McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

[Guest]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

Quite Correct concerning driving being the real hazard statistically. But they don't really keep stats on hassles and scary run-ins with creeps. But I said all that having lived downtown in a modest sized city for a year. To each his own, but I think the era of mass commuting to centralized workplaces for no particular reason will decline in the coming years as there isn't much reason to do it for information based jobs. Here in Atlanta 90% of the workforce of a financial company may live in the northern burbs but they all have to commute 1.5 hours each way in heavy traffic to an office near the perimeter, just out of tradition and habit. They drive by tons of office space near their homes to get there. Past a point it's easier to move the jobs to the workers than vice versa, especially if gas returns to $4/gal.

[c1ue]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

Tokyo has 25 million people pass through each day in its major stations.

Tokyo also has far higher population density than any city in the US.

Fitting into the city isn't the problem.

As for telecommuting - I've said it before and say it again.

Once you remove the need for a physical person at a job, why then does the job have to even be in your town? Or even in the US at all?

[bpr]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

wrong spot.

[BadJuju]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

When I eventually build my villa on the beach, it will be designed so that another family can live in it!

[dbarberic]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

I've been watching some episodes of the show I mentioned when I started this thread. It is somewhat interesting. The show profiles someone who got in over their head with a large mortgage. They actually tell you what their mortgage is with monthly payments. Then the show's host provides to potential conversion options depending upon how much money the home owner wants to invest. The owner picks and then you watch the renovation. At the end they show the finished product and typically an update of how quickly the unit rented and for how much per month.

I've seen owners reduce their monthly mortgage typically 40-50%.

I could clearly see this becoming a trend in the future. Especially with baby boomers with retirements that have been blown up due to investment losses. I think we will see some of their children create a in-law suite which will be cheaper for their retired parents to rent than moving to a retirement community and having to pay for on-site care once they get to old and frail.

[cjppjc]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

I think so. I have relatives, a family of 4, who can't pay their $1500 mortgage on their 3br/2ba house. The alternatives are a nice 3br apartment for $1200 (still can't afford it), a crappy 3br apartment for $900, or a 2br for $700 (with their boy and girl sharing a room). None of these are as appealing as living for free or cheap in a relative's finished basement in a nice subdivision.

Remember, apartments generally require a deposit and good credit report, both of which are unlikely to come from people who just lost their home to foreclosure.

Jimmy

How true. Get ready for the posts about dogs and cats being let loose, because landloards wont rent to people with pets.

[flintlock]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

I could clearly see this becoming a trend in the future. Especially with baby boomers with retirements that have been blown up due to investment losses. I think we will see some of their children create a in-law suite which will be cheaper for their retired parents to rent than moving to a retirement community and having to pay for on-site care once they get to old and frail.

As a contractor who works on a lot of homes in the Atlanta area, I can say for a fact that a lot of this is going on already. Quite a few in-law suites in basements.
Friday I was on a job where the mother had Alzheimers and they were of modest means, so they built a room with a handicap bath in the basement. Unfortunately she really belonged in an assisted living home and she fell and shattered her shoulder. Now she has round the clock nurses showing up at the house. I really worry about what our society is going to do with all these elderly in hard times. So few have prepared for a retirement even in the best of times.

[cjppjc]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

When I lived at the beach there were a large percentage of beach homes that had been converted into multiple units as home prices rose from cheap to ridiculous. These were usually not high end homes, but they were still $1M places due to the rise up in beachfront land values. In one case I discovered a smallish beach home that had been coverted into FOUR units. This trend did NOT do wonders for the locale and that part of the island where it was allowed is now kind of seedy, with rents reflecting that.

I'm thinking that zoning laws and motivated neighbors pushing to keep them in place will prevent this from going on in suburban areas where the most empty McMansions exist. It's considered quaint in town to have a big house with 3-4 tenants living in various sections, but it's considered destructive to property values to have that occur in a neighborhood of upscale homes. It might happen in an area where the neighborhood is otherwise abandoned, but probalby not in any established neighborhoods with just a few unsellable and vacant homes in it.

Yes. So far you are the only one to point out zoning laws. VERY few affluent towns will allow a newer single family home to be converted into a duplex. Now if you've heard the expression illegal two family. In older neighborhoods where there are a lot of legal two and theee family homes you can get away with this. In a newer subdivision it will be impossible. Neighbors will rat them out.

[cjppjc]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

Yuppies love city life....until the first time they get their front teeth knocked out for the $76 in their wallet. (unlike in woody allen movies, they don't ask you for it first) Or when they have a baby and it gets woken up and cries all night from the barflies pouring out of the nearby taverns screaming at the top of their voices. Or they have to go to the grocery store 4x/week because they have to park 200 yds away and then drag them up a few flights of stairs, so you're limited to what you can carry or put in a collapsable cart. Then there's just the mundane crime. My city loving cousin's been broken into 3 times in the last year or so. Meanwhile I don't even have to close my garage door or lock my vehicles if left in the driveway.

There's more to life than dollars and cents.

Not true. They do ask you first. about 10 years ago my brother was asked with a knife at his stomach. They took a beautiful ring our father had given him, plus his money. The loss of that ring is heart breaking. I too never locked my front door or car in my driveway. Crime in the cities go up exponentially in relation to distance of subways.

[cjppjc]

Re: Kunstler's sources wanted this in the 70s and 80s

We have been consistently over-optimistic in our rate of change forecasts.

This raises three questions:

1) Does this mean we get to a "bottom" faster?
2) Does it mean the bottom is deeper than we imagined?
3) Does it mean a recovery may be as swift?

Hard to say.

1) No
2) Yes
3) I doubt it

I spent most of the morning reading deflationistas, inflationistas, and hyperinflationistas. Great stuff for sure. Right now it sure has the look and feel of a deflation depression. I agree that inflation will feel like victory. It just seems so hard to get up after the knockdown.

[pwcmba]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home...Suburbia-R-I-P

"quartets"

[flintlock]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home...Suburbia-R-I-P

"quartets"

I don't see that happening everywhere. Some areas perhaps, but I think its more what the "new urbanists" want to happen than will. Its fits with their view of people crammed into cities, strolling to work, living green, in a multi-cultural Utopia. The reality of American urban areas is anything but that.

The article also mentions a myth that I want to dispel. The idea that old homes were built so well as compared to modern ones. That's pure BS. I work on homes daily. Old ones, new ones. Older homes suck. There were almost no building codes back then and those in effect were horribly enforced. Old homes have old wiring, old plumbing, little or no insulation, single pane windows, cement block foundations instead of stronger poured concrete walls. The knowledge of home building has come a long way since then and its rare I come across an older home built anywhere near what the minimum standard would be on a starter home today. Sure there's a lot of plastic trim and other cheap stuff on new homes, but that's all minor stuff. The basic core of a new home today is a lot better than all but the finest of homes built in the 50s and 60s. The workers back then probably cared a little more than now, but they simply didn't have the technology we have now and there's no comparison.

[metalman]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home...Suburbia-R-I-P

"quartets"

The downturn has accomplished what a generation of designers and planners could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl. In the wake of the foreclosure crisis many new subdivisions are left half built and more established suburbs face abandonment. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes. In Cleveland alone, one of every 13 houses is now vacant, according to an article published Sunday in The New York Times magazine.
Suburbia R.I.P.
by Michael Cannell
Thursday, March 12, 2009

vs

Step D: Three years into the decline, marginal home buyers will learn what owning a home really costs, versus renting when housing prices are declining and jobs are more scarce. Rent is a fixed cost, whereas home ownership presents many variable costs, including increased interest payments on ARMs, and rising tax, insurance, and energy costs. Also, upkeep for the average home typically costs five to ten percent of the price of the home, annually. As prices fall, homeowners will have less access to home equity loans. Many will not be able to afford repair and maintenance expenses. Homes in some neighborhoods—and in some cases, entire neighborhoods—will begin to look neglected, further depressing prices.
Housing Bubble Correction
Fifteen Years to Revert to the Mean
January 20, 2005

i remember reading that in early 2005 when the housing bubble entered its final surge. sent it to friends. they said i was crazy, and itulip didn't know anything about the housing market.

[flintlock]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

I see plenty of unfinished homes and empty shopping centers in urban areas as well. I agree the suburbs have been hit harder though. But its not because they are suburbs, its because that is where most of the new construction was going on. That's where the raw land is.

[petertribo]

Re: McMansions into Multi-Family Housing

Chinese drywall gives new meaning to TOXIC ASSETS:

(CNN) -- Officials are looking into claims that Chinese-made drywall installed in some Florida homes is emitting smelly, corrosive gases and ruining household systems such as air conditioners, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says. Gas emitted from defective drywall corrodes copper wiring, turning it black, some Florida homeowners say.

The Florida Health Department, which is investigating whether the drywall poses any health risks, said it has received more than 140 homeowner complaints. And class-action lawsuits allege defective drywall has caused problems in at least three states -- Florida, Louisiana and Alabama -- while some attorneys involved claim such drywall may have been used in tens of thousands of U.S. homes. [my bold]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/18/chi...all/index.html

A lot of these new Bubble houses were built with shoddy materials. Plus, a lot of corners were cut, inspections bypassed. Turbo Caveat emptor on these babies.