Archinect - News

New York's population drain heads for smaller regional cities

2020-09-08T12:32:00-04:00

Instead of a house with a picket fence and a front yard, many urbanites have opted to rent in newly developed apartment buildings or to buy condominiums in denser, walkable suburban communities, where apartments tend to be bigger and offer more outdoor space than comparable units in the city.

Sydney Franklin of The New York Times highlights the growing demand for dense—but not too dense—urban developments located in secondary cities by those fleeing New York City as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Franklin highlights a collection of recently completed low- to mid-rise apartment and condominium developments across the region, including the new Allure Harbor Point development in Stamford, Connecticut, a 435-unit multifamily tower fronting the city's harbor, as projects that could shape the region's near-term urban future.

California embraces VMT metrics to asses project environmental impacts

2019-11-27T18:04:00-05:00

A transformational shift in perspective is taking shape in California, where the state's transportation agency, Caltrans, is in the midst of alterings its project impact analysis metrics by abandoning LOS in lieu of VMT.

Why is this important? Level of Service (LOS), on the one hand, measures the impact of a project on traffic flow in a given area, prioritizing the movement of cars over other factors. Because LOS is optimized for automobile traffic, project impact mitigation measures often favor reducing automobile congestion so that traffic can keep flowing. Common LOS-led responses to a high-impact projects include highway widening and the addition of new driving lanes, for example, approaches that often actually work to make traffic worse through the phenomenon of "induced demand."

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), on the other hand, measures the amount of travel generated for all vehicles by a given project. For projects that are measured against VMT, the goal shifts from reducing...

Boomers poised to leave suburban Dust Belts in their wake

2019-11-25T22:00:00-05:00

The U.S. is at the beginning of a tidal wave of homes hitting the market on the scale of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This time it won’t be driven by overbuilding, easy credit or irrational exuberance, but by an inevitable fact of life: the passing of the baby boomer generation.

A report in The Wall Street Journal highlights the coming vacancy crisis set to impact America's retirement communities and exurbs as members of the Baby Boomer generation age out of independent living with fewer members of younger generations left—or willing—to take their places.

The report states, "One in eight owner-occupied homes in the U.S., or roughly nine million residences, are set to hit the market from 2017 through 2027 as the baby boomers start to die in larger numbers, according to an analysis by Issi Romem conducted while he was a senior director of housing and urban economics at Zillow. That is up from roughly 7 million homes in the prior decade."

It gets worse: According to The Wall Street Journal, up to 21 million homes could be vacated by seniors by 2027, more than twice the number of new properties built during the decade that preceded the Great Recession.

The zombie golf courses are coming

2019-06-17T19:24:00-04:00

Municipalities, in the interest of preserving open space, could once be counted on to take over troubled courses. But subsidizing golf has become a toxic political issue in most places.

Are the days of America's golf clubs numbered? Reading the news, it doesn't look too good.

A recent Crain's report chronicling the ailing state of suburban Chicago golf clubs points out that while business was booming for the region's country clubs just a decade ago, the game has fallen flat in recent years. Many golf clubs are folding, being taken over by local municipalities, or eyeing redevelopment as golf playing slumps nationwide.

Real estate developer Chris Charnas, president of Links Capital Advisors, tells Crain's, "So many golf clubs face the reality of declining play. They once counted on 30,000 paid rounds a year and now that is under 20,000,” adding, “Many course owners will want to sell any way they can. They’re all looking for exit strategies.”

Planetizen adds that the trend extends to other parts of the country, as well, per a 2019 National Golf Foundation (NGF) report.

The report found that on top of a 5% drop in play between 2017 and 2018, nearly 200 courses clo...

There's a glut of McMansions on the market

2019-06-17T15:06:00-04:00

Many baby boomers poured millions into these spacious homes, planning to live out their golden years in houses with all the bells and whistles. Now, many boomers are discovering that these large, high-maintenance houses no longer fit their needs as they grow older, but younger people aren’t buying them.

The Wall Street Journal reports that wealthy baby boomers in America's far-flung retirement suburbs are having trouble selling their McMansions. The problem? The homes are too big, too expensive, and too far away from everything else.

Another issue: Too many multi-million dollar homes are hitting the market all at once. As the TV generation begins to age out of homeownership and sky-high student debt keeps city-loving millennials locked out of the housing market, giant suburban homes are sitting for longer than in previous years. As a result, owners are increasingly accepting below-asking price offers.

The problem, the report warns, could get worse in the coming decade as demographic transformations reshape America and some 32 million baby-boomer-owned homes go for sale.

Rick Palacios, Jr. of John Burns Real Estate Consulting told The Wall Street Journal, “You had this wave of homes built that now just don’t make sense for a lot of the people who bought them."

Maybe it's time to ...

Suburbanization is back at the worst possible time

2019-06-10T14:15:00-04:00

Author William H. Frey, senior fellow for the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brooking Institute, writes, "These trends are consistent with previous census releases for counties and metropolitan areas that point to a greater dispersion of the U.S. population as the economy and housing market pick back up, perhaps propelled by young adult millennials who may be finally departing dense urban cores as they make a delayed entrance into marriage and the housing market.

These slowdowns were especially pronounced in the biggest cities. Among the largest 22, all but two (Jacksonville, Fla. and Fort Worth, Texas) showed lower growth last year than in 2011-2012. Twelve of the cities displayed their lowest growth since 2010, including northern cities like New York City and Boston but also other pricey coastal cities like San Francisco and Sun Belt growth centers like Dallas."

Frey adds that as growth rates for larger cities have taken a dive, even booming mid-tier cities like San Antonio an...

Wall Street is cashing in on post-2008 housing crisis

2019-05-31T20:19:00-04:00

Blackstone Group is cashing in on its bet on the suburban rental class. The private-equity firm late Tuesday sold more than $1 billion of shares of Invitation Homes Inc., the giant single-family home landlord it launched following the financial crisis in a wager that many Americans would be willing to rent the suburban lifestyle they could no longer afford to own.

In the two years since private-equity firm Blackstone Group launched its suburban home management service, Invitation Homes, the company's stock has gone up by over 26%.

During that same time, homeownership has fallen to its lowest levels since the mid-1990s, rents have edged upward in the nation's biggest metro areas, and an increasing number of Americans have become long-term tenants of Wall Street-based investment firms.

Simply put: Owning rental housing is a booming business that, increasingly, is seeing profits flow into fewer and fewer hands. The phenomenon is due in large part to Obama-era policies enacted at the height of the Great Recession, when credit was scarce, demand was low, and the government moved to incentivize private investors into buying up flailing suburban properties. Nearly a decade later, following years of under-building in the housing sector, those policies and investments have begun bring in juicy dividends for the investment firms and their shareholder...

On the ground, a “new suburbanism”?

2017-01-09T16:01:00-05:00

In 2015, 18 percent of all existing housing units on Long Island were multifamily. While that is less than half the percentage in New York metropolitan suburbs over all, change is apparent across the island...12,500 condominium and rental units within half a mile of train stations had been approved over the last 11 years, 7,000 of which have been built. Another 10,000 units could be approved in five to six years.

Marcelle Sussman Fischler reports in from the suburbs around New York City, where luxury, amenity-rich, mixed-used TOD is offering up an urbanized suburbia.

Meanwhile in the Denver region, an innovative public-private financing tool Denver Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Fund, is attempting to "preserve and create affordable housing and community facilities". Denver's official Transit Oriented Development Strategic Plan from 2014.

Also previously, The New Suburbanism by Joel Kotkin.

Los Angeles' urban core is full (unlike most other major U.S. cities)

2016-08-25T13:39:00-04:00

This isn't your grandfather's urbanization: population figures in major U.S. cities, which on the whole are on the uptick after declining in the 1960s, are adding residents not to their already built urban cores but rather in the form greenfield sprawl, which makes use of farmland and lightly developed suburban housing tracts. The big exception? Los Angeles, whose urban core Slate pronounces full. Here's more detail from the piece:

A new and illuminating analysis by Yonah Freemark, a project manager at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and the author of the Transport Politic blog—well worth reading in full—reveals some important trends in the past half-century of city-building...

“The average of the 100 largest cities grew by 48 percent overall,” Freemark notes. “Yet the average city also lost 28 percent of its residents within its neighborhoods that were built up in 1960.” That’s not just true in Youngstown and Detroit, post-industrial Rust Belt cities that have struggled with...

Forgotten Spaceships of Po Valley

2016-05-04T13:30:00-04:00

Rem Koolhaas, in an infamous essay from 1995, goes straight to the point: ‘the style of choice (of suburbia) is postmodern, and will always remain so’.

'In the post-war period most of the middle class of northern Italy looked straightforwardly towards the future and refused to be ‘contaminated’ by tradition. The best experimental designs by Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Carlo Scarpa and Gianni Avon were inspired by the strong need for individual representation of these stubbornly progressive self-made men. This state of things was bound not to last. Starting from the early seventies, as migration flows from the city to its suburbs increased steadily, the need for a mass production of single-family houses emerged. Architects were ready to give up quality and exclusiveness in favour of quantity and repetition: the so-called villetta was born, accompanied by an update of its owners’ lifestyle."