The suburban social compact and parking

A ways back, I read a post where someone talked about new development disrupting the  'social compacts" of their neighborhood. Today, I realized that part of what makes suburbia 'work' is regulation. Not legal regulation, but social regulation, via social shaming. It's a series of unwritten rules and often unspoken rules with bounds established by the informal process of social shaming, gossip and stigma.  

Which relies on people sharing the same norms and values. So when your neighborhood ceases to consist solely of family households (with children), suburbia stops working. Clearest example I can cite is parking: in suburbia, you only park in front of your own house. Even if you have five cars and your neighbor has one, you only park on 'your' curb. As a urban renter, the whole idea is laughable: I park where-ever I can find parking, regardless of whose house it is. So as a suburban neighborhood shifts over, regulating things like parking has to shift from being a social compact to having legal framework. So you see the emergence of resident parking programs. Which is on it's face grossly inequiable--residents have no more right to the public right of way than any other person. But there is another sense of the word 'equitable', a more legal sense, that says when you've done someone harm, you owe them recompense, that they should be no worse off than they were before. Personally, I'm of the "Paris is worth a mass" school of thought. If a resident parking program that unfairly privileges incumbents is the price of getting new housing permitted, I'm willing to pay it. Because when you come down to it, most neighbor opposition is due to parking--people don't want to have the privilege they've been enjoying impaired.

I have a hard time keeping mum when someone talks about their 'right' to parking, because they haven't got one, in the legal sense. But urban history is pretty clear--the process of getting rights largely consists of traditional and customary privileges becoming enshrined in law (by treaty or charter)*. So insisting on a right to parking is hardly unprecedented or unreasonable.

It's worth a moment to talk to talk about the rest of the suburban social contract: most of it governs the acceptable use of 'public' space: streets, 'park strips', sidewalks. But a surprising portion of it governs lawns/landscaping. It's your property, but your neighbor has to look at it, which affects their ability to enjoy their own property. But, since lawn care is expensive, it's one of the first thing that breaks down when people not party to the 'suburban social contract' move in. Hence, there are a surprising number of public laws governing requirements to mow. 

There is an interesting class lens of the suburban social contract: things that happen in public space are regulated by public law, and so middle-class people have access to legal relief--they can call the police or code enforcement. But things like fences fall largely outside that penumbra. So it's only those wealthy enough to say 'my lawyer' who legally contest this. So you see a surprising amount of litigation about fences, quasi-fences, trees, spite fences, etc.   

*Which I suspect is why 'blue' cities are having a hard time advocating for themselves versus their red home states--there is a reliance on using courts to establish 'rights', as opposed to insisting on customary rights. And perhaps cities in conflict with their home state would do better to insist of legal recognition of the customary rights they've been enjoying. 

Cycle of Suburban Development

The cycle goes like this:

You have a metro area. Metro areas are always expanding. Infill development is almost non-existent, because it's cheaper to build on the edge.

Suburban development runs like this: A developer buys a parcel of farmland, creates a subdivision plan, and creates 'paper' lots. They then sell to a builder, who takes the plan and does the actual construction: utilities first (sewer, water, electric) and then the houses. Roads get done after the foundations are poured. The the houses 'got vertical'.

The land buyer buys at a certain price per acre, and holds the land until it becomes valuable enough for suburban development. Rule of thumb is that the land cost is 20% of the house, so a $200k hour will sit on $40k of land. Assuming a quarter acre lot, that's $160k/acre.

Now, there are people who want more land (for farming or a quasi-rural lifestyle or for keeping horses).  They want about 5 acres, but can't afford afford it at $160k/acre. So they go even further out, paste the edge of the metro area, and buy farm land at $20k/acre from Farmer John.

Ten years later, the metro area has expanded, and the land prices have increased. So the farmer next door to Farmer John sells out, at $40k/acre. But since the land price has doubled, new residents can only afford half as much, so the new in-movers take 2.5 acres. Big enough for horses, but too small to plow.  Ten year after that, the land brokers start buying land at $80k. Ten years after that, developers buy that at $160k, and develop it as subdivisions.

So the land is a mix of farmland, 'hobby farms', horse property, and new subdivisions. In a few decades, the rest of the farmland will be subdivided and the 'hobby farms' developed as townhomes.

DEMOLISHED - The 'Millenials will move to the Suburbs, just like their parents' narrative

Millennial First-Time Homebuyers and Location Choice

Elora Lee Raymond, Jessica Dill, Yongsung Lee

First Published October 25, 2018 Research Article 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X18807751

We research whether Millennial first-time homebuyers are more likely to purchase homes near city centers than Generation X. We use a random sample of individual credit records data to examine first-time mortgaged homebuyers from 2000 to 2016 in the fifty largest US cities. In a logistic regression controlling for age and generation, we estimate separate age and period effects. We also control for car ownership, income, credit score, mortgage size, mortgage payment, and student debt levels. We find that the odds Millennials buy near city centers 21 percent higher than Generation X. This suggests that as Millennials purchase homes, they do not move to the suburbs at the same rate as Generation X.

Doom Loop

So, let me posit an argument: As long as the accessibility supplied by highway outstrips the dis-accessibility of congestion, urban areas can keep expanding. As long as the supply of urban land keeps growing at the same rate as demand, land prices remain low. When this ceases, the price of existing urbanized land begins to rise. As those values rise, fewer and fewer people are able to buy, and the rents from that land ownership accrues to fewer and fewer people. This rents enable the purchase of more land, so there is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Over time, fewer and fewer people own their houses.

Now, this cycle has two possible outcomes: Socialism or Communism. In the Communism case, you get violent revolution by a oppressed proletariat renter class. The US is largely immune, because we have a functional democracy, and can enact 'regime change' non-violently.*

In the socialism case, governments recognize housing has outstripped private ownership for the majority of the population, and start producing 'social housing', where the government owns/rents the land. This is basically where Europe went with post-war welfare states (Britain, Germany). Britain sold off all of it's social housing under Thatcher, permitting people to buy it. It created a one-off surge of Tory home-owners. But now the same problem has re-occurred: The population needs housing, the land is owned by rentier land-lands, and the rent is too damn high.

Fools (conservative and liberal) would like to believe that this dynamic can be fixed by making it easy to buy homes: downpayment assistance, subsidized mortgage rates, mortgage interest tax deductions, home owners property tax deductions. It's foolish because it ignores the underlying dynamic: A fixed supply of land driving increasing land rents.

It's also grossly inegalitarian; it disproportionately benefits the wealthy. Having money (enough to become a landowner) should not be reward by a government handout. Arguably, if it reaches enough people, it's re-distributive. But what share is that? And how shall it be measured? Using the home ownership rate is almost criminal in its duplicity: It reflect people who could buy homes in the last 50 years, not people who can buy houses now.

To my mind, the solution is Georgist: The value of land is not created by private action, but by public investment in transportation. Those outlays should be recouped, in proportion to the degree of value they have created.









*Assuming we have fair boundaries, rather than 'pocket burroughs' owned by one party through gerrymandering....