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Property taxes will go down if the jurisdictions that set the rates reduce their budgets which I don't see happening. Here in Texas autonomous appraisal districts value each property annually and then after that municipalities set their tax rates to get to the overall figure they are after, e.g. a total city budget. That is the appraised value on your property can actually go down but your tax burden can go up if the rate set more than offsets the decrease in value.
When a large subdivision is proposed, especially if it has not been annexed to the City/Village, how much it would bring in (properrty tax) vs. cost of services, is a big consideration. Also, existing residents usually object less to a high-income development. At least that was how it was where I used to live.
Yeah that does happen but it is more a matter of one type of commercial use versus another rather than competing residential uses which since they don't generate sales, liquour and hotel taxes are not very beneficial to city coffers versus the cost to service them. In other words commercial properties subsidize residential more often than vice-versa.
Existing residents are not one in the same as staff at the city planning department and since there are public meeting requirements all of this should be out in the open anyway.
There is always a range of variables in zoning. Developers will build based on what they think they can sell in the neighborhood and make the most profit. I see it with knockdowns in my neighborhood. The original houses range from 1100sqft to 1900sqft on mostly 50 x 100 and 100 x 100 lots. There is no profit for a builder to modernize a 1300 sqft house after paying for the house and the land. However, replace the 1300 sqft house with a 3300sqft, 4br/3.5 bath open concept colonial (that still fits the zoning) and the builder will make a boat load of money and the house will sell pretty quickly. There are now 6 within 600 feet of my house. They look out of place, but if this continues, my original house will look out of place.
If the plan meets the requirements of the zoning, there is not much the zoning board can do to stop the building. Now, the bigger the plan, the more leverage the town has to get the builder to pay to upgrade services affected by the plan (roads, drainage, water lines, school upgrades).
Developers exist to make money and selling high priced houses leads to more profits.
News flash. Developers have always gone after the most profitable projects. That developers are building less middle income and more upper end has to do with the shortage of developable land in fast growing areas with high incomes (that bid up prices) and high regulatory burdens.
The builder can't make money on the 1,300 sq. ft. home because the incremental cost to build a 2,000 or 3,000 sq. ft. is very little compared to the original cost of the land. Buyers are not going to pay exorbitant prices for tiny homes if there are better options If you were out in rural Idaho this would not be an issue and the 1,300 sq. ft. home might make financial sense in the larger context of less associated costs, e.g. no impact fees, and cheap land.
If you want to promote affordability you should be pushing to reducing land use regulations that decrease development potential and consequently increase scarcity of housing.
If the proposal meets zoning requirements then nothing should be done to stop the development. We had a project in Austin where the developer did meet zoning requirements for an apartment building and even willingly proposed 10% affordable units even though that wasn't mandatory. The neighborhood zealots demanded 20% and after much negotiation the developer scrapped the planned apartments and is building an office building instead.
Yes developers exist to make money but anyone in real estate aside from the Habitat for Humanities and their ilk are the same way. They exist because they serve a use to their customers who happen to want a place to lay their head down at night. We need more housing and they are part of the solution unless regular people start building their own homes like in colonial times.
Newer housing = more expensive housing, by default.
Just wait after 50 years, and those new homes built today will be solidly affordable and lived in by blue collar folk.
And the giant McMansions will have been subdivided into apartments, just like happened in the 30s and 40s to all the stately houses built in the 1880s and 1890s.
And the giant McMansions will have been subdivided into apartments, just like happened in the 30s and 40s to all the stately houses built in the 1880s and 1890s.
Well, I think it'll take longer than that, given that the single family houses of the Levittowns of the 1950s are still single family homes.
If your question is "how can I obtain housing at a lower cost", my advice is to buy a duplex and rent out part. Often they don't cost much more than a SFH. If you don't have to concern yourself with schools you can buy in an iffy neighborhood and rent the other unit to someone trustworthy with a different work schedule than yours. Thorough background and credit checks, of course. There are new FHA loans available for such a scenario that take the rental income into account.
If you are in a high cost area , I'll suggest buying an inexpensive travel trailer and seek out a senior who will let you park at their house in exchange for light housekeeping, running errands and the like.
Hmm, your "inexpensive travel trailer" idea made me think & I typed said idea into my "TO'-DO" document to look into. Thank you!!
(P.S.-- After the fact, I noticed a host of typos in my reputation point given to you . . . so I typed the same message here in this posting without any typos)
Building some high rises here and there won't save you a lot of money. You need to mass produce high rise buildings in a massive scale to cut the cost down drastically (i.e. build a huge apartment complex filled with 100 exactly the same buildings, and then duplicate the entire complex 100 times). Otherwise, the construction cost alone could be higher than single family housing, due to the inefficiency coming from low volume, lack of experience/fine tuning, etc. This is already a big hurdle. There are many tract home builders/developers who have a good experience of mass producing the tract housing (e.g. both DR Horton and Lennar has been delivering 50k houses per year), and everybody know how to build one, and the whole supply chain is based on SFH. But many builders don't have much experience of building concrete apartment buildings, let alone constructing 10,000 apartment buildings which contain 1 million units in total.
If you build 30-story residential concrete buildings in a massive scale, the cost of construction (including some basic-level finishing and landscaping) could go down as low as $100/sqft, which is somewhat lower than the construction cost of average SFH. But the $100/sqft build won't have 1.5 parking spaces per unit (rather, it'll feature zero parking spot), which is the required amount of parking spaces in many cities. Likewise, the unit would be substandard in many ways. On par or above standard units would cost you roughly $200-250/sqft to build, which is higher than average SFH construction cost. But still, the construction cost of small 1,000 sqft unit is lower than median new house, thanks to its smaller sizes.
You might think this has to be more affordable, since apartment units require far less land per unit, thus low land acquisition cost. Yes, high rise apartments needs very small amount of land per unit. If you build the whole complex on a 50 acre land with 4.8 FAR (occupied interior floor space only) or 6.0 FAR (including shared area) or 8.0 FAR (including underground parking), you could have roughly 50 buildings (30-story) which contains 10k units (1k sqft). So each unit only need 0.005 acre (217 sqft), which is only 2-4% of 0.125-0.25 acre lot for SFH. Even if you bought a bunch of house in Bel Air for $6m/acre and build the complex on the demolition site, the land cost per unit is merely $30k.
However, 50 single family house each sitting on an acre land in Bel Air have only 100-200 residents. Therefore, roads nearby only need to handle 1,000 car trips a day, blackwater pipe only need to handle 100-200 poops (and some more urine) a day, water supply pipe only need to supply 20k gallons, power grid for the area work just fine with 1MW capacity and the area definitely don't need its own dedicated schools. That's not the case with 10k units / 30k residents. These high-density high-rises have much worse impact than low-density high-rises (i.e. mainly huge units, high price). Nearby roads will see 150k trips a day instead of 1.5k, and water demand will skyrocket to 3 million gallon instead of 20k gallon, blackwater pipe will see 30,000 poops a day instead of 150, power grid load will shoot up to 100MW instead of 1MW, and the area will need its own elementary, middle, high school. The hilly roads stand no chance against 300k trips a day, just like the pipes/grids. You need to beef up the infrastructure as well. Without a dedicated underground highway to either 405 or Santa Monica Blvd, 3-5 schools, huge water/gas supply pump and pipes, sewage upgrade, etc, the apartment would be unlivable (i.e. unsellable, thus no realization).
To make it happen, someone has to pay for all that. Developers pay some portion of it in the name of various fees. After those fee, the apartment units usually become unaffordable. To make it very affordable, the city need to build an underground highway, power grid, water/gas/sewage pipes, schools, and everything just for them by using tax money. Good luck with that.
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