ENDANGERED SPECIES
Emblem of the American dream faces an uncertain future
“A man is not a whole and complete man,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1856, “unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” A nation of such homeowners, Franklin Roosevelt said in World War II, was “unconquerable.” In the Cold War, the builder William Levitt said no householder could be a communist — “he has too much to do.” ❚ The single-family house and yard, on a street of other houses and yards, helped make America something new in the world: a nation of suburban homeowners. ❚ Cape or ranch, colonial or contemporary, the house — more even than the car, the skyscraper or the Hollywood movie — is the American idol.
But now, demographic and meteorological changes are calling the future of the single-family home into question.
Its critics say that the house is too sprawling in a time of climate change, too expensive in a time of economic inequality and just too boring for many city-dwelling Millennials, that more of us should live closer together in neighborhoods near mass transit with less need to drive and more chance to interact.
Its defenders say the single-fam-
ily house is what most people want, if not what professional planners, social reformers and academics — the elites! — want for them. And they say construction of new houses on empty land at the edge of the metropolis offers working and middle-class people the best shot at the American dream.
Construction of single-family homes, eclipsed by multifamily starts after the housing market
crash a decade ago, regained primacy two years ago. Home builders’ confidence hasn’t been as consistently high since 2005. Home ownership, which had declined for years, has stabilized around 64%.
But the image of the house is clouded by Houston’s experience with Harvey; by the need in California and elsewhere to both cut greenhouse gas emissions and build more housing; and by the Millennial generation’s looming decision about where to settle.
❚ In Houston, famed for its rapid construction of relatively affordable, market-rate single-family houses, Hurricane Harvey has raised questions about the wisdom of paving so much of the floodplain and drainage areas.
❚ In California, where prices of singlefamily houses are drifting beyond the reach of the middle class, a proposed law would promote multifamily housing and discourage sprawl, effectively declaring YIMBY — yes in my backyard.
❚ Across the nation, the Millennial generation, the largest in history, faces two questions: Do you want a singlefamily house? And can you afford one?
House, sweet house
If Whitman was the poet of the singlefamily house, its polemicist is Joel Kotkin, a former East Coast newspaperman who now lives and teaches college in suburban Southern California. Three years ago he founded a Houston-based think tank, the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, to extol the low-regulation, low-tax school of real estate development.
He says the future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: T-e-x-a-s. Last year, Houston and Dallas were No. 1 and 2 nationally in single-family building permits with about 35,000 each; the next closest metro was Atlanta at 25,000.
Kotkin says that although people love its space, privacy and convenience, the house is under attack as “an environmental hazard” by left-wingers who’d take us back, he says sarcastically, to “the good old days when we were herded together in tenements.” He calls renters who are unable to afford a house “the new serf class.”
Kotkin and his COU colleagues disdain many of the building and land use rules that, according to the National Association of Home Builders, add $80,000 to the average house price.
He likes sprawl, which he says signifies a healthy housing market. Construction of houses on empty, relatively cheap land at the edge of a metro area keeps down prices throughout the rest of the metro market.
Only sprawl, he says, can deliver the American dream.
Harvey and the house
Houston is the nation’s largest city with no municipal zoning. The county in which it sits has logged the nation’s highest population growth in eight of the past nine years. The metro motto could be “When in doubt, build.”
As a result, much of greater Houston — an area three times the size of greater London with half the population — has been paved over, compromising the region’s capacity to absorb storm rain.
Houstonians, Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg wrote after Harvey, “have come to tolerate and even expect … policies that favor developer profits over public safety.” An installment in a Chronicle series on the flooding said Houston’s laissez-faire development formula “suddenly had a death toll in the dozens and a price tag in the billons.” Harvey, it concluded, “was Houston’s reckoning.”
“This is an inflection point for Houston,” says Bill Fulton, director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. “In the future, home construction will still be less expensive here than on the coasts. But it will be more expensive than it used to be.”
My old California home
Once, the single-family house was as much a symbol of California as the golden bear. But its precarious status these days is illustrated by state Senate Bill 827, sponsored by a senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener.
Wiener’s bill is an aggressive attempt to address two problems: high housing prices and vehicular air pollution. The measure would override local zoning to allow developers to erect taller and larger housing structures near mass transit stations and stops. Buildings four to eight stories high could be constructed in neighborhoods zoned single-family residential, and such houses could be torn down and replaced with several smaller structures or one larger one.
The bill is notable for its opposition — a coalition of neighborhood preservationists, civil rights groups and environmentalists who say it’s too heavy-handed.
The Millennial moment
A few years ago, many planners and developers said Millennials were different. They preferred dense, walkable, ur- ban neighborhoods to the suburbs where they grew up and accepted less living space as part of the bargain.
But even then, surveys showed that while Millennials might be happy apartment dwellers at the moment, in the future they saw themselves in a suburban house — especially if they had kids.
And now, with median age of the Millennial generation around 28 — two years from the traditionally median age of first time home buyers — the problem is supply and price.
This year work will start on about
900,000 houses. But the projected demand for such homes is 1.2 million to
1.3 million, according to the homebuilders association.
And fewer of those built are starter models. From 2002 to 2009, 44% of new single family homes were $200,000 or less. Last year it was 13%.
In a survey by Mayflower movers, two in five 18-to-35-year-olds said they’d moved to a city with no intention to settle there, but to move after a period of time, often to find more affordable housing. The term for such vagabonds: “vacation movers.”
Last of the builders
By the start of the 20th century, the single-family house had replaced the row house as the home to which most Americans aspired. Builders like Bill Pulte made that hope a reality.
When World War II ended, little housing of any type had been built since the early 1930s. Veterans were sleeping in Quonset huts and converted trolleys, on relatives’ couches and fire escapes. By 1947, 6 million families were living doubled up.
Pulte started building in 1950, the summer after he graduated from high school, with a bungalow on the outskirts of Detroit.
Inspired by Levitt, who was building thousands of houses at Levittown on Long Island, and by Henry Ford, the master of assembly line production, Pulte built more and larger houses. He developed his first subdivision in 1959. By 1995, Pulte was the nation’s largest homebuilder.
When Pulte died last month at 85, he was among the last living members of the generation of builders who created the single-family suburb. He’d also lived long enough to see their creation called into question.