At Zillow Research, our days are fully consumed with bringing you the best, most interesting and most actionable real estate research around.
But to that end, we also find time to read a variety of reports, news stories and investigations, on any number of issues, from social justice, to economics, to real estate and sports. We read them for education, for entertainment and out of pure curiosity – and each one helps us discover new questions we want to answer and helps identify new trends worth following.
Zillow Reading List is a regular roundup of these interesting pieces we come across, with some thoughts about each and how it ties into our existing research and/or has spurred new questions. We’ll post these roundups regularly, and of course will continue to strive to publish research that is as enriching, thought-provoking and useful as these pieces have been to us.
Enjoy!
San Francisco Considers a Moratorium on Development
Laura Clark in the San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has proposed a temporary moratorium on any development in the city’s Mission neighborhood that doesn’t consist entirely of affordable units. This strikes us as a particularly bad idea. When has a production moratorium ever helped solve a supply crisis? And with only 75 new units completed last year in the Mission, is now the time to slow down development? Proponents argue that this is just a temporary pause on development. But what will we learn during this pause? Whatever steps the city wants to take to try and preserve the local character of the Mission and help its current residents deal with the transition are better taken now, when more of that culture and those residents still remain. Some may argue it is better to wait until we fully understand the effects of new development on an existing neighborhood. But that principle neglects the cost and risks of waiting – and with San Francisco in the midst of the rental affordability crisis, those risk are significant indeed.
Patricia Leigh Brown in The New York Times
An interesting profile of the movement in Oakland to reintroduce the city’s namesake, and “re-oak” Oakland. The larger movement towards “cleaning and greening” – reclaiming land to plant grass and trees to create park-like settings – appears to be gaining stream. And there is some early evidence of success in Philadelphia, amid the perennial questions of what to do with empty lots or abandoned homes in places like Detroit.
Prashant Gopal and Heather Perlberg in Bloomberg Business
Given the strength of the high end of the market, even as overall new home construction and sales have been slow to recover, builders have been angling to get into the luxury segment. This presents a bit of a challenge – buildable lots are in short supply in the best areas of towns. The solution? Increasingly, builders are buying up smaller homes in an area then tearing them down to put up much larger luxury homes. Of course the lot isn’t any larger, so builders are just squeezing more home on the same land. One the one hand, this is effectively updating the housing stock to more accurately reflect what people want (big bedrooms) and what they are willing to give up (yards), which is typically a good thing. But with new construction numbers already low relative to household formation, tearing down a place to put up a new one means we are actually creating fewer net homes, which is worrying.
The Plan to Build a Brand New $200 Billion City in Turkey
A Turkish political party just released one of the most ambitious housing plans we have ever seen. They want to create a brand new metropolis in the center of Turkey, and they promise that it will be a hub of economic activity as the country turns its development priorities eastward. This reminds us a little of the idea of Charter Cities advanced by Paul Romer, startup cities that fast-track reform to accelerate growth. In the United States, it strikes us that given housing prices in cities, there is a lot of demand for urban living, and many existing cities are running out of space. But with only 5 percent of the land area in the United States developed, could we create brand new cities? That sounds like a herculean task, but it looks like some folks in Turkey are up for the challenge.
And let’s finish with this fun quiz, testing if you can identify cities around the globe based on their skyline. We got 15 out of 16 right. So there is room for you to top us. And if you do, shoot us your resume.
