Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Ind-CID-eous Sprawl

In his e-mail Herb Childress quoted Susan Bickford:

…the dominance of CID housing is a result of deliberate institutional policies. It is not the case that consumers demanded these private, controlled environments and then the market reacted to those demands. Rather, CIDs originated in response to land scarcity after the first swell of postwar suburban construction; common ownership plans were not utopian social experiments but simply a way to put more people on less space. Municipalities in financial difficulties welcomed the construction of private infrastructure, and both federal and local governments joined with real estate associations in creating policies and public relation campaigns to create a market for the "product," since "CIDs departed significantly from what most middle-class families expected from home ownership."

So there’s evidence on the table that this desire for hyperprivatization is manufactured rather than some aspect of "human nature."


I am not sure I can agree with their conclusions.

Bickford goes on to stay, "The second crucial point is that these developments are... undemocratic internally and externally... Homeowners associations are essentially private governmnets wielding the "quasi-constitution" of the CC&Rs, which can and do include restrictions of all kinds:.."

However, Bickford also found that up to 60 percent of all new housing in major metropolitan areas is in developments of this kind. Beyond being the in-CID-eous scourge on our landscape these CIDs are extremely popular. All of the marketing in the world will not cause the majority of new home buyers to choose this type of development over other more traditional styles. And if lots of people weren’t buying in they would definitely stop building them. People must be willing in large numbers to sacrifice some autonomy and be doubly taxed in exchange for the "known quantity" of these CID’s and their promise of stable property values. The CID’s surely are focused on a specific target income group, but just as surely they cannot discriminate based on race, religion, color, creed, etc.

1 comment:

smunger said...

I have to disagree about your interpretation of why CID's/ PUD's and the like are so popular with the buying public.

At the end of the day it all comes down to money. Looking at Columbus (the city I know best) and the surrounding suburbs, many constructed in recent years, there is one major reason that the homes are selling. ECONOMY and AVAILABILITY. These homes tend to be less expensive than those older homes within either the city or surrounding older suburbs.
The idea is that the house is a product, meant to sell, in mass quantity. there is simply no way that the older neighborhoods can put as much stock up at such low prices.

Also as the population increases, there is an increased demand for housing. It is much easier to put in these developments as edge cities than it is to re-work an existing neighborhood to create more housing stock. An economy of scale means that developers are able to sell "more" for less. This is what people find most appealing.