Urban Planning Blog

Looking to finding a perfect suburbia for your family? Businessweek lists the 50 most kid-friendly small towns and suburbs in the U.S.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in.

Are today’s suburbs going to be tomorrow’s slums as consumer preferences move back toward city center living?

Is this penthouse located at One Hyde Park, London priced at 100 million pounds, the most expensive apartment in the world?

Prices will probably drop some more but personally I don’t expect to ever again see index values around 110.  Do you?  If we don’t see the massive drop back to “normal” levels then the run up in prices should be described as a shift to a new equilibrium - much as happened during World War II.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution uses the oft-quoted Robert Shiller’s chart on home values and concludes that fundamentally there was no housing bubble.

Update: As expected, Paul Krugman has a response.

Quick calculations showed that, given construction costs in the 1990s, profits made from the market-rate sale of 560 apartments would finance 1,000 free homes for slum-dwellers. So, to give away 160,000 homes, developers would have to sell almost 90,000 full-price homes. In total, they would have to build 250,000 each year.

In an insightful article, Dilip D’Souza, writing for the Outlook section in the Washington Post explains the futility of the current slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai.

I will always welcome the transfer of public property into private hands, and even the most left-liberal activist will agree that it is more preferable to hand over property rights to the “little guy” transparently than to big evil builders after intense backroom dealings.

Gaurav Sabnis, an Indian blogger takes the argument further and advocates transferring property rights to slum dwellers thus giving them a better say in negotiations with the builders.

My uncle, a builder and developer in the Mumbai suburbs runs his construction business through the model that Dilip suggests i.e. by redeveloping properties which have surplus FSI (Floor Space Index) and effectively giving free homes to the original residents while making the profit off the additional housing units that he sells at market rate. More on the impact of that strategy for the housing condition in Mumbai later.

In the times of declining home sales, houses modeled as Martha Stewart Homes are selling well. I guess consumers simply want more specialization and the unique factor is way up in their buying list. Or is it simply effective marketing and assumption of quality through well recognized brands? You tell me.

If you are one of those people looking to sell your home quickly, these simple tips by Rod Thomas will also help you get a better price for your house. Problogger, Darren Rowse relates lessons for blogging from his house-selling experiences. It is all about marketing.

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First you chop down trees. Then you build roads. And finally, you name those roads after the trees. Ironic, eh? The Austin Real Estate Blog [via] is examining if street names affect home value. Of course, there are enough wacky names to justify such a study.

In a bearish market, you still want to shave off couple of thousand dollars off your home purchase. In my previous post, I highlighted the infusion of information disseminating tools on the Internet that helps you make wise decision. Redfin is one such web service/tool that helps you save money. Kevin Kelly blogging at Cool Tools reviewed Redfin:

Redfin has a great online real estate website which we quickly found is one of the easier ones to use, with nice virtual walk thrus of each home, and good comparison data for the neighborhood. (The site is a joy to navigate, and we’d use it even if we did not get a rebate.) Then you, in the role of buyer and self-agent, do all the footwork of finding, visiting the various homes, checking out the disclosures, etc., and finally choosing which property you want. You are your own real estate agent up to this point. When you are ready to make on offer on a home, you do so online via Redfin, completing the necessary forms on the web. Then a human Redfin employee will take you through the final paperwork and signatures, and eventually visit the house with you. At the close of the deal they will rebate 2/3rds of their buyer agent commission paid by the seller, or 2% of the sale price, which in some areas of the country will mean at least ten thousand dollars.

I have not bought a home here in the United States (yet) but I’m sure many of you have or are close to buying one soon. Let me know if you try out this tool and if it helps you save money. Unfortunately, it seems that the service is available only in few select cities. But expect it to spread to more as it gets more popular.

Related: Moving the Search from Renters to Landlords.

Using music to sell condos? And I’m not talking about iPod giveaways [via therevitalist]. Interesting idea though. The impact of cultural homogeneity on residential location is steadily growing.

While the housing market in the United States is going belly up, the construction boom in India refuses to subside. With the new economy booming, demand for city housing is at an all-time high. However with incomplete and insufficient information and awareness, consumers can be duped by unscrupulous developers who promise the moon but fail to deliver even a rock. Before the age of the Internet, you couldn’t do much except perhaps bad-mouth the developer and warn your friends off. The developer always won after finding enough suckers for his dubious scheme.

But thanks to Youtube, blogs and other new-age Internet technologies, getting your opinion out there is much easier. One such disgruntled customer from property developers, Unitech Group shot a video comparing the promises with the end result and uploaded it on the web. The result - many potential buyers are now warned and have begun withdrawing their bookings with the firm (see comments).

One quick observation about ground realities in India. Suing is not particularly common and even if you do, the lawsuit takes ages and is often considered not worth your time. So in that spirit, spreading the word about dubious practices of developers via a mass-media outlet like YouTube does maximum damage to the property developers. Hopefully, this correction in information asymmetry will give more power to the consumer and make developers more accountable. The video is attached below:

Incidentally, websites set up to complain against errant homebuilders is not a new phenomenon in the United States. The following websites do exactly that - hold homebuilders accountable and spread the word on dubious practices:

1. Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings (HADD).
2. Homeowners for Better Building (HOBB).
3. Crap Construction.
4. Exposing New Homebuilders.
5. Neighborhoods for Quality Homes.

Targeted sites towards specific construction companies are pretty popular:

1. K. Hovnanian Homes Suck and Not Khov.
2. Levitt & Sons Problems.
3. The Pulte Homes Experience, Fight Pulte, and My Pulte Experience.
4. Stop BEAZER Homes.

Mind you, I am not an anti-business individual but simply believe in holding any organization that is providing a service accountable. More information is always a good thing. So share your opinions and reviews of your home-buying experience. Even if you have had a good experience, you might want to share it so as to encourage good business practices that provide good customer satisfaction.

Ten areas that offer both affordable housing and rapidly rising home values in some of the country’s largest cities. Also, check out the list of biggest Metro areas with the lowest rent. All four Texas metros make the cut.

The ‘white flight’ to the suburbs was followed by other citizens who well, were not so white. When the Fair Housing Act criminalizing racial discrimination in housing came into effect followed by the gradual decline of exclusionary zoning practices like redlining, etc, communities hunkered down further by creating the ‘gated community’. Justified in the name of keeping out crime and other evil social conditions [although not always true], the gated community was the ultimate in creating a Truman’s Show world provided you had the money and of course, the right ‘attributes’. The homeowners association probably the strongest private body that can at times be so un-American played the role of the gatekeeper and of course, law-enforcer and isolator if you ever managed to crash the gates.

In a increasingly globalized world and with the leveling of the playing field that Friedmann mistook for the flatness of the world, gated communities are making a foray in Indian cities. Expats are returning home and wish to duplicate the good life of their U.S. experiences. The market obliges and provides them with their own haven. Welcome to Palm Meadows:

It is a gated community of about 600 single family homes, with 10 or more security guards manning the gates at any given time. Some houses are big and some are small, but most houses have at least three bedrooms each. Residents of Palm Meadows are a mix of original owners, returning Indians and expats [source: Blogpourri].

Heck, even the name is U.S.-centric and trust me, I have never seen a meadow of palms. But leaving that aside, it does appear to provide all you could wish for to eke out a luxurious living. Of course, considering the clients and homeowners are considered to be rich and ‘earning in dollars’, prices are steep and as Sujatha mentions, collusion among the real estate agents have hiked up the rents further. Of course, some of that wealth trickles down to the domestic help. In India, it is quite common to have domestic help, even the middle-class families have them. The only difference is in the price.

Of course, you can enjoy all you want while you are inside Palm Meadows but once you cross the gates, not even God can help you navigate through that dreaded Bangalore traffic.

I am a self-professed critic of sprawl development which unfortunately isn’t saying much because any urban planner especially in this new age of planning is exactly that. Yet we see sprawling sub-divisions crop up everywhere around us and chances are that we will end up living in one of these cookie-cutter homes that we so love to hate. Call it trying to do the best thing for your children or just finding a good deal on your investment dollars, we see that in spite of the growing criticism of sub-division development, it continues to flourish. So are we just trapped in our ivory tower while the common people go about making the perfectly rational choice?

Witold Rybczynski, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and the acclaimed author of Home and A Clearing in a Distance tackles this paradox in a subtle narrative of his experiences of a new development in his latest book, Last Harvest - How a Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and why we live in Houses Anyway. If the title and the subtitle hasn’t tired you, I’m sure it certainly has piqued your interest. Simon and Schuster was kind enough to send me a review copy because the conflict of promoting new urbanism in the face of persistent popular choice for regular homes has always been a subject of interest for me. Rybczynski takes us along on the slow path of a real-life development of a residential sub-division in rural Pennsylvania called New Daleville. Located on a former cornfield, New Daleville was conceptualized by its developers as a neotraditional development, complete with homes built close to each other to encourage a sense of intimacy and community.

Rybczynski assumes the role of a bystander as he witnesses the often slow-moving process of real estate development that is often fraught with bureaucratic redtape and technical limitations. However, at no point do we sense a feeling of hopelessness or exasperation with the process but instead reveal in the everyday process of getting things done in the real world. At one point in the book, Rybczynski shares an incident regarding disposal of treated waste water and how an unexpected change in plans requires working around a sub-optimal solution that would inordinately delay the project. As students in architecture or land development school, we often tend to overlook such petty details but in the real world, they often tend to be the biggest obstacles in getting the work done.

The underlying theme of the book is utilizing and remaining true to the form of neotraditional development. We read plenty of background literature on the development of New Urbanism and Celebration and Seaside, Florida make repeated appearances in the narrative. While arguing for a different perspective in our living, Rybczynski does not shy away from emphasizing the decisions of owning a home and even having larger bathrooms as perfectly in line with our real-world needs. Rybczynski underlines the fact that new residential development although encroaching on natural agricultural land need not resort to unoriginal cookie-cutter homes that we have come to hate. Customized home building that emphasizes on architectural treatment of facades gives as much importance to the exterior as it lends a subtle yet strong complementary effect on the neighborhood. This effect on the community is not lost on the developers who are not only selling a house but are also looking to create a community that blends in with the rest of the town.

Overall, I quite liked the book. It was an easy and refreshing read quite different from overbearing polemics that often chastise us for giving in to our selfish need and indulging in sprawl-encouraging homes. Rybczynski’s book gives us an insight into how the developers understand this growing need for neotraditional development and highlights their efforts through this engaging anecdotal read.