America's real estate industry is racing to build more
homes, but builders are losing confidence in the market. Housing affordability is the primary challenge in the
marketplace right now, and frankly, it's going to get worse as interest rates increase. The cost of housing far exceeds what some of the essential employees workers need in order to have housing. Architects say that these and other concerns could ease over
time with better planning. Suburban retrofitting has the potential to transform
people's lives. What started as a fantasy concept for vacationers is now
hitting Main Street USA. Developers call them mixed use districts or master planned
communities. The Howard Hughes Corporation just announced its purchase of
7000 acres 30 miles outside the city for a master planned community. These new neighborhoods bring people closer to stores. The change could chip away at the country's larger issues. The central thing that everyone building suburbs fails to
grasp is that this is a great one life cycle product. It's really not a multiple life cycle, regenerative kind of
thing. Can master planning solve the nationwide housing supply
shortage, and what would it mean for the future of America's suburbs? The first thing to know is that nearly half of the renters
in the country are struggling to pay their bills. We know that the laws of supply and demand drive housing
prices. For too many years, the United States has not produced
enough housing to meet the demands of a growing nation. The second thing to know is that more people are moving away
from major cities to places like Fairfax, Virginia. I'd like for us to make houses more attainable for our
people. Evelyn Spain is a planning commissioner for Fairfax County,
Virginia. It's a popular suburb outside of Washington, D.C.. Fairfax County has over a million people. So you can imagine there's a lot to learn and a lot to
apply to make life equitable and inclusive. Fairfax County is in many ways typical. It's still the, you know, single family home community, but
it's changing a little bit. The American city has been amazingly dynamic, despite
powerful built in limitations on land use. Thinking about that old model of a dense core where
everybody works, that's a 20th century, if not a 19th century model. June Williamson has studied these new developments for over
two decades. She calls them suburban retrofits. Part of what's driving retrofit is the understanding that
this kind of growth machine paradigm that was pursued somewhat aggressively in the 20th
century has kind of stalled out. And the rush to outlying areas has often been so great that
the congestion of the highway has become as bothersome as the congestion of the city. These preexisting properties that aren't generating the tax
income that they had in the past but they've already been heavily invested in
can be very carefully rethought and have new things layered into them. Among several of the highlights in her book is The Mosaic
District. It feels less like a parking lot and more like a college
campus. The developers there thought about making a better mix of
uses and really making a destination that had a much higher percentage of public open amenity space. And part of this was in recognition that people can can now
shop at home and click on their computers just to have things delivered to
them. But what's really missing is the opportunity to have social
engagement with other people. If you walk through these new neighborhoods, it'll feel
nice, maybe too nice. Gentrification is often a word that's used by people who are
saying, Okay, we're looking at this construction activity and we're thinking about cost
concerns or traffic concerns and like but to young households, construction is the way that you
add those those homes of the future. And so a complaint that's often made is, well,
you know, it's typically higher end housing that tends to be built. Well, the challenge is it's impossible to build 20 year old
apartment buildings. The only way to get 20 year old apartment
buildings is to build today In places like Fairfax, long term residents risk being
pushed out to make room for new development. We also need to make housing more affordable for our aging community so they can age in place. Some of the most popular trends in city planning started in
retirement communities. Developers call them master plans. I think the defining characteristic of a master planned
community is a sense of neighborhood. Even Walt Disney had an idea for a new neighborhood that
better mixed technology in daily life. But Walt never saw his idea realized. However, in the 1990s, the Walt Disney Company assembled a
team of city planners, which in turn created Celebration Florida. This neighborhood has 26 miles of walking trails and an
open air shopping center. There are about 10,000 residents in the community. Disney recently announced a major expansion in this space. The idea has been so popular that copycat retirement
communities sprang up all around Florida. Today, the fastest selling master plan community is nearby. It's The Villages. That's also the fastest growing metro area in the entire
country. Companies like Blackstone have poured billions of dollars
into real estate too. Blackstone's privately held real estate investment trust is
spending big to repair old apartment buildings, and it launched a $1 billion
affordable housing fund. Other investors, like UMH properties, sell
manufactured homes. The CEO says that taking production off site saves a
lot of money. Everything's based on location, age of community, all those
things. But we're capable of providing the brand new houses low as
$900, $950 per month. Investors are pouring money into these neighborhoods because
they have hidden benefits. Take a look at this chart to see why. It's comparing the maintenance costs for a typical
commercial lot versus something more like the Mosaic District. From the government's perspective, it's a no brainer. The smart growth is more cost effective. Still, these new designs are just a small share of the
overall housing market. If you're thinking about the traditional master plan
community, the big suburban development with thousands of units, that's only about 3.5% percent of total
single family starts. So it's a small share. Teardown construction, 6%. Now, two thirds of the home construction in this country is
undertaken by small, privately held companies. And they don't get a lot of attention. They're the ones out there building townhouses, building
duplexes, doing teardown construction and remodeling our aging housing stock. Smaller developers like James Rouse brought master planning
to the middle class with suburban cities. The developer created Columbia, Maryland, a city
full of master planned communities. The ten villages that comprise the city
surround a big mall. People spend more time in a mall than they do anywhere else except home. More than they do in church, more than
they do in school. Is that good or bad? Well... You know, the problem that the New Urbanists were trying to
solve was really how to stop making bad suburbs. How do we create a better version of this thing that we're
out building? The central thing that everyone building suburbs
fails to grasp is that this is a great one life cycle product. It's really not a multiple life cycle, regenerative kind of
thing. The financial community believes that adding housing to
older shopping centers could have a meaningful impact, both for their bottom line and for the public good. Dead malls and sleepy retail districts have become a common
issue in America. I think we often neglect to recognize that we actually have
created a development pattern that is a throwaway development pattern. It is a one generation of success and prosperity. And then essentially we walk away from it and allow it to
go through a cycle of decline. Maybe if it's located well enough, will we'll do some
heroic thing to rescue it, but we're basically just allowing it to fall apart. That comes with all kinds of costs, related costs, social
costs, political costs, cultural costs, economic costs. Charles Marohn has compared US land development to a Ponzi
schem...
The video still doesn't get to the core of the problem: car dependence. Even the suburban "retrofits" are described as "destinations". I sadly see a picture of having islands of master-planned areas and islands of retrofitted shopping malls all separated by highways.
I hate so called "master planned communities" or "new urbanist" style suburbs
Jeez most of the stock footage still looked so soulless here. I think it’s part of the difference of converting suburbia, versus infilling cities which had at least some historic period of natural growth
Master planned communities are only permanent if they're built as Transit-Oriented Districts (around rail stations) so that they're connected to jobs and a central city hub.
I feel like in a lot of these videos that are made by news networks they always sort of miss the point of what the issue is. A lot of these places they’re offering up as the solution are still the same car dependent, space wasting sprawl, they just have a nucleus now instead of being exclusively houses. They’re an improvement, but the core point is that building housing miles away from most of what they need to survive with no public transit is stupid and unsustainable. The solution isn’t to just plop down a Taco Bell as well and to hand over the country to Amazon. The point is to build with transit access in mind and to stop subsidizing/mandating the type of development that intentionally wastes huge amounts of land and tax money.
Relevant article shows some of the "good examples" mentioned in this video are maybe not that great after all: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/4/6/my-countys-award-winning-smart-growth-plan-is-a-disaster-heres-why
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