People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

I don't know that much about seattle's downtown and I imagine I'd prob agree w/ that author's definition of 'old' and 'heritage' but at the same time it doesn't escape the problem that you have to draw a fairly arbitrary line in the sand somewhere with those words.

Increasing unit size does not seem to be a particularly pressing problem in NYC!

I'll tell you where increasing unit size *is* a pressing problem....

my fly zipper?

xxxp The examples he shows (and are argued over in the comment section) aren't in Downtown proper, but in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood (Seattle's oldest) and in the International District, both south of downtown. Most of the old buildings in Downtown itself were torn down and replaced with skyscrapers or other modern architecture decades ago. But part of his point, like Max et al were expounding itt earlier in regards to NYC, is that there are plenty of places for infill that don't require tearing down these type of buildings, even within spitting distance of Downtown Seattle.

the area between Denny and, like, Olive? is really calling out for a lot of parking lot replacement.

I imagine it's actually probably inevitable there?

Yeah, Denny Triangle is filling with high-rises even as we speak.

my Seattle recon is a little out of date

Yeah, that place was all surface parking and other garbage for a long time. Still a few lots left, but their days are numbered.

amazon's putting up 3 mil sq/ft of office space in just 3 of those blocks. which is a hell of a lot of office space

yeah it makes a good contrast w/ apple's horrible new headquarters:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/03/how-amazon-got-urban-campus-right/1485/

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/shiller-housing-chance-bottom-suburban-prices-may-not-161914444.html?l=1

let us pray

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html

Sugrue is a p. great historian. excited to see that he's doing a book on real estate/housing specifically. it's been an underlying theme in his work from the start (& of course he has the whole collection on suburbs he edited).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html
― iatee, Thursday, April 5, 2012 12:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't see an argument against mass home-ownership in this article though, all I see is the already exhausted point that home ownership shouldn't be a get-rich scheme.

it's an argument against ease-of-homeownership, which is an argument against mass home-ownership as we have known it

i didn't see any opinion/advocacy in the article at all? (except for the subtitle, which sugrue may well not have written). and yeah, i didn't see points either, really, just some really nice, well researched and summarized history of (a slice of) the troubled story of suburbanization and federal housing policy.

xpost right but I don't actually understand what his argument against ease-of-homeownership is, other than "houses aren't slot machines."

Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home, and in the process, gutting inner cities, whose residents, until the civil rights legislation of 1968, were largely excluded from federally backed mortgage programs. Of new housing today, 80% is built in suburbs—the direct legacy of federal policies that favored outlying areas rather than the rehabilitation of city centers. It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.

Sure, but you could also have policy favoring ownership in cities. It's not only homeownership policies that led to sprawl and urban exodus.

or you could just not have policy favoring any particular market outcome

not favoring

there's no such thing

that is, technically speaking, true, by 'not favoring' I more meant 'policies that were created w/ an intent towards one particular outcome'.

iatee: he's describing the history of specific governmental policies, not making any argument about whether promoting homeownership is good or bad in general, or was even good or bad as a general proposition at the time. he's just describing what actually happened, why it happened, and the consequences. (implicitly, given what we know about sugrue, we can also see that he would tend to believe that what actually happened was bad, but we can't infer what he would have preferred to happen except "not that".) the arguments you're getting out of him beyond that seem to me really coming from attitudes that you're bringing to the table.

"It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition."?

tbf I think we're getting those arguments from the headline: "The New American Dream: Renting
It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition"

well I don't think we have to begin and end w/ that article

ultimately homeownership is more a cultural issue than an economic one, and the question is whether we'd rather be more like ireland, spain and italy or more like germany, denmark and sweden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate

iatee: that's exactly what i addressed earlier when i suggested that the subtitle was the only explicit place, and i suspect that sugrue had little to do with it based on A) having read a bunch of sugrue B) not seeing it argued explicitly in the piece and C) knowing how subtitles and titles of articles and editorials tend to get written.

Also lol at "question is whether we'd rather be more like ireland, spain and italy or more like germany, denmark and sweden." being a cultural rather than economic one! Some of these things are not like the others...

yeah I'm not sure how you can read that article and think he's suggesting that we need the rate of homeownership to grow or stay constant, which leaves one possibility

basically I can read that article and think "he's a historian who has no particular attitude towards current federal policies regarding homeownership except that a bubble is a bad idea. or if he does have such an attitude he's keeping it to himself because he's writing as, you know, a historian, and his work, while informed by a pretty clear set of concerns, deliberately stakes itself out as basically descriptive."

really you think the dude who wrote "Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home" has no particular attitude on the subject

Well if you want to talk about whether more homeownership is a net good, you have to talk about more than just the housing bubble (which was created by a lot more than just the fact that federally-backed mortgages exist) or the house-as-investment mentality. You have to talk about whether it's beneficial to encourage people to be more geographically mobile versus stationary, both in cultural and economic senses, whether the "forced" saving of home equity is a good thing to encourage (not literally forced since no one has to buy a house), whether local housing policies concerning renters are going to be sufficient to protect their rights, whether it's a good thing to let residents capture some of the benefit of rising land prices versus being at the mercy of rent-raising landlords, etc.

And I don't really understand how ownership versus renting is really the central issue in suburbanization, because as I said, you could just as easily promote ownership in cities or renting in suburbs.

what would the downsides to increasing the capacity for geographic mobility be? places w/ renter majorities tend to have strong renter rights, not-coincidentally. and we should be less concerned about who gets the gains for rising land prices and more concerned about how rising land prices affect the city's overall affordability - individual households have reason to want to constrain a city's housing construction, whereas renters have an interest in as much overall housing as possible.

that's sorta a generalization, you can be a renter-NIMBY, but you don't have a 'personal investment' in the same sense

there's no "downside to increasing the capacity for geographic mobility" so much as there is an arguable upside to the "ownership stake" in a community. For example where I rent my street looks like a complete hellhole but I don't give enough of a fuck to be involved in any significant way because I doubt I'm going to be able to afford to live there in a year or two.

"Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home"

^^ that's a pretty straightforward, descriptive sentence. you're reading more into it, because of how you feel about the word "sprawl" and what it connotes to you in the context of your understanding of the suburbs and housing issues. i'm not even trying to argue you're right or wrong, or what sugrue "really" thinks or whatever. just, you know, that we should be able to tell the difference between advocacy and historical description.

in a world where nyc were capable of building a housing supply that matched the demand, you wouldn't have to worry about being priced out so quickly, and people concerned w/ this issue generally think that renters political interests are more in line with increasing our housing supply.

fair point

NYC is probably not the ideal example for an argument about any aspect of fed housing policy.

well it's a good example of how a place w/ a 31.0% homeownership rate can still function

I don't think it functions that well tbh unless you're very well off.

again that's mostly due to a constrained housing supply I mostly just meant 'functions as a civil society'

BTW "stronger renters rights" kind of undermine your points here, because (1) they contribute to constrained housing supply and (2) they make renting more like owning, and in that sense "favor a market outcome" by stripping some of the advantages owning has over renting

well I don't mean rent control, I just meant basic 'tenant's rights'

the right to a roommate under nyc law, for example, does not constrain housing supply.

hey iatee, I'm buying a house with a federallybacked loan, r we enemies now ;_;