Early last month I was back in my hometown for a few days and had the chance to look around and see what has changed in the ten years since I visited last. It’s one of those older, substantial small cities that expanded with the industrial revolution and is filled with those lovely Victorian-style homes that have a half-dozen bedrooms for the large families of the era.
Nowadays all the newer homes are on the fringe of the city that has no suburbs of its own, and as the younger generations mature and get married they tend to drift to these more modern neighborhoods to settle in. The grand Victorians in the center of town are now divided into multiple living units and rented out to college students or other younger people who are starting out their working careers. The exterior of the homes looks the same, but the insides are drastically different than they were twenty years ago.
What brought this to mind was an article that I read in the Sunday newspaper about how this twisted new-homes market is further suffering from a change in living habits by the people who would normally be buying those huge woodchips-and-glue McMansions that are sitting vacant in rows across a former pasture. It’s beginning to look like those tracts of unsold homes just might have to be re-packaged before they will be used.
Earlier this year FossilMedic wrote (HERE) about how these exurban neighborhoods will become the next “suburban slums” with the over-sized homes being converted to multi-family uses and the related property uses that follow. With this optimistic spurt of home building that took place a few years ago leaving all these white elephants sitting around, I’m wondering if just maybe we’ll be jumping directly into this final step of the housing evolution. Tomorrow’s Victorians are here today. It would be worth your while to go back and read FossilMedic’s article again.
Not far from where I live sits one of those projects. About one-fourth of the homes are occupied and the remaining houses have been sitting vacant for two years. The builder, out of desparation, has continued to lower the selling prices to where they’re just over half of what those early residents paid for their homes. (I wonder how they feel about that?) There is speculation that in order to save their financial hides, the builders will have to reconfigure these empty houses to accomodate “extended” families with many more members than were first considered when the tract was laid out. They (the builders) might even have to rent them out instead of selling them in order to preserve their investment and get the cash flowing again.
Getting the neighborhood rezoned to allow that will be no problem. The local politicians will be glad to revise the rules if it means restoring the tax collections that they’ve budgeted for but never saw. So you can probably picture what’s going to be happening out there in Happy Land Acres before too long. And these new homes filled with flimsy gusset plates and composition board floor joists…. well, you know how it goes. Keep up with your ladder drills.
And make sure the equipment’s ready for today’s activity. I’ll get a fresh pot of coffee going.
