KCRag Forum

Highlander wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:14 pm This table was posted on City Scene today. It shows KC is one of the most affordable large cities for singles renting an apartment.

https://www.renthop.com/studies/nationa ... YJAZ692Bfg

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He saw families getting outgunned by investment firms that could afford to pay $450,000 for a $400,000 house. Rents on single-family homes were also rising fast—up 19% in the Phoenix metro area during the pandemic, according to Rick Palacios, research director of John Burns Real Estate Consulting LLC. The result was that buyers could lose out on a home and see it resurface at a rent that was hundreds of dollars a month more than what they would have paid to own it with a mortgage. “The way I see it, they’re stealing from first-time homebuyers,” Vidana says. “They’re trying to push this idea that your first step is not to buy a house anymore, your first step is to rent.”
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At first, Vidana wasn’t too worried about the new buyers, because homes were still affordable. In 2019 he’d helped a client sell a house in Surprise, a suburb 30 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix, to a Japanese company. The buyer, a family-owned conglomerate called Yamasa, redid the kitchen and listed the house for rent at a price that seemed unrealistic. But it rented, and Yamasa’s agent started blasting him with emails, offering cash for other homes. Yamasa, which did not respond to requests for comment, has since become a prolific buyer of rental real estate, acquiring hundreds of homes in the Phoenix suburbs and thousands of other properties across the U.S.
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Pretty soon, capital followed. By the middle of 2021, speculation accounted for roughly half of all home purchases in Phoenix, says Palacios, the real estate researcher. Most of the activity was driven by small landlords and home flippers, who targeted affordable homes near good schools—the same places Vidana’s clients coveted.

The suburban gold rush also proved irresistible to private equity giants, sovereign wealth funds, life insurers, and everything in between.
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Their perfectly sized house is being constructed by the Evanston Development Cooperative, a cooperatively owned builder that specializes in ADUs. The worker co-op is also a local advocate for efficiently sized homes as a way to address the often-interlinked issues of race, climate change, and affordable housing. It was founded in 2018, the same time that the city took the first step to update its zoning code for ADUs.
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Before EDC’s founding, the city did the work of legalizing existing ADUs, which were technically illegal because of changes made to city zoning in the 1950s to prioritize single-family housing. In 2020, thanks in part to EDC’s advocacy, two additional key changes were made: allowing the construction of ADUs on any residential property and legalizing internal ADUs, such as an attic or basement conversion. Prior to the updates, only single-family homes and not duplexes — which are disproportionately in Evanston’s neighborhoods of color — were allowed to build ADUs. Resolving that line item was an equity issue, Markus says.

“Only certain parts of the city were allowed to build intergenerational wealth and increase their property value through this mechanism,” he says, “while other parts of the city were often being denied this opportunity.”

Last year, Evanston made history as the first city to institute a reparations program. It is specifically focused on mending the harms of “discriminatory housing policies and practices and inaction on the city’s part.” But over the past 20 years, the city’s Black population has been declining; many people cite the rising cost of housing as the reason, according to Markus. Last year, the median Evanston home sale price was $450,000.

“We are in such a crisis with the cost of housing that we have to put every option on the table,” Markus says. “Accessory dwelling units will not single-handedly alleviate the housing cost pressures facing our city. But on the other hand, it does not cost a city any dollars to amend its zoning code to allow for these units.”

Building ADUs might not be a silver bullet, but they can open up housing options in the city: According to EDC calculations, building ADUs on Evanston properties has the potential to add 10,000 additional housing units.
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What she found, after an analysis using Zillow data between 2000 and 2020, and controlling for overall market trends, was that the only significant change was in the positive direction. Homes located within a typical block of the affordable housing developments saw property values increase, on average, by a small but still significant 0.9%.

“I think the point here is that it’s not a negative impact,” said Stacy. She stresses that the analysis doesn’t prove the relationship is causal, only correlated. But it adds another finding to the growing body of research on what adding housing for lower-income people does to the community around it. “There’s so much evidence about the positive impacts of affordable housing: on reducing homelessness, lifting people out of poverty, improving health outcomes, improving long-term outcomes for kids... There are so many benefits.”

The link between affordable housing construction and property values has been studied before, with mixed results. A look at federally subsidized rental housing in New York City, conducted by researchers from New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, showed that property values were typically not depressed by nearby affordable projects. “In fact,” researchers wrote, they “led to increases in many cases.”
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kboish wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:17 am You can talk in percentages and easily obscure the reality that the average sold price in those neighborhoods (under $140k) is still very affordable.

KCtoBrooklyn wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:32 am That number is still well below the metro average and what most would consider "affordable", but it is out of the price range for most who live in the area.

TheLastGentleman wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:49 am

kboish wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:17 am You can talk in percentages and easily obscure the reality that the average sold price in those neighborhoods (under $140k) is still very affordable.

Affordable to who though?