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Workforce Housing is Increasingly Costly
According to recent study by the Center for Housing Policy of the National Housing Conference. The report is called "Paycheck to Paycheck: Wages and the Cost of Housing in America," and it’s a valuable resource for anyone seeking to advance the cause of affordable workforce housing. The study finds that the cost of a median-priced home increased 20%, to $225,000, between the final quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2005. Meanwhile, the annual income needed to qualify to purchase a home grew from $54,855 to $71,354. Importantly, this interactive, online resource allows you to cull average incomes for various professions and compare them to housing costs in 183 metro areas nationwide. For example, you can find out how much a police officer or teacher earns in the city of Tucson, AZ compared to what it costs to qualify for a mortgage on a typical home or to rent a one- or two-bedroom apartment in that city. You can sort by occupation (63 of which are represented in the study) or by metro area, and scroll down for a graph that gives you a clear visual representation of the challenges faced by working families seeking to either purchase or rent a decent home.
Local Regs Hammer Affordable Housing, Study Finds
Local government regulations can add as much as 30% to the cost of a new home, according to a recent study of development regulations in 187 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts.
The study found that for each instance that communities increase minimum lot sizes by one-quarter of an acre, about 10% fewer homes are permitted. Fourteen municipalities in eastern Massachusetts zone more than 90% of their land area for two-acre lot sizes. Half of the municipalities zone at least one-acre lot sizes on more than half of their land area.
Two Massachusetts research organizations, the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research and Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, jointly conducted the study and the results of the research are reported in “Regulation and the Rise of Housing Prices in Greater Boston.”
James Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, explained the research findings during a Jan. 12 press conference at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, Fla. He was joined by Jeff Rhuda, business development manager for Symes Associates, Inc., a Massachusetts development company, and Layne Marceau, president of the Northern California Division of Shea Homes and chairman of the California Building Industry Association.
Marceau offered the perspective of builders and developers in California, one of the most heavily regulated states in the country.“It has gotten to the point that more than 20% of the cost of new housing is regulatory costs,” Marceau said. “Some of these are hidden regulatory costs and some are very direct costs.”
Marceau pointed to an example of NIMBY-ism and ill-conceived land-use regulation in Livermore, Calif., where impact fees and regulatory costs now add $120,000 to the cost of every new home built. A proposed, moderate-density residential community in an area of Livermore that had been slated for development was put to a vote and rejected by the city’s citizens, 72% to 28%.
Instead, the developer must now subdivide the property into 20-acre lots, Marceau said, and, incredibly, still meet Livermore’s inclusionary housing requirement to make 30% of the housing affordable. That is difficult to do, Marceau pointed out, when the cost of each 20-acre lot is over $1 million.
Rhuda, speaking about the Massachusetts experience, said the high cost of housing is making it difficult for Massachusetts companies to attract and retain top employees.
“Massachusetts is one of the few states that have lost population the last two years in a row,” Rhuda said. “Businesses are saying that housing and healthcare costs are their two biggest concerns.”
Among the findings from the Pioneer/Rappaport report:
Housing prices in the Boston metropolitan area would be 23%-36% lower than they are now if the region’s housing stock had increased by the same rate in the 1990s that occurred from 1960 to 1975. The region’s housing stock increased by 27% during the earlier period, compared to only 9% in the 1990s.
One additional acre in a locality’s minimum lot size is associated with an 11.5%-13.8% increase in housing prices in that locality.
As minimum lot sizes increase by one acre, the share of homes that qualify as affordable drops by 8%-20%.
“There had been a lot of anecdotal evidence that regulations were a large and growing part of the cost of housing,” Stergios said. “We wanted to move past the anecdotes and compile the hard data that would show us the real cost of local regulations.” This research model could be used to assess the impact of local regulations across the country, Stergios said.
In addition to this analysis, researchers at the Pioneer Institute and Rappaport Institute assembled and coded a database on zoning codes, subdivision requirements and environmental regulations that as of 2004 governed land use in the 187 communities within 50 miles of Boston. The database is an online catalogue that enables its users to view and compare regulations throughout the sample communities.
For more information, e-mail Blake Smith at NAHB, or call him at 800-368-5242x8583.
Local Fees Contributing to Escalating Homes Prices
Escalating local fees are a major factor in rising house prices, adding up to 20% to the cost of of a new home today verses less than 5% a decade ago, according to NAHB Vice President/Treasurer Brian Catalde at the recent Pacific Coast Builders Conference (PCBC) in a presentation that was directly quoted in the Financial Times.
At a PCBC press conference, Brian outlined four factors that home builders see as major drivers of home-price escalation, beyond the obvious strong buyer demand. First was the rising cost of doing business — particularly insurance costs that are being pushed upward by construction defect litigation. "Ten years ago I was building the same kind of homes that I’m building today. But I’m paying $10,000 more per home now than I was 10 years ago for general liability insurance," he explained. On a nationwide basis, GLI costs increase the cost of every new home by about $2,500.
A second contributor to higher home prices is "cost shifting," where new home buyers are forced to fund a variety of public needs and services. "In addition to roads and schools, impact fees are now being used by some local governments to pay for such things as public art, recreational facilities and jails," Bryan said. Impact fees in California typically run from $35,000 to $50,000 per home, and one jurisdiction has fees over $100,000 per home, he noted. A third big factor is production constraints, particularly those pertaining to land supply, such as large-lot zoning, setback requirements, urban growth boundaries and open space mandates. "When you add up all of these things, you’ve taken a tremendous amount of land out of circulation ... or you have a brutally inefficient use of land," said Bryan.
Finally, the costs of complying with hundreds of regulations raise the threshold for ownership by thousands of dollars per home. Brian cited the proposed IECC code change that would increase wall insulation requirements and result in about $1,000 more in home construction costs as just one example. The Financial Times piece that quoted Brian also cited several examples of unfair and excessive local fees and regulations as "the hidden dimension in the housing boom, adding heat to an already bubbling market in many areas."