“By the time we renovated them, it would have been more expensive to do that than building a brand new energy-efficient home. That’s how we made the decision,” Chinburg said…
The company comes up with homes prices, he said, by “basically adding up what it costs to buy the property and build the homes,” and then adding “a fair margin.”
“Unfortunately that’s the market now … we’re not gouging people,” Chinburg said.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the different costs. Older homes may not be a great state of repair, they may need to be brought up to code, and they may not have the current features property owners expect. All of this requires money.
This reminds me of what can happen with big box stores. Vacant ones may not be very attractive given maintenance costs and the need to reconfigure the space for another user. Why not just build another one?
And while teardowns tend to occur in places where land is desirable, I wonder if this points to a tough future for many older homes and the aging American housing stock: will the costs of maintaining or updating the home be perceived as worth it?
West Dundee and Bloomingdale officials have similar visions for the mall properties in their towns.
West Dundee sees a mixed-use development with residential, office, retail and entertainment. Bloomingdale’s consultants have drawn up conceptual plans showing residential, commercial and recreational development in place of the mall’s former retail buildings and parking lots.
Typically, villages stay out of the real estate business and leave redevelopment of retail centers to developers. But for West Dundee and Bloomingdale, taking ownership of their malls and clearing some obstacles, such as multiple property owners or restrictive covenants, were deemed essential for future redevelopment.
“Almost uniformly, every developer with whom we spoke stated that the site has too many complications — too many owners, too many covenants, too many uncertainties,” Nelson said last year. “The village’s aim is to bring simplicity to the process so reliable developers with established track records will be interested in partnering to reformat the area. Without municipal intervention, that simply won’t happen.”
I wonder if this is an instance where a large property owner – the owners of these malls – can afford to sit on these properties for a while to see if there will be a bigger financial return later. I remember reading in the past about parking lots in downtown areas; they are not flashing and they are not the preferred land use but the company who owns that lot can wait until there is significant demand for the property and then make a lot of money on selling the parking lot. Compared to these suburbs, the property owners may be less interested in moving quickly on a redevelopment plan. (This could also apply to recent conversations about suburban office parks and downtown office buildings: even vacant buildings might not need to be sold or redeveloped if an owner can afford to hang on to them.)
There are hundreds of zombie malls throughout the U.S. like the Berkshire Mall, more dead than alive. The older, low-end ones have lost at least half and, in some cases, more than 70% of their value since the industry’s peak in late 2016, according to real-estate research firm Green Street…
That’s when Namdar Realty and Mason like to swoop in. The New York-based real-estate partners are among the most prolific purchasers of U.S. malls. They make money by buying malls cheap and keeping them going, even as town officials beg them to pull the plug.
Bare said the community would be better served if the Berkshire Mall was turned into something more valuable. Ideally, a mixed-use property with housing and medical offices or educational space, and maybe some retail and restaurants…
Malls typically sit on large parcels of prime real estate—which often include nearby buildings such as restaurants as well as large parking lots—that can be subdivided and sold in parts, sometimes at a value exceeding the purchase price of the mall. The partners keep the malls open, but cut costs by appealing their property-tax bills and reducing expenses such as staffing and maintenance.
All the while, they continue to collect rent from the mall’s remaining retailers. When national retailers move out, Namdar Realty and Mason try to replace them with nontraditional tenants such as call centers, local small businesses, doctors’ offices and bounce-house venues.
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Here are some of the reasons communities do not like malls surviving in this state:
-They are not generating the kinds of tax revenues they did as a thriving mall.
-The land could be generating more revenue if used in different ways. Communities want to replace the tax revenues of the malls with other revenues. (And this is a reason housing might not be too appealing to some leaders.)
-A mall in bad repair and/or is partly to mostly empty is an eyesore. Gleaming and busy malls are a source of pride; struggling or dying malls are the opposite.
-Outside mall owners may not always be perceived as having the best interests of the community in mind. Imagine how locals might interpret their actions: someone is trying to profit off our struggles. They are impeding our progress just to make money for outsiders.
-Even if malls can be demolished or repurposed, it can be a hard path to putting new and worthwhile in its place. These outsiders are slowing the process or making it impossible to move on.
Even zombie malls will meet their fate eventually, either as unprofitable ventures that are sold and redone or as places that continue to generate profits. And if they can keep making money, are they really zombies?
“For lack of a better description, [developers] really understood and pitched California City as an alternative and potentially competing city with Los Angeles,” Shannon Starkey told SFGATE. Starkey is an associate professor of architecture at University of San Diego and has spent years researching the city.
Piecemeal development was responsible for Los Angeles’ traffic problems, California City’s developers thought. They believed that LA, which appeared to be pressing against its population ceiling, was unprepared for California’s postwar population boom. New communities would need to pick up the slack. California City was designed to fit the bill: a sprawling, self-sufficient city in the desert. In the original plan, Starkey said, the city was projected to hold 400,000 people…
The town was incorporated in 1965 with a population that hovered around 600. According to Gorden, who moved to California City early in the decade, nearly everybody gathered in the newly built elementary school, which hadn’t yet opened, for a big dance. Mendelsohn and California’s lieutenant governor took turns sharing remarks. The mood in the 1960s, Gorden said, was one of “absolute expectations.”…
Grievances over false advertising culminated in a civil penalty issued against Great Western by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC found Great Western responsible for deceptive sales practices, requiring the company to refund $4 million to over 14,000 of its customers. (Great Western Cities also had developments in Colorado and New Mexico.) At the time, it was the largest refund ever issued by the commission.
Shortly afterward, the Hunt brothers, who were heirs of an oil tycoon, acquired the company through a hostile takeover. According to Efford-Floyd, the Hunts only bought the company to drain its accounts, which they did as fast and as hard as they could…
Perhaps part of the reason that the city’s population never exploded is that it never developed an economic base of its own. “For many years, this was considered a bedroom community,” Jim Creighton, who serves on California City’s City Council, told SFGATE.
This would not quite be a ghost town as people do live there. However, it is an example of another common feature of the American landscape: a developer once had big plans but they did not pan out. Here, the eventual development did not match the grand vision. Elsewhere, other development might have eventually landed on top of what had once been planned. Either way, the community did not reach the lofty goals once set.
Should there be a name for such places? We would have to account for the scale of the plans. The ambitions here of a big city with hundreds of thousands of residents is different than a big subdivision that never quite got off the ground. We retell the stories of some of the planned communities that did happen, such as Levittown, New York or Columbia, Maryland or River Forest, Illinois. How many other places did not make it in the same way?
Dominating the New York skyline brought prestige and publicity, but tall towers also resolved a more prosaic problem: As land prices climbed, developers had to build upward to turn a profit, pushing their projects as high as engineering, natural light and, eventually, zoning would allow. “Skyscrapers were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the heated real estate market,” writes Neal Bascomb in his 2003 book Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. By the 1920s, with Europe in ashes after World War I, these buildings became brash totems of a new world order. Manhattan in particular had become the “harbor of the world, messenger of the new land … of the gold diggers and of world conquest,” wrote the German architect Erich Mendelsohn in his seminal 1926 book Amerika, published the year after New York overtook London as the world’s most populous city.
In a dense space like Manhattan, demand for land pushed prices up. To make more money from the same plot of land, skyscrapers offered more space. The addition of thousands of square feet of office space, even if it could be hard to fill at times, provided profit.
I would be interested to see analysis shows the profits of a skyscraper over a lifetime compared to other options builders, developers, and companies could have pursued. Instead of building up in major cities, here are other options they could have pursued: building underground; building dense and wide buildings (imagine ones that cover several city blocks at a height of ten stories or so); constructing large buildings in other parts of the city and suburbs; and pursuing multiple business districts rather than centralized locations where everyone wants to gather.
Even if there was profit at stake, there is also the matter of the prestige of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are important symbols in a city skyline. Were skyscrapers both profitable and status-enhancing or did the increased status mean that the absolute numbers did not matter quite as much?
Also known as covenants, they’d existed for decades, typically as an agreement between a developer and buyer on a single lot, proving unpopular to Americans who didn’t want to be controlled on their own property. But Nichols sensed he could foster long-term stability, which would be profitable for him and for homeowners. He initiated restrictions on entire neighborhoods, placing them on the land before any lots were sold—a private zoning system before municipal zoning was widespread. He’s credited as the first developer to emphasize the covenants for middle-class areas and to make them self-renew after periods of 25 to 40 years unless a majority of residents objected, ensuring they’d essentially last forever. For enforcement, he set up homeowners associations.
Nichols’ restrictions started with a few sentences on neighborhood plat documents and eventually ran for a few pages. They set minimum prices for home construction, mandated single-family housing and banned apartments, required a specified amount of space on the fronts and sides of homes, and regulated routine housing elements like chimneys, trellises, windows, vestibules, and porches.
There were also racial restrictions that barred Black residents from owning or renting homes. An early billboard for Nichols’ Country Club District development described the area as “1,000 Acres Restricted.” Newspaper ads claimed that Nichols’ neighborhoods blocked “all undesirable encroachments” and promised that “complete uniformity is here assured.”…
Nobody had seen a swath of suburbia as vast his neighborhoods, which comprised the Country Club District: By the 1940s there were more than a dozen contiguous upper-class and middle-class subdivisions filled with bubbling fountains, tree-lined vistas, and cul-de-sacs, providing homes for as many as 50,000 people across two states. Many subdivisions were buffered by parks and golf courses, and they were all tied together with restrictive covenants. It was the “American’s domestic ideal,” opined a visitor from the New Republic.
Nichols wasn’t the only builder applying covenants. Their use accelerated after 1910, imposing segregation and strict land-development rules across the country. But he was their most prominent proselytizer, promoting their spread through speeches and articles and in leadership roles with national real estate organizations. Nichols’ covenants in Sunset Hill and Mission Hills, two of his poshest neighborhoods, were said by his company to have been copied in more than 50 cities.
Developers, officials, residents, and others developed and put into practice a number of measures to keep people out of white suburban subdivisions. Today, these measures tend to be more economic and zoning-based with fewer explicit references to race and ethnicity. But, as noted above, the outcomes are clear: the suburbs were segregated by race and ethnicity.
Detroit officials want to triple property-tax rates on vacant land and reduce rates by an average of 30% for homeowners. The idea is to spur development on 30,000 neglected vacant lots held by owners who pay almost no taxes. It is a tall order. The city’s population has fallen by two-thirds since its 1950s heyday, and the Detroit land bank holds another 63,000 vacant lots.
In Pittsburgh, the city council this month passed a measure to more easily transfer the 13,000 or so city-owned lots and vacant properties to a municipal land bank and into the hands of developers or nonprofits. The city’s population is down by more than half since its peak in the 1950s.
Chicago, whose population has fallen by about a quarter since the 1950s, has more than 10,000 city-owned vacant lots. Another 16,634 are caught in a limbo of back taxes and unpaid fees. Every other year, the county tries to unload such properties in a tax-lien auction known as the Scavenger Sale. Only about 8% of the properties in the auctions from 2007 to 2019 went to buyers who managed to obtain a clear title, the Cook County Treasurer’s office found…
A measure signed into law last week by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker aims to resuscitate such properties. It cuts interest rates on overdue property taxes to 9% from 18%. It also allows Cook County to automatically acquire tax liens on delinquent properties before they reach the Scavenger Sale, reducing the time it takes to clear titles and transfer them to developers or nonprofits.
Even with reduced obstacles, it will take time for the number of vacant properties to be significantly reduced.
Once the property can be purchased and redeveloped, new questions emerge. What will be built there? What do owners, developers, and builders see as the price points that make it worth their time? How do new buildings and/or land uses fit with the existing neighborhood?
In other words, this is a multi-decade story worth paying attention. How did these properties become vacant and where did the residents go? Where do things stand now? What will they look like in the future? Specific decisions now could help alter the story to come.
There are more than 2,000 active adult communities from Florida to California, and all along the Sunbelt in between. Click on websites such as PrivateCommunities.com or 55Places.com, and the results can be overwhelming. Florida has 673 to choose from. California has 220. Arizona has 151. There are 217 more in the Carolinas. Pennsylvania has 215.
“Over the past decade, the housing market has been driven, in part, by the 73 million Baby Boomers who have been buying homes as they retire and adopt new lifestyles,’’ says Rob Parahus, president and chief operating officer for Toll Brothers, one of the leading home builders in the U.S.
Multiple forces helped bring this together: developers and builders seeing an opportunity, a growing number of aging Americans, people with money wanting to have communities with particular amenities and protections against what they might find elsewhere, and an ongoing interest in homeownership.
I imagine there are things missing from these communities. If a group of people with means have come together in an age-restricted community, they will not encounter all the same people and/or neighbors they might elsewhere.
What happens to these communities in a future when there are fewer older Americans who want to live in such places? How easy might it be to convert communities back to the general housing stock?
What is the modal experience in these communities or does it vary quite a bit? Some of these places get more media attention than others. Take, for example, The Villages in Florida is well known. But, it is hard to know from the occasional news story about whether this is a “typical” adult active community or not.
But perhaps nothing drives home the impact of Secretariat’s life more than looking at a map. Like, any map. We know because we’ve looked at them. All of them. In an effort to identify roads in the U.S. named for athletes, ESPN cross-referenced 2010 Census data with Google Maps. We were stunned to uncover 263 roads named after the horse — far more than for any other athlete, human or otherwise. “I’m not that surprised,” says Kate Chenery Tweedy, whose mother, Penny, raised and owned Secretariat. “Secretariat came along at a time of great crisis in this country — Watergate, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s impeachment. And unlike any other athlete ever has, he restored our sense that there is beauty and good in the world.”…
Born in Virginia. Won Triple Crown races in Kentucky, Maryland and New York. So it makes perfect sense that the states with the most Secretariat streets are … Florida and Texas?…
Road experts say there is little rhyme or reason to the way our streets get their names. It’s mostly just real estate developers who submit names to their town, there’s usually a relatively easy approval process, and voilà. Case in point: Somebody in Butte, Alaska, sure likes horse racing. You can take Sea Biscuit Lane to E. Man o’ War Drive, then hang a right onto E. Secretariat Drive — the most northerly road named for Secretariat. And if you wanted to ride Secretariat the 3,920 miles back to his burial site? At the record 37.8 mph he ran the Belmont in, he’d have gotten you there in a little over four days.
As someone who studies suburbs, here is my own theory for this naming pattern. Developers often want names for nicer subdivisions connected to tradition, certain lifestyles, and success. Why not reference both horse racing and one of the most successful horses ever? Horse racing requires money to participate and the audience for horse racing might fit particular demographics. Additionally, horse racing hints at nature. Secretariat is a well-known athlete. Such names will help establish their subdivision as an exciting place for people with means.
My own community has at least a few street names that connect to horse racing. This is not just a connection to racing in the abstract; our suburb has links to horse racing near these sites with a racetrack that was in existence in the early 1900s and another farm with wealthy owners who bred and raced horses in the second half of the twentieth century.
By linking single-family homes to horses and one of the most famous American athletes, how can a developer go wrong?
Their large five bedroom property with a sprawling 200 metre-long drive is located in The Ponds area in west Sydney, where hundreds of new homes have popped up in recent years…
The home looks bizarrely out-of-place wedged between identical chock-a-block newbuilds, where its 1.99 hectare garden could fit over 50 of the matching new homes inside.
However, when their neighbours upped and left – choosing to sell to the developers – the Zammits made a last hold out.
They refused to sell, despite being offered millions, and prevented the developers snatching up the last plot of land.
“The fact that most people sold out years and years ago, these guys have held on. All credit to them,” local agent Taylor Bredin told 7News…
In short, the land could be worth over £25million, especially after ten years of their private rebellion.
The valiant resident holds on to their land despite possible riches; all they have to do is move. Such a story fits the image of the sacrosanct property owner. A home is their castle. No one can tell them what to do. If they want to stay, they can stay. The government or private actors should not be able to move them.
At the same time, we believe growth is good. If even just a few property owners hold out, they can interrupt larger plans for new buildings and activity. Imagine an important highway project or mass transi line or new tall building that need several properties to make it better for others but those owners will not sell. Are there limits to whether a property owner can hold on?
In the Seattle story referenced by Up and in this Australian suburban story, developers could not force the issue but they could build right around them. Edith Macefield’s Seattle home was boxed in on three sides. The suburban property above is surrounded on all four sides by dense single-family homes. The property owner has stayed but the surrounding area has been radically transformed.
Legally Sociable 