NIMBYS AND BANANAS

It seems that at some point in an urban blogger's career they must list the essential acronyms that plague the development process. Most have become overused and as such have lost their required impact of derision and ridicule. And yet others have been sown onto flags and banners and waved at public hearings.

Now I enjoy a good acronym as much as the next person. With texting, we get all sorts with OMG, LOL, BYW, WTF and so many others it would take a SNERT to know them all (see below).

So here are most of the current faves, though some are a bit old. If you have others, please comment.

Anti-Development:

BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone/Anything, this is the omnibus phrase that takes everything in.

CAVE People - Citizens Against Virtually Everything, this of course has a double meaning as in against and where many live.

LULU - Locally Unwanted Land Use, things like massage parlors, marijuana dispensaries, cigarette stores, porn shops, fast food drive throughs (In-and-Out Burger comes to mind).

The Anti-Development Nots:

NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard, this is the oldest acronym and has become the primary phrase used to depict those against any project.

NIMFYE - Not In My Front Yard Either, obvious expansion of NIMBY, though a stretch I think.

NIABY - Not In Anyone's Backyard, this is the all inclusion form of the above.

NIMEY - Not In My Election Year, the current fall back within communities with tough choices, tells all about the political process.

NACTAE - Not A Chance Till After Elections, see above.

NITL - Not In This Lifetime, I have worked on projects like these.

NOPE - Not On Planet Earth, as we move off planet I am sure this will morph into NOTM (Not On The Moon/Mars).

NOTE - Not Over There Either, cute but why not over there, or there, or even there!

PIGINIMBY – Phew I'm Glad It's Not In My Backyard, whatever.

IKWIWWISI - I'll Know What I Want When I See It, this is the normal planning and approval process as done in California – this process continues until either the developer pulls the proposal, goes bankrupt, or dies. (I have had clients fall into all these categories).

Pro-Development:

BANY's - Builders Against NIMBYs, also includes chambers of commerce and other pro-growth groups, often these have little real standing in the process and the club meetings are secret.

CEQA - Consultants Employment Quantity Act (was California Environmental Quality Act), this is a new one to me and has been a significant profit center over the years – doing work that does absolutely nothing to move the project forward except to give political cover.

DUDE - Developer Under Delusions of Entitlement, every client I know has fallen into this category at some point in the process. They learn quickly or die.

SIMBY - Start In My Backyard, this is a group that is usually formed at the developer's request. This includes unions (jobs), schools (jobs), and often politicians who want a pet project in their district.

YIMBY - Yes in My Backyard, variant of SIMBY.

WIIFM - What's In It For Me? The logical extension of the last two.

WYGIWYD - What You Get Is What You Deserve, this often is the result of the planning process when every part of the project that gives it life and soul is extinguished. Color this beige.

IAMS - It's About Me Stupid, this can apply to all participants in the process.

Citizens Involved In The Process:

DINKY – Duel Income, No kids, Yet. The apartment demographic follows these people closely.

MUPPIE - Middle-aged Urban Professional. They were previously a Yuppie – yes, we all are getting older.

GLAM - Greying, Leisured, Affluent, Married – is the GLAMMIE the obvious evolution of the MUPPIE?

NINJA – No Income, No Job, or Assets. Often found living in parent's basements – never seen at planning meetings.

RUB - Rich Urban Biker, often seen in spandex and silly helmets at planning meetings for streets and developments, scary bunch, want everything to be paid for by others.

SINBAD - Single Income No Boyfriend and Desperate, major leader of many movements within the community, cats hair often present on the sweater.

SNERT - Snot-nosed Egotistical Rude Teenager, only shows when there is a skateboard park being planned (or marijuana dispensary as well).

SITCOM - Single Income Two Children Oppressive Mortgage, the result of our government and banks attempts at making housing more available and affordable, these were DINKs three years earlier.

WOOF - Well Off Older Folk (or other similar sounding term), the sweet spot for travel agencies, nice restaurants and luxury car dealers.

WOOP - Well Off Older Person, variant of the above.

Check this SITE out for more. http://www.businessballs.com/acronyms.htm

Stay Tuned . . . . . . . . . .

Noodling for March

I thought to start out this end of the month’s Noodle I would throw out some quotes on the process of city planning:

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

- Yogi Berra, baseball catcher (1925-present)

In our profession, a plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success. A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. And a plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God.

- Richard Carson, Pacific Northwest planner and writer.

Planning lies with men; success lies with heaven.

- Chinese proverb

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

- Douglas H. Everett

In Houston, a person walking is someone on his way to his car.

- Anthony Downs, writer

Long-range planning works best in the short term.

- Euripides, poet (480-406 AD).

A hundred years after we are gone and forgotten, those who never heard of us will be living with the results of our actions.

- Oliver Wendell Homes, U.S. Supreme Court justice

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

- Immanuel Kant

Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children.

- Margaret Mead

The home is where part of the family waits until the others are through with the car.

- Herbert Prochnow

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

- Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

Boomers and Home Sales:

One result of the Boomer Generation is that at some point during the next ten years a significant number of homes will be coming into the resale market. If this coincides with some reports that the younger generation isn’t in a buying mood then, on top of the current foreclosure issue, we could be faced with numbers of larger homes that will be asking more than the marketplace can bear. When this change comes or even if it comes remains to be seen. US Business: GO HERE.

Tesla and the Brick Issue

The latest issue of Fast Company magazine (actually quite a nice rag on cool high tech and the people behind it), goes into the brain of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors and tries to break it down. A very good article that explains a lot about Tesla, the new Model S car, the engineering, and the dream. I am a skeptic as long as the industry must have government subsidies to succeed, but I’m no fool when it comes to technological advances. As in a lot of things it will be the third investor that makes the money (GO HERE). And BTW they never do answer the question about the batteries turning to a brick if it loses its charge entirely.

Home Sales Up, Down, Sideways, No One Knows

In the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in and around Silicon Valley prices for high end homes are being bid up and up. Foreclosures continue on homes not more than fifty miles away and are selling for one tenth the prices in Santa Clara County. It is all a mish-mash of bank financing, Google and Facebook money, and no one has to mention Apple. Low and moderate income home sales are limping along, there are ongoing arguments over “required” affordable housing issues, and does increasing interest rates push up housing demand (the fear of being left behind syndrome)? For a bit more go HERE and HERE for a taste of the vacation home market.

In Memory – Edna A. Davis

And lastly, on a personal note, this week we lost a wonderful woman who was the quiet anchor to our family. My wife’s mother, Edna A. Davis (nee Peak), passed away. This woman was 98 years old. She supported her daughter and herself for most of their early days and then for herself as she grew older. She was a beautician and hairdresser, I never saw her with one hair out place and even after a stroke and other health issues she was always dressed in style. Think about this: when she was born in a small Ohio town in 1913, the Wright brother’s flight was only ten years earlier, Woodrow Wilson had just been sworn in as president, and half the country still had no electricity, telephones, and indoor plumbing. Edna watched the Great War as a child and feared for her brothers fighting in France during World War Two. One of thirteen children (a brother died in 1902) she watched an America change for the better and for the worse. In the her twenties Cleveland was an world industrial powerhouse with the likes of Ryerson Steel and the growing automobile industry, now dried newspapers blow through its empty neighborhoods. Her small town of Avon is now a typical suburban tract of widened roads, strip malls, and affluence. She was a proud and incredibly strong woman; she is the best example of an independent American woman I will ever know. There was always a proud softness about her that hid the tragedies of her life. We will miss her very much.

Noodling Housing and Economists

Nood-ling (nōōd’lĭng) n. 1. Fishing for catfish using only bare hands, practiced primarily by crazy people who cannot afford proper fishing gear. 2. The intentional annoyance by bloggers who are skeptical of the news as it’s reported, as in “Noodling bureaucrats is more fun than fishing bare hand for catfish and a lot more surprising.” This is now an end of the month feature.

Megan McArdle in a brief article arlier this week in The Atlantic Home asks the question, “Are There Too Many Homes in America?” She goes on to say that the issue is not that too many homes, there is, at the moment, not enough buyers. As I have argued in earlier blogs, we are silently developing an extreme shortage in housing units especially when considered against an almost invisible and growing household formation curve. Potential buyers are living at home, renting, sharing, etc. and the housing supply is not meeting any level of a projected demand. As with any product when a tipping point is reached, such as an expected increased demand spike (see the years 1946-1956), bubbles can grow.

Brendan Lowney, macroeconomist with Forest Economic Advisors, said a week ago that there is an oversupply of about 2.5 million homes on the market. This is putting downward pressure on home prices as well as consumer demand. Well, duh! I do ask, and argue though, how can the housing oversupply put pressure on consumer demand. The only pressure I can see would be on prices and that would result in a good result for the consumer. The real issues are the retreat of the buyer from the marketplace (fear), their inability to find a loan (acceptance), and unemployment (qualification). These three factors must be overcome to restart the housing engine.

I have been and will continue to be a firm believer in demographics. Simply put, I believe that people will: 1)continue to be people and have children, 2)grow older and wealthier, 3)tend to want to live where it’s nice. I went to college to come to these conclusions. But since the development industry is more complex than my in-depth knowledge of the human condition, they look at trends, buyer groups, age brackets, and other esoteric issues. The fundamental issue is this: Where is the next customer going to come from? Who are they? and, “How can I meet this consumer and sell them my product? It is, as my economist hero, Lugwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, “The market is supreme.”

My second favorite economists are good friends and fellow associates on many projects; they are Claude and Nina Gruen. Neither has let time push them around, they are still as feisty and irreverent as ever when it comes to the failings of our anointed leaders. They both continue to produce excellent books and studies on the development industry. Claude’s recent Rutgers University imprint is New Urban Development (buy here). It attacks the church of entitlements and points a finger at those that allowed all of the past five years of silliness to happen. It is an economic history course on America’s development past, thorns and roses all.

Nina, on the other hand, has coauthored (with Alan Billingsley of Americas Research) one of the best and most readable essays on the current marketplace in America, titled; Boomers, Echo’s and X’s:Generational and other Structural Shifts and Their Impacts on Future Demand forReal Estate in the Coming Decade.   Nina has forgotten more than most of us have learned about development. I won’t go into the broad study in detail but it does look at the three most dominant generations (i.e. those with the money), listed in the title. She takes a broad cross section through the development industry and teases out interesting details that will be helpful in the coming decade. A caveat that runs through the paper is the development industry’s Prime Directive: “Location, location, location” as always, drives regional markets. I will add just one more word, “and Timing.”

I am also reminded of the old Star Trek Prime Directive, General Order #1 of the United Federation of Planets. “There can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilizations, consistent with the historical real world concept of Westphalian sovereignty.” Oh, if only the tweakers, meddlers, and diddlers in Washington (that includes politicians and industry wonks and lobbyists), understood this directive and allowed the marketplace to be truly free.

Stay tuned . . . .

Are We Ready to Roll the Dice?

Before I begin, please take second and look at this short video I made of our garden this spring, if you're stressed it will help to soften your day.

Windsor Hill Garden

After last week’s extremely pessimistic blog and enumeration of many of the problems within the housing market (it could have been ten pages longer), I thought this week I’ll take a look at the issue from a planner’s point of view.

I have been in the development industry for forty years as a designer, planner, and facilitator for my clients. Probably 70 percent of these efforts were focused on some aspect of the housing market, both rental and ownership. My clients were, and still are, merchant builders; some are developers (speculative entitlements are their meat and potatoes), some are builders (the next step after entitlements – they are the three dimensional guys), and some are both (a much rarer breed). During the last three years the speculators stayed low and dumped land like it was a toxic landfill, the builders cut staffs to nothing and many shut down their operations, and the developer-builder (if he managed his money well) went to Hawaii to wait it out (and are very bored about now).

My small part of the development industry creates plans for things that are to come; it’s all about the future. We try to anticipate what the market wants and will need four and five years from now. In 2004 my company had over 150,000 housing units in master plans, neighborhood plans, infill projects and outland parcels. These were great chunks of land that would eventually generate billions in income and thousands of jobs. In some cases these plans would alter the balances within communities, in others they would greatly improve the overall value of housing, but in general there would be significant improvements to a community’s infrastructure. What a difference five years makes and what a catastrophic difference the fall of 2008 made. Without exception every one of those projects either died or was put on hold for the last three years.

But from this development purgatory there are now glimmers of hope and change. (I am drawn to the definition in Wikipedia: The word "purgatory", derived through Anglo-Norman and Old French from the Latin word purgatorium has come to refer to a wide range of historical and modern conceptions of postmortem suffering short of everlasting damnation, and is used, in a non-specific sense, to mean any place or condition of suffering or torment, especially one that is temporary (so true, so true))

I have, both on my desk and underway, residential projects that are being released from purgatory, many were started in 2007. They are being purged of their sins, (more focused and affordable now), responsive to prayer (i.e. markets), and hope for salvation (buyers and renters). A few are being reincarnated, (changed from podium condos to townhomes), and some are just being reborn as rentals. It’s all so religious; it must be from all the praying that’s been going on at the Urban Land Institute and the BIA.

One theory that I have held for years is that the developer/builder is a gambler, the worst kind in many ways. He plays with other people’s money (OPM). When he’s good he clears the table and makes everyone happy. When he’s off his game or the OPM dries up, he walks away confident the game will resume. But at some point he will get very bored, his wife will throw him out of the house, and his back will go out from too much golf. It is about then (or now) that the itch will return, he’ll start doing ROI’s on napkins at lunch, he’ll cruise through a town he knows and sees empty lots begging for attention, he makes that call to the REIT that has had no place to put its money for three years. Our man is getting ready to put money back on the table and, I think, he’s also going to church more.

Stay tuned . . . .