Urbanexus Update - Issue #143
This selection of real estate and community development news and information is curated by H. Pike Oliver. Please note that some items may be behind a paywall.
Transforming the Irvine Ranch: Joan Irvine, William Pereira, Ray Watson, and THE BIG PLAN is off to a strong start on Amazon—number one in new releases in Real Estate. Thanks to everyone who has purchased.
The economy and finance
Five charts explaining why inflation is high
Persistent supply chain backlogs and high consumer demand for goods have kept prices elevated. One of the five charts is shown below. Click on the link or the image to see the rest.
Private equity may be heading for a fall
If investors in equities and debt markets will remember anything from the first half of 2022 it will be generational sell-offs. But the turmoil in public markets has not yet fully bled into private equity: fundraising has marched on, large deals are still being consummated and paper returns look strong.
The blood, however, may be about to flow. Buy-out barbarians made their names in the late 1980s, not the 1970s, for good reason. The corporate buy-out is a financial ploy unsuited to slow growth and higher inflation; no previous boom-and-bust cycle in private equity’s 40-year history has been like it. Most important, cheap debt is unlikely to be available to save the day.
Residential
Excellent reporting by Conor Dougherty and Ben Casselman on systemic underproduction of housing across the USA. And the chart below prepared by your curator using data compiled by that St. Lois Federal Reserve Bank highlights the long term decline in annual U.S. housing production relative to total households.
Why are apartment rents increasing?
One of the reasons is that we're not building enough apartments in the USA to keep up with demand per the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Master-planned communities
The top-selling master-planned communities of mid-2022
A lack of new home inventory despite the consistent and growing demand for new homes was generally cited as the reason for modest growth by master-planned developers as reported in the latest ranking by RCLCO
Reshaping the Valley of the Sun
Despite a recent slowdown in home closings and homebuilder permits, the Greater Phoenix region's housing market is still undersupplied as more people continue to move to the region. Remarkably, the Valley of the Sun only has about 28,000 finished lots available for homebuilders to build on and another 35,000 lots under development, according to Zonda housing market research firm's first-quarter field survey.
Knowing the lot supply has been dwindling over the past few years, developers and homebuilders have been busy planning huge master-planned communities to bring hundreds of thousands of homes to the area — complete with resort-like amenities. In particular, eight master-planned communities in various stages of development across the region are poised to change the landscape of the Valley's housing supply, as they introduce a variety of new products — from dense, entry-level homes to luxurious expansive homes on larger lots — to meet the needs of a variety of homeowners.
Anthony “Tony” Mansour, Sr. — urbanland.uli.org Anthony “Tony” E. Mansour, Sr., who was best known for developing El Dorado Hills, a master-planned community near Sacramento, California, passed away on June 5. He was 84.
Office
Lonely last days in the suburban office park — www.nytimes.com Yes, downtown offices are struggling. But there is a different kind of emptiness in suburban settings that were already isolated and lightly populated by design.
Metropolitan trends
Best-performing cities 2022 The Milken Institute’s Best-Performing Cities Index (BPC) compares the recent performance of metro areas throughout the United States. The 2022 index continues a trend noted in last year’s edition: a shift in high-tech jobs away from the largest coastal cities toward comparatively affordable inland cities with thriving local economies.
Tight labor market conditions and remote working are changing tech talent growth patterns, creating new opportunities across the U.S. and Canada as noted by global real estate services and investment firm CBRE. Highly skilled North American tech talent workers total 6.5 million and comprise more than 20 occupations, ranging from software developers who enable the devices we depend on to systems and data managers who ensure the functionality of our tech ecosystems. Employment growth continued its decade-long upward trend in 2021 but industry, occupation, and geography patterns shifted.
CBRE analyzed fifty of the largest markets in the U.S. and Canada by the number of tech talent professionals to create a scorecard ranking them comparatively. The top 25 are presented in the following graphic. Go to the report for details on how the ranking was calculated.
Development regulation and litigation
YIMBY, an acronym standing for "Yes In My Backyard," describes advocates who support housing development as a response to the outcomes of restrictive zoning and planning policies.
According to James Brasuell in a recent Planetizen article (see link below), " . . . the terms NIMBY and YIMBY contest some of the most fundamental debates of planning: what to build, where, and how much. YIMBYs and NIMBYs contest this ground in court and in the legislature, in a constant push and pull of regulation and litigation with results that vary by local and state jurisdiction. Despite the well-entrenched political power of anti-development forces, YIMBYs have ascended into the political mainstream, with a string of substantive political, legislative, and legal victories (more on the rise of the YIMBY).
YIMBYs can claim recent political victories in California, Oregon, and Minneapolis, with laws that have ended the use of single-family zoning to ban all forms of residential development other than single-family detached homes. YIMBYs have also pushed for reforms of parking requirements, resulting in a string of ordinances removing or lowering parking requirements in cities like Boston, San Diego, and Toronto."
Four ‘low-hanging fruit’ zoning reforms
In an excerpt from a book about land use zoning by UCLA Luskin School urban planning Ph.D. candidate M. Nolan Gray argues for four approaches to reform that can immediately improve regulation of housing development in the United States. They are: 1) end single-family zoning; 2) abolish minimum parking requirements; 3) eliminate or lower minimum lot size and floor area regulations, and; 4) Decriminalize inherently affordable housing typologies.
Planning and design
Perspective on Brutalism — architizer.com
The architectural style known as Brutalism — or, in the original formulation, “The New Brutalism” — has been practically moribund for half a century, but the aesthetic remains a sticking point between architects and the general public. What some consider to be the "ugliness" of Brutalism was really a provocation aimed at retaining the modernist ethos and preventing it from curdling into a readymade style.