Size doesn’t Matter
A couple of weeks ago, Lauren Do had a post up about housing prices in the Bay Area. It was a follow up on discussions about housing affordability in Alameda and one that will probably go on forever. It started back in September; around the time Lauren provided interesting data on income levels here.
Alameda has an inclusionary zoning ordinance that mandates that 20% of houses built be as affordable for low-income households which makes sure that housing stock is available in our expensive real estate market. The trouble is, housing for middle-income earners is not being built. We’re building for everyone but the middle class (no wonder it’s disappearing).
In order to house people whose household income is between $100K and $150K in the the upcoming developments at Alameda Point, we need to look at apartments and condos as a part of the housing solution.
A quick look through the housing sales listing for homes sold in 2006 (through December 10) shows that houses selling below $500K in Alameda are hard to find. The houses selling under $500K are mostly apartments and condos. I’ve created a quick spreadsheet of all 2006 Alameda House Sales. (sales listings with “apartment” next to them are simply just the listings that list an apartment # on them, many of the sales under $500K that have no apartment determination are likely apartments as well).
The data also shows that just building small homes is not the answer, most of the smaller homes (34 out of 644 listings are less than 1000 sq. ft.) are selling above $500K, some are selling for over $700K!
An open community discussion needs to happen on housing and what we want to build out there. And it needs to happen before the Alameda Point development starts moving forward with a new developer.
While a few people are willing to boldly state that “anyone who can’t afford to live here can move to Kansas,” most Alamedans I hear speaking about the issue want to include all income levels in the mix of housing, how we’re going to accomplish this is still very much up for discussion.
laurendo
December 12th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
…it’s the motion of the ocean. Oh wait, wrong blog.
I used to live in Kansas, trust me, Alameda is a lot nicer.
None of the homes below $300K are really fit for a family of 4 to live in. If you bump that up to $400K and below than only three homes have sufficient bedroom space to house a 4 person family.
There definitely needs to be an open dicussion about housing on Alameda Point. I know it won’t happen before the new developer is selected, but perhaps one of the requirements should be the sponsorship of a series of workshops to talk about our collective vision for Alameda Point. I have a feeling that there will be a lot of overlap and agreement between folks who think they are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum when it comes to who we want to house and how we want to house them.
We need to keep dialoguing about this on blogs, on websites, in person, in whatever format people are most comfortable with, but the conversation needs to continue.
Michael Krueger
December 13th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Thanks for posting the raw data! I played with the spreadsheet a bit, and I found that the median price for attached units (the ones you labeled “apartments”) is $427,000, nearly 40% lower than the $693,000 median price for detached units. If attached and detached units are considered together, the overall median price is $674,000. In other words, the data in Alameda confirm that having some multi-family housing units in the mix provides market-rate home ownership opportunities at a price point that is significantly lower than that for single-family homes.
I also made histograms of the prices of the attached and detached units; these provide a nice way to visualize the effect of the attached units on housing affordability. Since I can’t post documents here, I’m sending them to you in an e-mail attachment.