Love dabbling in real estate data? Zillow, the online real estate website is looking for a Data and Analytics Specialist. Although I’m quite well versed in ArcGIS, unfortunately my knowledge of SQL is pretty limited which is one of the important criteria for the position. As Steven Levitt says, if you get the job after reading about it on here, don’t forget to double the value of my home in their database 
Tag Archives: Housing
Gated Communities – now available in India
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.
Last Harvest – A Review
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.
Dubai – advertising the property market
You know a country has too much money when they build a hundred acre park covered with lush green grass in the middle of a desert or for that matter, even a skiing slope. Dubai is no stranger to ostentatious spending but compared to its equally rich cousins in the Middle East, the rulers of Dubai tend to ‘invest’ their oil revenues in their infrastructure and building an alternative to an after-oil future rather than building colossal palaces (just because you can!) I was in Dubai seven years ago and my brother and I chose to visit this thriving economy rather than idle our time on Mall Road in some Indian hillstation. Of course, we missed out on sylvan-lined bucolic evening walks but instead were exposed to wealth as never seen before. Since then, we have heard that there are plenty more things that Dubai has to offer including your own private island shaped like a country within a set of islands set to the world map.
We’ve all heard of the construction boom that is going on in Dubai so I thought it wise to revisit the Dubai property market through a paid review of LatticeWerks. You have seen the glamorous symbols of Dubai like the arching sail-like Burj-Al Arab Luxury Hotel and the view of the Giant Palm Islands but did you know that a majority of the construction cranes in the world are found in Dubai? That in itself should tell you that it is not over yet and the future of Dubai skyline is just beginning to form.
LatticeWerks, a property investment firm in Dubai gives us an overview of why you should invest in Dubai. I just hope they would increase the font a little and emphasize the headlines more since it makes it extremely difficult to read and you don’t want to lose out on potential investors if they can’t read your website, right? And of course, everyone loves photos of fancy buildings and cityscape. Perspectives of upcoming projects and a view of the future doesn’t hurt either. Convincing investors in overseas property can be much more tricky than showing them palm trees lined oceanfront property in say, Florida.
That brings me to another point -are customers convinced of investment opportunities by simply browsing through the websites of investment companies? Probably in hot property markets like Dubai, nothing can go wrong (or will it?) but are customers still gullible to read a rosy picture description of a faraway land and willingly hand over their hard earned money or will they demand more information even if it is on the Web? Probably I’m looking at it the wrong way. Probably such websites merely open the Pandora’s box and hook in the consumer making him initiate an enquiry following which the sales experts take over.
What do you think?
Effect of Homework on Property Prices
Seems unlikely, eh? The Case against Homework, a book by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish explores the myth of importance of homework towards your child’s educational outcomes. I remember being piled with homework after school and threatened with completing it before going out to play so as to “stay ahead of my classmates”. I bet they were told the same in a classic game of pitting one kid against the other and watching them slowly rot away in the rat race. But does homework have any other external effect apart from harming an individual’s outlook toward life (as if that isn’t dire enough)?
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing mentions the effect of No Child Left Behind on neighborhoods and property prices:
No Child Left Behind and standardized testing not only turns your child into a slave to her test-scores, but they can even affect your property values: a school with low test-scores brings down the neighborhood property values. That means that whatever your approach to your kids, the chances are that the other parents in your neighborhood are busting their asses to get their kids great test scores, drilling them, sending them to tutors, helping them with assignments that they were meant to complete themselves. If you don’t do the same, your kids will suffer by comparison [emphases mine].
So it isn’t enough just getting in but also more important to keep fighting hard by keeping at it and how? By doing homework that in all probability is not going to make much difference in your education anyway. But it is like the rolling juggernaut that no one wishes to jump off in fear of being crushed under.
The Dilemma of Gentrification
Living in cities is once again a viable option as trends of suburbanization are seen to be reversing at least in some urban areas. The inner city was long neglected and seen as a haven from poverty and crime. This was much in part to the dilapidated structures and abandoned property that resulted due to the changing economy from manufacturing to services. Industries no longer needed central city locations or simply found cheaper land outside the city due to advances in telecommunications and transportation. So they left lock stock and barrel leaving behind either contaminated lands or simply abandoned structures that the vandals took over.
Of course, the people that worked in those establishments didn’t follow the path of the retreating industries either because it wasn’t feasible or affordable to but largely because the industries no longer needed them. They found themselves to be out of a job and the poverty status wasn’t too far behind. Crime and poverty are often unwilling partners in these neglected parts and soon everyone else including the government writes them off and let them remain in these godforsaken parts of inner cities.
But things don’t remain the same as economy changes and so does attitudes and perceptions of people. It once again became hip to live in cities. At first, certain sections of the seemingly middle-class started moving back in the city. They spruced up their neighborhood a little, tried fitting in with the neighbors and soon got their friends interested in moving next door to them. The neighborhood, as they say, started gentrifying. Homes that once housed low income residents slowly began to be occupied by higher income people who moved to the city owing to low rents or property prices long suppressed either by crime, dilapidation, or simply due to the fact of being where it was.
People who moved in didn’t just move in but they fixed up their houses, cleaned the yards, and even got the government to cleanup the nearby brownfields. It doesn’t take long for the laws of economics and real estate to notice such changes. Prices start rising and so do the property prices. Unfortunately, the ones that had always lived there enduring years of poverty, crime, dilapidation suddenly find their homes to expensive to live in as the state comes calling for the increased property taxes. If you can’t afford your property taxes, why don’t you sell your homes to those nice people who would love to fix it up, says the state (or the market). Economically it makes sense but do they really want to leave? Probably they have lived there all their life, went to school there and built their childhood memories in the neighborhood. But the calling of the market is strong enough to stifle such sentiments.
The city isn’t complaining. It can finally look at the neighborhood without feeling sorry for its residents; after all they seem to have gotten a new lease of life. And of course, there is that little matter of increased tax revenue through property taxes for the city coffers. Everyone loves the new folk and like what they are doing to the neighborhood. Soon there is a Starbucks to cater to the new clientele and a wine bar is opening shortly. You hear faint music and laughter on Friday nights.
Where are the erstwhile residents, you ask? Who knows. Probably in some old-age home living their last days in peace or some other ignored neighborhood that hasn’t yet been gentrified. You never know they just might have to move once again when it is the turn of that neighborhood to be gentrified. The gentrified neighborhood sports a new look but where are the people that made it a neighborhood in the first place? Should we care about the place or the people?
Technorati Tags: gentrification, redevelopment, planning, neighborhood, community, revitalization