Category: Housing
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Richmond and DC Among Cities People Are Most Eager to Ditch
by Don Rippert Anywhere but here. Moneywise Publishing is citing a “study” detailing the most and least desirable American cities based on real estate inquiries. Real estate brokerage firm Redfin tracks Americans using their web site to find new places to live. According to the company, 25% of people browsing home listings online are “looking…
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Those Tenant-Eviction Stats Are Valid
by Marty Wegbreit The August 15, 2019 post, “A Closer Look at Those Tenant-Eviction Stats,” fails to stand up to statistical or critical analysis. The post blames Virginia’s Independent City/County form of government for high eviction rates. (Five of the highest ten eviction rates in large U.S. cities over 100,000 population are in Virginia.) Virginia’s…
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A Closer Look at those Tenant-Eviction Stats
Virginia’s eviction-reform movement gained considerable momentum last year when the New York Times, citing data of the Princeton Eviction Lab, published a story asserting that four Virginia cities numbered in the top 10 cities with the highest eviction rates in the country. Richmond supposedly had an eviction rate five times the national average. Armed with…
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Density as an Answer
It seems that our leader, Jim Bacon, is on the cutting edge of new thinking about how to address the rising cost of housing. (Of course, this is no surprise to BR readers.) An article in yesterday’s New York Times describes how planners, economists, and environmentalists across the country have begun to advocate more density.…
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As Arlington Housing Prices Soar, Supply Is Unresponsive
The worst fears of Amazon critics are coming true. Housing prices are becoming increasingly unaffordable — even before Amazon sets up shop at its HQ2 facility in Arlington and floods the region with 25,000 employees. The average home price in Arlington County jumped 7% in the past year to $713,000, as investors poured into the…
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The Virtues of Incremental Development
One more angle to think about when appraising Amazon’s HQ2 project in Arlington… A single developer, JBG Smith, will have a disproportionate impact on the evolution of the urban fabric in the National Landing district of Arlington and Alexandria. In theory, a single big developer can mobilize more resources, carry out better planning and execute…
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The Crux of Arlington’s Affordable Housing Crisis: $350,000 Per Unit
Amazon will donate $3 million to support affordable housing in Arlington County, the company has announced. While government officials and charities welcomed the donation, reports the Washington Post, critics contend that the sum is sufficient to build only a handful of units. According to the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance, new housing in the Virginia…
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Want More Affordable Housing? Try Free Markets.
Exclusionary regulation at the local level is the root cause of unaffordable housing, and a rollback of exclusionary regulation is the best long-term solution, argue Salim Furth and Emily Hamilton, research fellows at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “Contemporary American land use law embodies the bad idea that private land ought to be publicly planned.…
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Housing’s Supply-Side Revolution
IndieDwell converts shipping containers into affordable housing. The Idaho-based business has taken an idea championed locally by entrepreneurs Sheila and Sidney Gunst (see “Thinking Outside the Container“) and turned it into a growing business enterprise. The company now sells 640-square-foot dwellings, including the cost of delivery and installation, for $78,000. Add $11,500 to build a…
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Helping the Poor by… Replacing Lower-Income Housing with Mixed-Income Housing?
The premise behind public housing is that “market failure” fails to supply enough decent and affordable housing for poor people. Government must intervene in the housing marketplace not only with subsidies but as a real estate developer to fill the gap. What government succeeded in creating all too often — from Chicago’s infamous Pruitt Igoe…
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Bacon Bits: A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That
Safe hospitals. I’ve long maintained that the best thing you can do for your health is stay out of hospitals — 160,000 deaths occur annually across the country from avoidable medical errors monitored by the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade. Fortunately, Virginia hospitals are safer than most. The Old Dominion has the second highest percentage —…
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Giving Slumlords a Bad Name
I tend to be sympathetic to renters and landlords in their disputes with problem tenants, many of whom can be irresponsible and exasperating. Some renters are deadbeats. But then I run across a shocking case like the one documented by renter Winter Whittaker and published on the Virginia Mercury. Whittaker, a Richmond resident, called her…
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JBG Smith Raises $75 Million for Amazon-Related Affordable Housing
JBG Smith, the dominant developer in the National Landing area where Amazon will build its HQ2 offices, has raised $78 million in an affordable housing initiative. The company hopes to raise between $100 million and $150 million in all. The funds would be used to develop “workforce” housing, targeting households with incomes too high to…
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Fresh Thinking from Richmond’s New Public Housing Chief
The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority has a new chief executive, Damon Duncan, who led a housing authority in the Chicago suburbs before taking on his new role in March. He has a tough job. The public housing stock has been deteriorating — units have outlived their useful life by 10 to 15 years at…
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Bacon Bits: Boomtowns, Amazon, and Rent-a-Tribe
Pockets of prosperity. America’s big metropolitan regions may be sucking up most of the growth and prosperity of the current business cycle, but they’re not sucking up all of it. In crunching data measuring economic prosperity, population growth and rising incomes, GOBankingRates found numerous “cities” (not metros) that qualify as “boomtowns.” One region stood out…