Home Construction Huh?

Here is another Boston.com article on housing, once again blaming communities and zoning for the lack of housing construction. It is actually quite pathetic how they took some simple, national statistics, and twisted the results.

Let's start with the basic numbers, drawn from the Boston Herald story, new housing sales fell to an annualized figure of 309,000 housing units. This level was lower even than the previous record low in 1981. At the same time, annualized new housing starts (from the Boston.com article) stood at 466,000 units. Thereby housing starts outpaced demand by 157,000 homes, or almost 51%. The Herald article goes on to point out that new home inventory would take 13.3 months to exhaust. Essentially meaning that current supply has far outstripped demand.

The Boston.com article goes on to note the "boom" states of Florida, Arizona and California have been so hard hit by the recession that there are large numbers of subdivision and condo ghost towns. These are clear examples of the reckless speculation in the housing market in recent years.

If you look at the Case-Shiller data I provided here, you can see that the Boston region housing market has not been hit as hard as other parts of the country. In fact, the Herald even notes that the Northeast was the only part of the country to see increases in new home sales.

Now, one could look at all this data and conclude that the northeast in general, and the Boston region in particular, has been preserved by slower housing growth. But, even though noting the foreclosure ghost towns in the once booming (read over built) states, the article on Boston.com once again finds fault with local land use policies.

The Boston Globe and Boston.com writers need to change their mantra. They should read the New Yorker article I wrote about in my previous post, they should read some of the real estate foreclosure stories from San Diego or elsewhere in California. If Massachusetts were in the same dire straits as some of the boom regions, would they be blaming the overbuilt environment and collapse of the housing market on a lack of local leadership on land use?

Rather than looking at lots available for construction or other surrogates for the ability to build housing, the Boston Globe and Boston.com writers continue to focus on the issuance of building permits. A recent review I conducted of other planners across the state illustrate thousands of approved housing units languishing as builders have not proceeded to construction.

Over the past few years the Globe has also been full of stories about housing developers who promised the world to communities to get projects approved with visions of large profits dancing in their heads, and then had to return to the towns to ask that the conditions the developers offered to begin with, be removed.

The relative stability of the Boston region's housing market is illustrative of smart land use decisions by both community officials and the region's builders. And, unlike the Boston.com conclusion, the number of projects with valid local approvals and the lack of builder's languishing in bankruptcy, like in San Diego, will leave the region well positioned for both short and long term economic recovery.