Posted Wed, Apr 25, 12:53 p.m. Inappropriate

Land Lords: Fascinating reading, indeed--not least because so many on the list are relatively unknown.

Posted Thu, Apr 26, 3:37 a.m. Inappropriate

Enormous Possession vs Enormous Dispossession: Federal, state, and local government own huge chunks of America (including approx. 50% of King County). When you combine the discussed private property owners and their huge tracts, and the various environmental organizations who lock-up land to protect it from people, we end up loosely constraining the supply of land in a pretty large country. In urban regions, this constraint however is severe and exacerbated by the "zoning tax" that is placed on property to assure high property tax revenues. For example, this zoning tax is deemed "responsible for 50% or more of the total price of the median Manhattan condominium."

Zoning is used to constrain residential development and to segregate environmental lands. From a purely environmental viewpoint, this is benign, sustainable, and good. But nowadays these boundaries are less about environmental concerns and more about tax revenue. Because of revenue concerns, government is forced to require that the "urban growth boundary" become as much as possible identical to the "residential development boundary." The loser is not the environment or government, but the growing segment of our population that is being disenfranchised and priced out of affordable housing, let alone home ownership.

Recently, I was at a Habitat for Humanity on the Eastside luncheon, where a single-family mother gave a moving description of what it is like to try to live with children in this County without much hope for a home. Before getting a Habitat home, she would rise before 5am so she could make a long commute, work, then make another long commute home. She lived paycheck to paycheck. Her economic plight was largely due to high housing costs, in this case paying rent. When put in this context, artificially high housing prices feel down-right immoral.

At the luncheon they announced that the median cost of a home on the Eastside is about $660K and that no homes had sold for less than $150K in the past year. (NB: These are recalled ballbark numbers that I haven't verified). Certainly the vagaries of the market are at play here, but the manipulation of these prices upward is in large part due to government and environmental groups working to protect the environment AND to raise property tax revenue.

The tragedy is multi-fold on the Eastside. First the "zoning tax" is several hundred thousand dollars on each property. And then, a builder because of zoning incentives is almost obligated to fill up every given lot with an enormous mansion, or with dense condos. No one builds modest ramblers, which really should be and have been the middle way for suburbia and for your average family. It's what most sane families starting out aspire to: a place to call home with a back yard for the kids.

Unfortunately, it seems that every cities from Seattle to Redmond, is counting on a large, dense residential urban base for generation of tax revenue. All this will be connected by light rail and no one will need a car. That's the vision and Manhattan seems to be the model (David Owen's 2004 /www.walkablestreets.com/manhattan.htm" >piece contrasts this green ideal of a dense Manhattan with the green idyll of suburbia:

The dense urban life style does a better job at conserving natural resources ( e.g., the article shows how a 48-story building is equivalent to about 150 acres of sprawled single-story office with parking). However, the suburban neighborhood idyll, does a better job of sustaining families and growing our kids. The point here is that we're dispossessing our young families and the needy. Lets create, implement, and embrace policy that drives the construction of small homes with backyards built with environmental sensitivity at an affordable cost for teachers, police, firefighters, Wal-Mart workers, and single-family mothers.