"Home Ownership in America Has Collapsed"

An interesting discussion from "On Point" about the collapse of the housing market, and the dilemma facing Millennials - the generation that is larger than the Baby Boomers, now coming to maturity.

Why Homeownership Isn't Catching Up With The Rest Of The Economy

Home ownership rates are at a 20-year low.  Millennials and more aren’t buying. We’ll look at what American’s think now about owning a home.

Realtor Helen Hertz stands in front of one of her listings in Cleveland Heights, Ohio Friday, Oct. 24, 2014. Hertz, a real estate agent for more than three decades, has seen firsthand what has happened to the market in the wake of the recession and foreclosure crisis. (AP)

Do you want to own a home?  A house?  A condo?  After everything the country and the economy have been through, fewer Americans own a home today than at any time since 1995.  Almost twenty years.  The headlines on housing – if you care about owning – are dire.  “Home Ownership in America has Collapsed,” is typical.  Some look at Millennials as the no-shows in the market.  Millennials have their reasons.  So do a lot of others right now.  There’s still that American dream.  All cozy in your own home.  But it’s not everyone’s dream.  This hour On Point:  Home ownership in America.

– Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Susan Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. (@Susan_Wachter)

Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic. (@DKThomp)

From Tom’s Reading List

The Atlantic: Homeownership in America Has Collapsed—Don’t Blame Millennials — ” In the last 20 years, homeownership has fallen less for young people than for any other age group under 64. Today’s historically low homeownership rate isn’t the result of the cheapest generation abandoning the housing market. It’s their older cousins, Generation-X, who are really running for the exit.”

New York Times: More Renters, Less Risk for Wall St. – “Tightening mortgage rules would no doubt make it more difficult to buy and sell homes. It would lead to more renters and fewer homeowners. That might be worth it, though. Germany is doing fine with a homeownership rate of 45 percent, compared with about 65 percent in the United States, which is actually down from a peak of near 70 percent in 2004.”

National Journal: Four Ways to Help Millennials Break into the Tight Housing Market — “When the housing sector slows down or stalls (see: The Great Recession), it drags down the health of the overall economy. The debate now among economists and industry advocates, like Stevens, is whether millennials will eventually enter the housing market as they age, or whether there’s been a permanent shift that has young people no longer interested in buying homes as prolifically as their parents did.”

Changing Demands in Form-Based Codes

Reposted from SRQ

"You talk to millennials or to aging boomers and what they are looking for in places is the ability to get to activities they want to go to in the shortest time possible, whether that is parks, museums or coffee houses," he said. "They want to be close to things, and time has become much more important."

Development

BY JACOB OGLES   |   SRQ DAILY FRESHLY SQUEEZED CONTENT EVERY MORNING   |   WEDNESDAY OCT 1, 2014

Whether helping pull together celebrated redevelopment efforts in Orlando or contributing to a major revitalization of Nashville, Rick Bernhardt has been in the background helping make sure legal aspects of key projects come together. During a visit to Sarasota as a guest of the Downtown Sarasota Alliance, he stressed good planning can make sure developments aren't stalled, largely by getting the entire community on board with the same vision.

"We had situations in Nashville of 30 years of conflict with neighbors and developers and nothing ever got built," Bernhardt, executive director of the Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County Planning Department  told SRQ in advance of a Tuesday night event at The Francis. "But the system was set up to bring a proposal to neighborhoods and have them respond. We never opened up the process to say what was important to neighborhoods and what they actually would want. The system was set up to be contentious."

Bernhardt more recently has won accolades for work turning that pattern around, notably through the adoption of more than 30 form-based codes aimed at establishing a shared vision for growth and bringing it to fruition. The codes were developed through a process that involved the community, and that has led to developers being able to move on projects with less opposition.

Of course, form-based codes are not new to Sarasota, and Bernhardt had some role in bringing them here as well. He was one of the consultants working with Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company more than a decade ago on the Downtown Sarasota Master Plan. It has been between eight and ten years since Bernhardt was last in Sarasota, but at first blush he likes what he sees. "It looks like a lot of the plan has been implemented," he said. "The streets look nice and the scale is good."

Tensions between neighborhoods and developers, though, have not disappeared. The conflict remains central to the city politic, and also has been the greatest source of discord in an update to the Sarasota County 2050 Plan.

Even when a community vision is put forth, Bernhardt said, it needs routine updates. Modern demands for more dense urban cores are a perfect demonstration of why, he said. 

"If you look at the plans in the early 2000s, even up to 2005, things were very different from today," he said. "Nobody actively anticipated the change in millennials—the change in household size, household make-up and demand for an urban community." While people a decade ago still tended not to buy homes until they started families, a shift in mindset has younger buyers getting units now. Combined with the retiree population that lives an active lifestyle for longer, Bernhardt noted, the highest demand in the housing market is not for one-person homes.

Beyond housing, there is also a change in demand for centralized amenities, which means dense, mixed-use development. "You talk to millennials or to aging boomers and what they are looking for in places is the ability to get to activities they want to go to in the shortest time possible, whether that is parks, museums or coffee houses," he said. "They want to be close to things, and time has become much more important."