Urban Growth Boundary: Boomers stealing from Millennials

Ignoring the Reality of Growth Constraints | The Antiplanner

The boundary restricts supply, drives up price, drives wealth into the pockets of the Boomers, and costs Millennials huge sums to buy property.

​More after the break.

"The young people who have moved to Portlandia like to eat out a lot, and as a result the Portland has more restaurants per capita than all but five other metropolitan areas in the country. However, the cost of eating out is rising because inexpensive restaurants are getting pushed out by more expensive ones that can afford to pay the rising rents required to stay in Portland.

This is just one more symptom of Portland’s growing affordability problem. In May, median home sale prices in the Portland area exceeded $350,000 for the first time. This is 4.8 times median family incomes, the worst Portland has yet seen."

It's not just home prices, it's rentals as well.

Boomer versus Millennial Wrestling World Smackdown, Portland is out ahead, but Seattle is running a close second!

Millennial Home Ownership: Disappointment Ahead in Some Places? | Newgeography.com

This is listed as a Millennial issue, but the problem has been created by Boomers who want to keep their property values high by retaining destructive urban growth and/or services boundaries, and highly limiting zoning, and construction/development policies. 

"Millennial renters overwhelmingly plan on buying their own homes, though affording them could be far more challenging than they think." 

The Boomers, in inimical Boomer fashion, climbed into the tree fort, and smugly pulled up the rope ladder behind them. 

"Apartmentlist.com matched results from its own survey of prospective renters that visit its site with housing market data from more than 90 metropolitan areas around the country, The most revealing finding:  Millennials intend to purchase their own homes, but that housing affordability is the greatest barrier. According to apartmentlist.com, the problem is the greatest on the West Coast, New York and Miami (See Figure “% of Millennial Renters that Can’t Afford to Buy”, from apartmentlist.com):

In nearly all the metros we looked at, affordability was the #1 reason for delaying homeownership, but millennials on the west coast struggled the most: Portland, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all had more than 80% of renters listing affordability as a concern. Miami and New York, expensive metros with many cost-burdened renters, were #6 and #7 on the list.

Perhaps surprisingly, two metropolitan areas that have been among the greatest beneficiaries of the housing affordability driven net domestic migration from coastal California, Portland and Seattle, scored the worst on affordability as a barrier to purchasing homes (90 percent and 89 percent respectively). These areas were once much less expensive in the past, but are rapidly catching up with California in terms of unaffordability."

Brilliant. Portland is the worst in the nation for Millennial housing affordability. Has Portland reached peak Millennial? Probably not, but it likely will begin to see out migration of the older cohort of millennials who want families, but will never be able to afford a home in Portland on their salaries. For they younger cohort of Millennials, Portland is still THE place to go to retire. ​

"Growth-boundary advocate Joe Cartright claims that “affordability is about growing up, not out.” He is simply wrong. Numerous urban areas in the country have “grown up,” dramatically increasing their population densities, in the last few decades, and most of these are also counted among the nation’s least affordable urban areas. Between 1990 and 2010, San Francisco-Oakland-Concord-Livermore densities increased by 27 percent; San Jose by 37 percent; Portland by 17 percent. Meanwhile, the densities of affordable urban areas such as Atlanta and Dallas-Ft. Worth declined."

More density will not change this, it will exacerbate the problem. Portlandia is completely off its rocker, don't let Portlandia happen to your town.

"Of course, Portland officials are ignoring these facts. They hope to stuff 260,000 more people in the city of Portland over the next 20 years by building more multifamily homes in single-family neighborhoods and more high-rise towers in and near the downtown area. To move all these people around, the city plans to build more streetcar lines–just the ticket if your goal is immobility, as streetcars have the lowest capacity of just about any form of transit and reduce the capacity of the streets they are on as well.

Meanwhile, Portlanders are talking about spending $100 million on a “homeless campus” that would shelter 1,400 people. That’s more than $70,000 per person or $280,000 for a family of four, which is far more than a four-bedroom house typically costs in cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries. High housing prices aren’t the only causes of homelessness, but to the extent that they are, the region would do better to make housing affordable for everyone rather than provide huge subsidies for a few. That’s just one more economic reality that the city’s leaders are ignoring."
Lunacy. Money is free, debt is good, the appearance of prosperity is prosperity, all progressive mental illness driven by zero common sense, and the desire for graft, and corruption, which all of these proposals offer in large measure.

The Boomers in Portlandia go along with this because it drives wealth into their pockets through home price appreciation. As prices rise, however, Millennials, and GenX'ers will find it increasingly difficult to buy property. As they continue to age, they will want families, and property. The window of opportunity for this in Portlandia will be closed soon. It seems highly unlikely that Portlandia will continue to attract Millennials under these conditions. Once they stop coming, Portlandia will begin a long slow decline. 

This is just one more example of Boomers stealing money from the Millennials.