Apartments are a great way to ease the burden of population growth, if you would call it a burden. 

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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The Bay Area is a great place to live, and people keep moving here regardless of astronomical housing prices.

Somehow a prohibitively expensive cost of living doesn’t ward off population growth.

In fact, the Bay Area is expected to swell 30 percent by 2040 to 9.3 million people — meaning we will need an estimated 660,000 new housing units. Policy and market demands influence developers to build, yet residents often oppose planning for population growth.

I wrote on a story for our current print edition on how policy and market demands influence developers. That piece accompanies a larger story about residents who oppose planning for population growth.

The Bay Area’s perception of development is full of ironies.

No one wants sprawl because we want to preserve natural environments, but people also don’t want density or tall buildings that could possibly, at some angles, block views of nature.

People love it when companies go on hiring sprees and industries flourish, but they don’t like it when a new apartment building to house those workers comes along.

“Growth really needs to be seen as an opportunity,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, during a recent Commonwealth Club panel I attended on how development trends need to address climate change. “Regions of the United States that are growing have the opportunity to take all that growth and rebuild both our cities and our suburbs so that they become more walkable, so that they can be organized into nodes for transit”

I know many dream of owning a single family home with all the fixings, but in reality, that’s just not sustainable and this is the Bay Area, right, aren’t we all about sustainability?

Now, here’s my take on why we should consider apartments a viable solution even though time and time again, residents do what they can to block those developments from moving forward.

1. Young and old people don’t like mowing lawns or cleaning large homes.

2. People in the Bay Area like using public transit — when it’s nearby. So, put apartments near transit and more people get to live by it.

3. Apartments are a way to fit lots of people in less space using up fewer resources such as land and energy.

4. Roof decks on apartments are great for catching views of the region and nature. If you are worried about an apartment building blocking your view, hike up Mt. Diablo and take some photos with your smartphone that you can refer to later.

5. Apartment developments can energize underutilized areas, such as vacant lots that you drive by and ignore all the time, places that won’t be turned into tract homes anyway.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/05/5-reasons-apartments-can-save-the-bay.html?page=all

Apartments are a great way to ease the burden of population growth, if you would call it a burden. 

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

Email
 | Twitter
 | Google+
 | LinkedIn

The Bay Area is a great place to live, and people keep moving here regardless of astronomical housing prices.

Somehow a prohibitively expensive cost of living doesn’t ward off population growth.

In fact, the Bay Area is expected to swell 30 percent by 2040 to 9.3 million people — meaning we will need an estimated 660,000 new housing units. Policy and market demands influence developers to build, yet residents often oppose planning for population growth.

I wrote on a story for our current print edition on how policy and market demands influence developers. That piece accompanies a larger story about residents who oppose planning for population growth.

The Bay Area’s perception of development is full of ironies.

No one wants sprawl because we want to preserve natural environments, but people also don’t want density or tall buildings that could possibly, at some angles, block views of nature.

People love it when companies go on hiring sprees and industries flourish, but they don’t like it when a new apartment building to house those workers comes along.

“Growth really needs to be seen as an opportunity,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, during a recent Commonwealth Club panel I attended on how development trends need to address climate change. “Regions of the United States that are growing have the opportunity to take all that growth and rebuild both our cities and our suburbs so that they become more walkable, so that they can be organized into nodes for transit”

I know many dream of owning a single family home with all the fixings, but in reality, that’s just not sustainable and this is the Bay Area, right, aren’t we all about sustainability?

Now, here’s my take on why we should consider apartments a viable solution even though time and time again, residents do what they can to block those developments from moving forward.

1. Young and old people don’t like mowing lawns or cleaning large homes.

2. People in the Bay Area like using public transit — when it’s nearby. So, put apartments near transit and more people get to live by it.

3. Apartments are a way to fit lots of people in less space using up fewer resources such as land and energy.

4. Roof decks on apartments are great for catching views of the region and nature. If you are worried about an apartment building blocking your view, hike up Mt. Diablo and take some photos with your smartphone that you can refer to later.

5. Apartment developments can energize underutilized areas, such as vacant lots that you drive by and ignore all the time, places that won’t be turned into tract homes anyway.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/05/5-reasons-apartments-can-save-the-bay.html?page=all

“Despite multi-billion dollar buying sprees by well-funded Wall Street hedge funds, real estate investors bought fewer properties in 2012 than they did in 2011, which was a record year for investors. Investment-home sales declined 2.1 percent to 1.21 million from 1.23 million in 2011, but those sales had been well under a million during the market downturn,” according to a new survey from the National Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, previously surging single family rents are flattening. Nearly 4 million more single-family homes have been added to the rental market since 2005, according to Trulia.com. Supply has finally caught up with demand, with single family rents up just 0.1 percent in March from a year ago. That has housing bears roaring again.

(Read More: Deep Freeze: Home Sales Barely Budge in Spring)

“In Phoenix—like Las Vegas, Florida, the Inland Empire, Central Valley et al—we now have a rental supply glut,” said Mark Hanson, a California-based housing and mortgage analyst.

“Wherever the institutional money has gone in and ravaged is high risk for housing investment or building. These regions have become highly volatile speculative regions in which prices can rise 20 percent one year and fall 15 percent the next. The insti’s have turned these markets into something I have never seen before…more like high-beta, speculative, volatile tech stock markets than housing markets.”

Prices are soaring in these markets because all-cash investors are finding very little left to buy. Regular buyers can’t compete with investors, so they are heading to the home builders. The builders were caught off guard, because they did not foresee this dynamic. Now they are rushing back to meet demand, while having no idea how long that demand will last. Why? Because when home prices get high enough, investors could cash out, pushing inventories higher and prices lower.

The birth of the new asset class, the REO (bank owned foreclosures) to Rent model, put a floor on home prices and reduced distress dramatically in the market. It also, however, added a new volatility to housing for years to come.

If investors hold and rent the homes, recovery will continue apace, but if sentiment shifts, and investors see bigger returns in sales than rents, the game could turn quickly.

RealtyCheck producer Stephanie Dhue contributed to this report.

—By CNBC’s Diana Olick; Follow her on Twitter @Diana_Olick or on Facebook at facebook.com/DianaOlickCNBC

Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.com

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100627586