U.S. neighborhoods grow more crowded

USA Today ^ | 07/02/02 | Haya El Nasser

[FreedomFriend]

TRENTON, N.J.

[Gabz]

College students can be just as bad.

That's true - but only because their parents didn't teach them propeer manners - apparently yours did.

I remember the differences in the house keeping habits of some of m friends that lived in fraternity houses when we were in college. It was so obvious which of the guys' mothers had taught them how to do laundry, etc. and who's fathers had taught them how to make minor repairs.

I'm no Martha Stewart as a house keeper but my house is clean, albeit cluttered, but my husband has clean shirts for work everyday and my daughter always has clean clothes.

And after spending 25 years in the construction industry, hubby is quite capable of keeping repairs up.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, it doesn't take much effort and upbringing has much to do with it all.

[FreedomFriend]

bump

[timestax]

ATTEMPT to find a decent, law-abiding, pay the rent on time tenant for your house/unit. it's a needle in a haystack

Ya got that right, man!!

[FreedomFriend]

bump

[FreedomFriend]

bump

[summer]

bttt

[Arleigh]

I guess that makes it official. America has surrendered!! Our high standards have been replaced by the standards of third world immigrants.

Celebrate Americas birthday tomorrow and enjoy it. We don't have many left!!

A disgustingly pessimistic observation. Probably true, but I don't feel up to facing reality right this very moment. Instead, I'll drive to the mega-mall in my SUV happily chanting, "Diversity is our Strength...Diversity is our Strength."

[FreedomFriend]

Are you playing the role of a liberal with that quote?

[FreedomFriend]

perhaps

[bandlength]

i hear ya, however, when i talk of walking away, i mean foreclosing, letting the bldg. go back to the bank or city or whatever. i realize that this is highly distasteful and will kill your credit, but sometimes, especially in downward-spiraling neighborhoods, ya gotta cut bait and run. i too, was an owner occupant in a horrific neighborhood. i moved to a slightly better neighborhood (36 miles away) and became a landlord; not because i wanted to, but out of necessity (unable to sell). i owed pretty much 98% of what i bought it for. i lived there as long as i could without going nuts (3 1/2 years). my kids were getting beat up everyday, stabbed with needles, the pop-pop-pop of semi-automatic gunfire at night during yet another drug raid, prostitution, neighbors telling me that their kids can destroy, defecate and urinate on my private property and if i don't like it then "whitey can move." well i did and they threw rocks at our moving van when we left. i'm a single divorced mother of two kids and was making approx. 25K a year with no child support, so i know all about "wherewithall" rather, the lack of it.

many a totally law-abiding fellow landlord (and i mean people who never even had a speeding ticket) would ask me if i knew anyone who could throw a molatov cocktail or stage a furnace blow up (ever wonder about all those "suspicious" inner city fires in vacant buildings where the landlord just didn't have enough money to keep up with the tenant destruction?)

this was how far people felt they were pushed. it was either arson or foreclosure/bankruptcy, or the extremely lucky ones just rented to a single mother with a firebug kid and nature took it's course. (all the time worrying if the family was ok and if they would be sued it the family wasn't ok).

for those of you who wonder why i would buy in such a neighborhood, it was a "starter" home AND i was dumb enough to buy it during the winter months. NEVER buy a home during the winter months where you can't get a TRUE picture of the neighborhood.

[valkyrieanne]

Excuse me, but zoning laws are what made this problem.

How? According to the article, the examples given are as follows:
Mount Vernon, Wash., pop. 26,232, is rewriting its building code after complaints that 12, sometimes 20 people are living in one house. The code limits occupancy to eight unrelated people. But it does little to prevent large, extended families from cramming into one house or apartment.

Another example:
Santa Ana then argued that too many people under one roof create a fire hazard. State fire officials refused to change the code. It asked legislators to set occupancy limits, but a bill failed.

Further,
Sam Surtees, West Windsor's community development director, says that dozens of homeowners are renovating their basements — usually to create guest apartments. The township can't legally stop them.

The township sure can stop them - by passing a law forbidding the building of guest apartments, mother-in-law quarters, whatever. If occupancy codes are written properly and strictly enforced, this will not happen.

The school situation is a matter of local enforcement too. Districts do NOT have to accept students living with grandparents etc. unless there is a court order granting custody. It *can* be done - the question is, is there the political will to do it?

[Carry_Okie]

Housing shortages like this are not an indication of a transient problem, nor are they often isolated. Such things are a long time in developing. Besides the immigration rate creating a demand pull on an inelastic good, why is the housing stock so tight? If there were more units, then the occupancy rates would not be so high. Zoning (and housing regulations in general) is the prime culprit.

You know, I probably shouldn't have made that comment to you, only because it opens a can of worms for which I don't have time right now. Zoning is a subtle issue with which a number of complex games are played. I wrote a couple of chapters on the political and economic mechanics of zoning and environmental regulations in my book. It includes an inflation-adjusted opportunity-cost-based analysis (net of the cost of funds) of land transactions in the County of Santa Cruz, CA, under a couple of different tax scenarios extending over 30 years. During that time, a select group of developers sponsored zoning laws that literally controlled an inventory of developable rural/suburban parcels to make aquisition for conversion cheap while excluding outside competitors. They also put a squeeze on urban parcels to drive up the value around undevelopable parcels. When the market was ripe (and they had finished screwing the bag-holders) they simply had the planning department rezone previously "substandard" parcels for "in-fill." These are the classic gambits common to sustainable development (we were the first).

It's really dirty. For me to make my case I would have to familiarize you with a whole new vocabulary in order to do a comparative analysis and show how the mechanics repeat elsewhere. Then I would have to familiarize you with what some communities have done to preclude such problems. I do suggest that you consult Randal O'Toole's book: The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths where he goes into more detail on the unintended consequences of sustainable development (smart growth).

[valkyrieanne]

Zoning is a subtle issue with which a number of complex games are played. I wrote a couple of chapters on the political and economic mechanics of zoning and environmental regulations in my book.

I want to thank you for your thoughtful response. I've captured your post/links and will look at some of this info. when I have more time.

[foreverfree]

God Bless America bump

[mdmathis6]

unless you are a Christian who wants to have an occaisional Bible study in his home..as what happened in South Carolina

[foreverfree]

unless you are a Christian who wants to have an occaisional Bible study in his home..as what happened in South Carolina

I'm not hedgetrimmer, but nevertheless I never heard of what happened in SC. Where in SC? Could you give us details? I think something like this happened in CO, too.

foreverfree

[palmer]

On the contrary, I think cheap houses will start being built
in earnest further out. The traffic may be crappy, but people
will work around that.

[the bottle let me down]

What is it with HUD? How come they often seek to place "HUD HOMES" in middle income neighborhoods instead of low income neighborhoods, of which there would be no devaluing of property, therefore prohibiting blight?

What HUD is trying to do is create one poorly maintained house on the every tenth block as opposed to putting everything together. They know that if they do that they'll create a slum. When you concentrate all of the public housing in one area you create Cabrini-Green or one of the other public housing disasters. The idea is that if you spread people out, the problems won't be as concentrated or noticable.

[FreedomFriend]

No, what usually happens is that slums spread to these middle income neighborhoods.

[FreedomFriend]

Yeah, and that's a problem. Before you know it, you're going to have most of your urbanized areas resembling the third world, while the outer crust and a few wealthy inner city enclaves is all that is left. Not right now, but perhaps in thirty years.