusetts, has become a big issue in Framingham, according to Dan McDonald of the MetroWest Daily News:

During the debate, incumbent state Rep. Pam Richardson, D-Framingham, said a collegiate football stadium and a group home both fell under the Dover umbrella.

"It's so broad in language it almost creates a loophole in which agencies can use in order to bypass community input," said Richardson later that week.

One of her Democratic opponents in this year's state rep race, Town Meeting member Chris Walsh, called Dover "one of the vaguest laws imaginable."

Dover also got a bad rep in Weston when Regis College used the law to cover a 362-unit retirement village, as Ray Hainer reported in CommonWealth last year.

Another hidden cost of the foreclosure crisis

The Eagle-Tribune's Edward Mason reports on the collapse of a program in Lawrence that would have purchased homes on the verge of foreclosure and then lease back them back to their original owners until they could buy them all over again (at a discount price). The problem for the nonprofit Lawrence CommunityWorks is that the many of the homes are falling apart:

Jessica Andors, the agency's deputy director, said the nonprofit organization determined the plan, aimed at slowing the city's foreclosure crisis, turned out to be too expensive...

Andors said the homes rescued by the agency would need extensive restoration. Homeowners at risk of foreclosure, Andors said, often are in such a tight financial squeeze that they also fail to keep up their homes, often putting off repairs so they can pay their mortgage and other bills.

Robert Preer reported on Lawrence CommunityWorks, and some of their more successful programs, in the Summer 2005 issue of CommmonWealth.

Montana left standing in housing collapse

The number of new housing units built in the US was down by one quarter from the year before, according to recent data from the Census Bureau, depicted on the map below. Estimates for 2007 (final data for previous years here) show that fewer homes were built in every state except Montana and New York, with especially deep plunges in Florida (down 49 percent), Michigan (down 36 percent), and California (down 35 percent). Massachusetts was down by 24 percent, or about the national average.

New York's net gain came entirely from multifamily housing; the number of new single-family homes still dropped there, as it did everywhere except the District of Columbia and Montana. In fact, the number of new units in buildings with more than five residences went up in 19 states, suggesting a turn toward cheaper homes in a bad economy.

The National Association of Home Builders predicts a further decline in new housing units in 2008, followed by a slight recovery next year.

The second map compares 2007 housing start figures with those of 2000. Even with last year's plunge, 22 states approved permits for more housing units than they did at the beginning of the decade.

Housing slump brings together Detroit and Las Vegas

USA Today has charts on the slump in housing sales and prices. We think we have it bad in Massachusetts, but the number of home sales fell by a relatively modest 10.3 percent here from the last quarter of 2006 to the last quarter of 2007. At least 32 states had sharper drops, with Nevada at the front (or rear) with a 44 percent decline.

Median home prices for the same period are reported for metro areas rather than states; they dropped by 1.9 percent in the Boston area and by 5.7 percent in the Worcester area, but rose by 3.5 percent in the Springfield area. Fifteen metro areas reported double-digit slides, and they included both Sun Belt cities with high population growth (Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa) and Rust Belt metro areas long past their peak (Detroit, Dayton, Fort Wayne).