Yesterday, my husband and I drove up to Frisco to try out a new döner place and go to IKEA. It took 45 minutes to get there, we had to pay $10 in tolls, the döner wasn’t really that great, and I got a drill bit in my tire.
I hate the suburbs.
The burbs are a good fit for some people. I lived in Frisco and went to high school there and it was fine. Not great, not terrible. It’s changed a lot since I left for college. But when we moved back to Dallas after college, there was never a moment where we considered heading outside the city.
I’m not setting up a piece that’s just five hundred words of dragging the suburbs1, but I do want to talk about what it means to live in a city and what they should require from the people who live in them.
The idea for this essay came to me in an email from Nextdoor a few weeks ago2. Someone had written up a big post about the Forward Dallas plan that was running through the city council and the planning and zoning board. The Nextdoor poster was particularly upset about the fact that the plan was going to allow heretofore forbidden multifamily developments in single family-zoned areas without changing the zoning.
He was upset for all the usual reasons people get mad about increasing density: traffic, “the character of the neighborhood”, and home prices. He thought he had legal standing to sue the city under the takings clause if they went ahead with this. I’ve got some tough love for my Nextdoor neighbor here. You live in a city, buddy. There’s going to be traffic. There’s going to be density. If you don’t want those things, you’re living in the wrong place.
Living in a city requires embracing density
Aside from my general philosophical objections to his issues with building multifamily units in single-family areas, I have specific rebuttals too. Those of us who live in neighborhoods that are much closer to the city’s average home price already know what it’s like to live in an area with multifamily properties in it. It’s more of a situation of multigenerational families than illegal duplexes3 but you still have quite a lot of cars parked in the street and heavy traffic flow during rush hour.
The cars all over the place suck! As a runner, I don’t like the visibility issues when I’m in the road and I don’t like how many vehicles are blocking the sidewalk while they’re parked in the driveway. These frustrations are inevitable parts of city life, in my experience. I see these cars parked in the street and across the sidewalk in neighborhoods where you can’t get in the door under a million and the lots are a half acre each. People just park in the street.
We have very annoying traffic in our neighborhood as well. It has nothing to do with density and everything to do with the fact that there’s a school smack dab in the middle of it. That school has kids walking to it from our neighborhood and others nearby, which is a very cool thing that’s much harder to come by in the suburbs. I don’t like the traffic, but it’s nice to see people out and about every day. Kids practice soccer and football on the field on the weekends and before they locked up the track4, people from the neighborhood would be out on it walking every single night. It’s a net positive, and it’s a good school too. It’s an asset.
The character of the neighborhood argument is hard for me to get worked up to respond to, because when you walk that one out, it pretty much comes down to “people who cannot afford to or do not want to buy an entire house are not of the character of our neighborhood”. There’s nothing to really argue with there. It’s just a crazy thing to say. If I were being charitable, I’d say that the “character of the neighborhood” argument is just another way of saying that they’re afraid that any change to the area they bought a home in is going to reduce the value of their home.
I get the fear of going underwater on the biggest asset you have. It’s certainly not something anyone wants to happen. But the idea that increased density will tank housing values either through a “character change” or an increase in supply feels to me like it’s rooted in a misunderstanding of the whole purpose of living in a city—and what home values actually are.
Even for those of us who are within city limits but not downtown, the pull is that you’ve got a house and a yard but aren’t living in a cookie-cutter suburban hellscape. There aren’t any master-planned developments down here. In theory, you can walk to restaurants and other local businesses because the neighborhoods are all dotted with retail properties. These are all desirable qualities of cities that make them fundamentally different than suburbs, and if you don’t like those things, it might be time to leave the city.
Home values vs. Home prices
When we talk about home values, we’re almost always actually talking about home prices. I promise you that the fundamental value of my home has not increased nearly as much as the Zestimate says I could sell it for right now. It’s basically the same house as it was when we bought it, but it’s nearly ten years older and more worn now. We’ve done a little upgrading and we put down sod in the backyard, but the home isn’t really much better than it was when we bought it. The neighborhood has gotten a little nicer, and the schools our house feeds into are doing well, which could explain a real increase in the value of our home.
The price for this house might have gone up for other reasons. The main one is scarcity, especially at the price range that our house falls into. We’re squarely in the starter home price bracket, and those are the rarest unicorns of all these days. As demand for these kinds of homes has increased, so has the cost of them. But without real changes in the offerings of the homes themselves, the prices are subject to the whims of the market and when you try to get peak market prices when the market has moved on, you won’t have any fundamental value increases to point out when someone’s looking for a justification for the price.
This probably feels very pedantic5, but I think the distinction is important, especially if you’re taking a long-term view of the world as I prefer to. If scarcity and demand are the only things making stonks go up, then the “value” of your asset is volatile and subject to events far beyond your control6. However, if there are things you’ve done to your property that are real improvements, then you can count on at least some of that value coming back to you when you sell the house later on.
How do you build true value, then?
The obvious ways—like an addition or more trees or a pool or a kitchen and bath reno—are often costly. And you can’t exactly up and move your house to a more desirable area, so you have to make do with the neighborhood you have.
But there is one way to make the neighborhood you’re in better: increase the density.
I’m not saying you’ve got to turn it into Kowloon Walled City, but more people means more customers, and more customers attract more businesses. Walkable neighborhoods near retail and dining are attractive to people who want to live in cities, which increases the demand not for housing in general, but for housing in your specific area, which adds real value to your property.
But won’t the addition of the multifamily units increase the supply and balance out the value added by the attractiveness of the neighborhood?
I don’t think so, no. Someone who’s looking for a townhome or a duplex or a quadplex probably isn’t going to be interested in a 3,200 sqft. single family home anyway. It’s either out of their budget or doesn’t meet their requirements for a house. But their presence in the neighborhood will make it a better, more lively, more interesting place to live and will bring people who are in the market for a traditional SFH to your door when you finally list it.
Final thoughts
I don’t have specific citations for any of this. It’s based off of my experience in a family that all works in various facets of real estate and my idle readings of YIMBY authors. It’s also based on my own experience living in Dallas for the past ten years, both in an apartment in a highly walkable neighborhood and in a house in a much less dense, less walkable area.
I love my single family home. I like having a private yard for the dog. I don’t want to live in a duplex or any other plex. But I want other people to have the option to. It’s no skin off my nose, and I think it would help the shopping center right outside my neighborhood bring in more tenants, which would make this area more desirable to live in. And since I do view my home as something more than just an investment, it’d be really nice to have more local stores over there in addition to the hardware store and pet supply store and my shoe repair guy and the French bakery. I love having those places right there and I want as much of that as I can get. Density will bring us to that promised land.
Although honestly I could if you wanted me to.
I’m subscribed to their safety alerts but 99% of the emails I get from them are “someone suspicious was walking down my street at 3:30 in the afternoon” and “I had my car stolen last night. I had the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition and I left all of my most valuable personal items in it but this is somehow someone else’s fault.”
I typoed this to “suplexes” initially and almost kept it because it made me laugh.
I absolutely am mad about this. They said it was about safety, but I don’t think that’s the case. They could have made it impossible to access the school from the track rather than making it impossible to access the track from outside the school.
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And you’re paying property tax increases every single year based on those wispy “value” increases, so it’s not a situation where it’s totally harmless as long as you can sell the house at peak value either. In Texas, our property taxes are higher than most states’ because we don’t have a state income tax, so the market value increases the past few years have been painful for those of us planning to buy and hold.