PropertyProf Blog

Have Kids, Will Move to the 'Burbs

The Wall Street Journal shows that Americans are increasingly segregating themsleves along class lines:

Many of America’s wealthiest people are clustering in more expensive and affluent neighborhoods, leaving their lower-income brethren behind. One possible reason: They’re doing it for the kids. The share of American families living in either poor or affluent neighborhoods has doubled over the last four decades from 15% to 33%, according to an analysis of Census data by researchers Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University. The proportion living in affluent areas shot up from 7% in 1970 to 15% in 2009, while the share of families in poor neighborhoods more than doubled from 8% to 18%. [...]

Put simply, many Americans, especially those with resources, like residing in socioeconomically-diverse areas when they’re younger, but once they have kids, and want the best for them, they head out — not just to the suburbs, but to suburbs with better schools and richer people and less crime — even if they have to pay up.

Worth a read.

Steve Clowney

Map of the Day: The Dispersion of Life and Gender in New York

 

This is an animated dot map of every person in New York City.  The blue-green dots represent  males and pink dot represent females.  The animation shows how clustering of people change with age.  The population of babies starts out gender balanced and pretty evenly distributed across the city.  Then things get interesting.  In their twenties, women cluster on the Upper East Side and men head to jail.  The early thirties show a reblending, and then men start to die off.

Steve Clowney

You May Want to Reconsider That Strategic Default?

The Chicago Tribune runs a story indicating that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will start pursing foreclosure deficiency judgements more aggressively:

Fannie and Freddie can pursue judgments against borrowers who walk away from their loans even though they have the ability to make their payments. That's called a strategic default, and many borrowers are taking that step — typically throwing in the towel because their homes are no longer worth as much as they owe.

But when their homes are sold at foreclosure and the proceeds are not enough to cover their outstanding loan balances, it creates a deficiency for which many defaulters either don't realize they are liable or don't care.

To date, the two government-sponsored enterprises, which are now highly profitable after five years of running in the red, haven't done a particularly good job at pursuing deficiency judgments, according to scathing reports from the Office of the Inspector General at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But the agency says it is going to make the enterprises clean up their acts. And that should serve as fair warning to those who can pay but fail to do so.

Steve Clowney

The Top 12 Urban Policy Innovators

Future Cities names the world's top twelve innovators in Urban Policy.

Steve Clowney

Building a Better Block

The Better Block Project seeks to revive blighted, vacant blocks with quick, inexpensive, and bottom-up infrastructure improvements.  The project's backers generally focus on bicycle parking, landscaping, café seating, and pop-up shops to create more active streets and public places.  Here's the Tedx Talk of the founder of Better Blocks, Jason Roberts.

 

Steve Clowney

New York City's Strangest Vacant Lots

A super-fun article in the New York Times looks at a catalogue of near-useless slivers of land that the city is trying to unload:

The origins of odd lot shapes — like awkward triangles, long slivers and rectangles with sizable bites taken out — are usually a mystery to city administrators, though they are assumed to come from old surveying errors or ancient easements, which allow one to use another’s property.

[T]he city once owned thousands of formerly private properties, taken over from owners who neglected to pay their taxes. Many buildings accumulated during the city’s economic crisis of the 1970s have since been sold off, but the city is still working through the backlog; some of the land may have been on the city’s books since the 19th century. Each property must be appraised, no matter how tiny or evidently useless, and submitted to a lengthy review process, so progress is not swift.

Most of the properties the city sells end up at auction, but if a lot is appraised and found to be essentially worthless, it enters the city program for “slivers, access ways and interior lots,” perhaps too eagerly called the SAIL Away program. In these cases, the city approaches neighboring owners and tries to sell them the properties for a nominal amount of money, maybe $5 per square foot, Ms. Koch said, or even $1 per square foot.

Steve Clowney

Population Growth and Productivity Growth Remain Disconnected

Richard Florida worries that people aren't moving to places with the strongest rates of growth:

The disconnect between population growth and productivity growth is striking. Palm Coast, Florida, which leads the country in population growth, also has the lowest  level of productivity growth of any metro in the country. Cape Coral, Florida, with the fifth highest level of population growth, logged the second lowest level of productivity growth. Myrtle Beach which is sixth in population growth had the eighth lowest level of productivity growth. Only one of the top 10 leading population growth metros broke into the top 100 in terms of productivity growth, Austin in 64th place. Six of out of the top 10 metros with the highest rates of population growth saw real declines in productivity over the course of the decade. And the average rate of economic growth across these top 10 metros was also negative, (-0.53 percent per year) and beneath the U.S. metro average (of 0.48 percent annually). When it comes to fast growing large metros, Houston and Atlanta both experienced considerable population growth rates over the past decade, while seeing real declines in productivity over the period.

Steve Clowney

Did VHS Tapes Save Central Cities?

 

Matt Yglesias advances the idea that innovation in pornography-delivery technology helped restore American cities:

[S]omeone should write a book about how VHS porn (and of course later the Internet) contributed to the cleaning up of America's cities. But why write a book when you can write a blog post?

[Y]ou do have a handful of businesses that can be commercial successful while also serving as neighborhood level dis-amenities. Many people do not want to live near a porn theater. And many of the people who do want to live near a porn theater do not want to explicitly articulate that preference during an intra-household discussion of where to live.

So when technological change causes these disamenities to close and be replaced by amenities (art house cinema, live theater, church) or neutral uses (housing, warehouse) the whole surrounding area benefits. The process is further spurred by the fact that there aren't great complementarities between porn theaters and other local businesses. You don't go out to "dinner and a movie" at the [porn theater], or meet up with your friends for a few rounds of drinks before the show.

 

Steve Clowney

State Switching as Secession

Over at Volokh, Eugene Kontorovich offers some legal advice to the wave of secession movements that have recently popped up around the country:

Some spirit of secession has spread across the land, with various areas in Maryland, Colorado, Texas, California and elsewhere discussing seceding from their states, because of political alienation arising from significant differences in values and preferences.

These secessionists have an advantage over those seeking outright separation from the Union – and a big disadvantage. On one hand, they don’t have to deal with the Confederacy/slavery baggage that tends to confound discussions of secession in the U.S. On the other hand, the Constitution, Art. IV, sec. 3 clearly forbids the creating a new state in the territory of an existing one without the latter’s consent, and the consent of Congress. That is a high bar, practically insurmountable.

But there may be an easier way for those who seek to secede from their state – instead of creating a new “51st” state, secede to join an existing state. The Constitution’s requirement of home-state and congressional consent only clearly applies to the creation of a “new state."

Steve Clowney

Nobody Can Afford to Live in San Francisco

It difficult to overemphasize just how expensive it is to live in places like New York and San Francisco.  The Atlantic Cities Blog looks at the toll this takes on the middle class:

High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it's costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.

In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron – a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class – 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.

If you're middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn't located where you'd like to live. [. . .] To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percent higher.

The gulf between those two numbers means that the most expensive U.S. cities aren't just unaffordable for the average American middle-class family; they're unaffordable to the relatively well-off middle class by local standards, too.

Many commentators have pointed out that the culprit here is zoning regulations that are criminally restrictive.  In places like San Francisco and Washington, D.C.--where there are lots of high paying jobs and people want to live--the buildings need to be taller to accommodate far more housing units and increase density.   

Steve Clowey

Keep Farmland for Farmers, Ctd

Yesterday we linked to an article that described how the farmland preservation movement may end up hurting farmers. This comment from friend-of-the-blog Bill Fischel examines another unintended consequence of preserving agricultural land:

The real victims of the farmland preservation movement are not young farmers who cannot afford land to grow unprofitable crops. The victims are potential homebuyers who would have lived in developments that are forestalled by this and other open space preservation devices, which I label zombie zoning. The donors of these easements take a fat tax break (appraisals are seldom contested by the IRS) and often get state tax credits. The IRS requires that they be perpetual easements (hence the zombie) and the opportunity cost of making the donation is often zero or negative, which makes them more or less like zoning--but without any serious public oversight.

Steve Clowney

Keep Farmland for Farmers

The New York Times looks at some of the unintended consequences of conservation easements designed to prevent agricultural land from being developed:

Easements are intended to protect farmland, water, animal habitat, historic sites and scenic views, and so they are successful in keeping farms from becoming malls and subdivisions. But they don’t stop Wall Street bankers from turning them into private getaways, with price tags to match.

Few bankers farm; long days with little pay lack appeal. A new report by the National Young Farmers Coalition, a group we helped start, reveals that one-quarter of the land trusts that oversee these conservation easements have seen protected land go out of production. Why? A nonfarmer had bought it.

Steve Clowney

The Effect of the Shutdown on the Housing Sector

NPR's All Things Considered looks at how the housing sector of the economy is holding up.  Their bottom line:

The partial shutdown of the federal government is starting to take a bite out of the housing market, and would-be homeowners are feeling the impact in stalled mortgage approvals and delayed closings.

Steve Clowney

Orpett on Excavating Law in the West Bank

Natalie Orpett (Jenner & Block) has posted The Archaeology of Land Law: Excavating Law in the West Bank (International Journal of Legal Information)on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Land law in the West Bank is a mess of multi-layered legal regimes representing the complicated political history of the region. From this confusion flow some of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, such as the legitimacy of settlements and the legality of the security barrier. Whether one’s concerns regarding the “Question of Palestine” are humanitarian or political, one fact is clear: the legal muddle of land law must be addressed.

But addressing the law first requires that we understand what that law is. This paper is not an investigation of the relative legitimacy under domestic or international law of each of the innumerable changes that were made to land law over the course of multiple legal regimes. Rather, it attempts to develop a purely descriptive answer to the seemingly straightforward question: what is the state of land law? To do this, I reconstruct the law of land as much as possible, from the still-operative, sedimentary layers of Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian and international law. In compiling this information, I hope to contribute to the efforts to fully understand where we are, so we can honestly assess where we may go from here.

Steve Clowney

A Short History of the Highrise

A cool interactive film on The New York Times website can be found here.  It features great photos from the newspaper's archives.  They had me when the first photo was a shot across Central Park dated 1843.

Tanya Marsh

Neighbors Really Hate Abandoned Homes

A news story out of Buffalo drives home the importance or order to people's happiness:

For a dozen years, Theresa Anderson was the queen of Deshler Street. The unassuming woman owned five small wooden houses along the poor side street, filling them with her children, grandchildren and other relatives who kept their lots tidy, watched out for trouble and pitched in with the family business.  That the family business was selling crack cocaine at all hours of the day and night didn’t seem to matter to some of the neighbors, who say their little street on Buffalo’s impoverished east side has actually gotten less secure since SWAT teams stormed in and shut down Anderson’s drug operation last year.

“I miss Theresa, I really do,” said Debra Walker, who has lived on Deshler for more than nine years. When Anderson was in control, “I actually felt safer. Now my place has been broken into.”

Steve Clowney

Conference Announcement: Association for Planning Law and Property Rights

The International Academic Association for Planning Law and Property Rights, 8th Annual Conference 2014 will take place in Haifa Israel, Feb. 11-14, 2014.
 
This is a reminder that the deadline for abstract submissions for PLPR 2014 is 15 October 2013.  Click here for the website, here for the call for papers and here to submit your abstract now.

We are happy to announce that our opening reception will take place on 12 Februaryand will be hosted by the Mayor of Haifa, in the historic City Hall in the Hadar mid-town area.  In addition, we will have a special pre-dinner reception on 13 February, hosted by the Bahai World Center (click here for more on the Bahai Gardens in Haifa).
 
Please note that we have added a new workshop to our list of optional pre-conference workshops:  Workshop 5 on National Land Ownership and Housing Policy.  Click here to see the new workshop in the list and and to submit your workshop registration form (you are welcome to resubmit if your preferences have changed).

Steve Clowney

Blandy & Wang on Power in Gated Communities

Sarah Blandy (Sheffield) & Feng Wang (Shanghai University) have posted Curbing the Power of Developers? Law and Power in Chinese and English Gated Urban Enclaves (Geoforum) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

This article contributes to the legal geography literature through exploration of the contested concepts of power and law and their interconnected processes. Research findings from studies of urban gated enclaves in China and in England are used as a starting point to analyse the spatialisation of power in the creation of gated urban enclaves, with a particular focus on the role of law. Four categories of law are identified. The article suggests an analytical framework for understanding how particular modalities of power intersect with these different types of law. This framework is then applied to temporal stages in the creation of gated enclaves, in the context of the different legal geographies of China and England. In the final analysis, the manipulative power of neoliberalism outweighs law’s authority, for example when developers form alliances with municipal government to circumvent ‘policy’ and ‘regulatory’ law. Property rights as conceptualised through ‘high’ law are shown to be ineffective in resolving problems experienced by residents of specific enclaves, particularly those relating to common property rights. Developers were found to use ‘facilitative’ law to gain control of the juridical field, materialised through property rights allocation and resolution of disputes within urban enclaves.

Steve Clowney

The Rights of a Tenant with no Lease

Straight from the New York Times' real estate Q&A section:

Q. My family has rented an unregulated full-floor apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone since early 2011. We renewed our lease in 2012 with no problem. This year, though, my husband called and e-mailed the landlord multiple times about renewing our lease, but the landlord has never replied. What are his obligations to provide us with a renewal lease? We have been told that the landlord is thinking about selling the building. If he does, what are our rights as tenants without a lease?

A. Sherwin Belkin, a Manhattan lawyer who represents property owners, says that once the writer’s last lease expired, she became a “month-to-month” tenant.

“An owner is not obligated to renew a free-market lease,” Mr. Belkin said, noting that if it is true that the owner is considering selling the building, it is generally easier to sell with month-to-month tenants than with tenants under a lease. If either the current or the new owner wants to evict a month-to-month tenant, he must provide at least 30 days’ notice, ending at the end of a month. So, for example, if the owner sends out the 30-day notice in the middle of October, the tenancy cannot be terminated before the last day of November.

Steve Clowney

Map of the Day: Your Country's Favorite Website

Mark Graham and Stefano De Stabbata, two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, have created a map that shows each country’s most popular website. The map-makers  have changed the size of nations to reflect the number of Internet users.

The Atlantic Cities Blog analyzes the things outside of the Google-Facebook bubble:

Baidu dominates China, though its spill-over popularity into neighboring countries makes the researchers doubt whether data from those countries is accurate. Yahoo! succeeds in Japan and Taiwan through its nearly two-decade-old partnership with Japanese SoftBank and its 2007 purchase of Wretch, a Taiwanese social networking site.

Elsewhere: Yandex, a search engine, is Russia’s most popular site; an email client is most popular in Kazakhstan. Data from central African nations appear unavailable, which makes me wonder if the starting data included mobile web. (If so, Facebook might be doing well there, too.)

Perhaps most interesting  to me are the Palestinian Territories, where a newspaper (a newspaper!), The Al-Watan Voice, is most popular.

Steve Clowney