Should you buy? or sell?

Much of urban design involves housing. This blog (new to my links) and eponymously named The Housing Bubble, focuses on the issue. It should be of interest to City Comforts' readers.

My own take on the supposed "bubble:"

If you live in a place which is very popular and with few or no barriers to development --
• either political in the form of growth management or inability to deal with traffic congestion
• or natural in the form of limited water or mountain ranges
-- and you have anything which anyone thinks is a "real estate bubble,"
and you have just bought a house with the idea of living there only a year or two, then watch out, you may indeed have a problem.

But it seems to me that the places which are accused (gleefully, I notice) of having a bubble are also the places which are characterized by strong economies, seemingly intractable traffic congestion, growth management, natural barriers of some kind etc etc...so what do you expect? These places -- NYC, Boston, SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington DC, Seattle -- have a growing number of people chasing a limited resource of single family houses. There seems to me to be a very limited opportunity -- in reality, not theory -- to substantially increase the number of dwellings in such places. Moreover, as I have pointed in this post titled Who really wants Affordable Housing? few who own, build, broker or lend -- have much of an incentive to significantly increase the supply which might indeed -- as markets do work -- dampen prices.

So, unless you can envision patterns changing-- and taking the specific Seattle context which I know very well -- things such as
1. effectively dealing with traffic congestion;
2. abolishing growth management;
3. making the single-family home less desirable;
4. Seattle declining as a regional and even global city,
then buying a dwelling in Seattle is a reasonably safe investment over the long term.

Of course development is my business, so I have a bias.

•••

The NYT asks Is Your House Overvalued?

Comments

[Brian Miller]

Well, there is always Boise or Reno for affordable, less bubbly housing, which according to some pundits are the hotbeds of high quality living and creativity. :)

[clew]

A lengthy tangent - it struck me a while ago, reading an argument about height limits, that part of the argument is moot. Whatever the height limit is that maximizes housing without destroying the delightfulness of the city, once it's reached some people will still have to live elsewhere - but this is not a Bad Thing; once enough people live elsewhere it too will become charming.

I love to hope that Tacoma and Edmonds and Bellingham and Vancouver will all develop happy urban cores, all slightly different, and all train-neighbors, from Vancouver to Portland, with forest and farmland between. Every whistlestop has been a fine small town once and could be again, within urban commuting range for the determined, close enough that the old can get to the specialized hospitals and school-trips can visit the museums and universities. On the train one can often see that it *used* to work this way.

I'm just old enough to remember Seattle as a sleepy hicksville, so am completely unconvinced that our hepitude (hah) is a finite resource.

Of course, this removes the problem of filling Seattle with skyscrapers and replaces it with the problem of fixing train travel. Poor Amtrak, in all senses of the word (anyone else catch the article a while ago about one of their putative court advocates admitting that he'd been suborned by freight firms, and Amtrak had ben paying in schedules, money and reputation for errors not their own?)