DENVER | Main Development Thread #7

[wong21fr]

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Name me a recent development agreement in Denver that doesn’t mandate affordable housing now. They all do.

As for environmental - how would you say Revesco is going to do River Mile? It’s certainly contaminated. They have an 18% affordable requirement. By your logic, it should be impossible. Are they just better at it than you?

Didn’t Revesco get an upzoning to offset the affordability requirement? Sure seems like an incentive right there versus a mandate- same thing applies for the 38th and Blake overlay. As for the environmental remediation when does the metropolitan district get incorporated and start issuing bonds to pay back the upfront capital that Revesco is putting up?

[bulldurhamer]

Originally Posted by Agent Orange

Americans of all stripes are protectionists now. Protect us from immigrants taking our jobs and diluting our culture. Build a wall, ban muslims. Protect our neighborhood character from being threatened by lower income households. Enforce exclusionary zoning but keep adding amenities so I can live the streetcar suburbanite dream.

And frankly, construction anarchy is essentially what we had prior to WWII and especially prior to WWI. And it resulted in incredibly diverse, pragmatic, and desirable neighborhoods. Top down planning doesn't work in many sectors of the economy, and I'd argue no part of our economy is more centrally planned and prescribed than urban land use.

Cue the dog whistle. Y’all still have no idea why Candi got elected do you? It aint about keeping poor people out.

[CONative]

Originally Posted by Stonemans_rowJ

I'm with you on everything until "the older neighbors in Denver are more uniform." There are so many examples of an entire several blocks of KB paired homes, or an entire block of Thrive Single Family Houses that all look the same, or courtyards with the same Wonderlands on both sides, virtually identical. With that being said, I still like Stapleton. Back in the 20's an average builder would build like 2-3 houses a year.

Nah...not really. The entire block of those Thrive houses still have different front exterior elevations -- even if they are similar in style...whereas there are many parts of Central Denver neighborhoods that have the exact same house exterior next to each other or every other house over and over again.

[SirLucasTheGreat]

Originally Posted by bulldurhamer

Cue the dog whistle. Y’all still have no idea why Candi got elected do you? It aint about keeping poor people out.

She exploited the economic ignorance of the masses by riding on the coattails of AOC and reviving political rhetoric which should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've tried to keep an open mind when listening to her but it is hard work navigating through her endless pseudointellectual, post-modern drivel.

[Agent Orange]

Originally Posted by bulldurhamer

Cue the dog whistle. Y’all still have no idea why Candi got elected do you? It aint about keeping poor people out.

Cue the daily bulldurhamer post calling everyone he disagrees with a racist.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by bunt_q

I think that’s the more coherent, not typed on the phone, version of what I just said.

Burnham Yard here is a good example. It’ll take some time, but it’ll more than pencil. Sure, guy off the streets who wants to buy land doesn’t have a chance. But it’s 60 acres - it’s still land, and a lot of it. If we are defining scarcity for conversation purposes as “how hard is it for the little guy developer to play,” that’s not the same thing.

Great comments. You are able to add detail-relevance on things I know little about.

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Just as you say not everybody gets to live where they want, well, not every developer gets to build at the cost of entry that they want. I guess I should say, there is plenty of land AT THE RIGHT PRICE. If that’s not you, go to Aurora, Murphy Creek will sell you something to build on.

Everybody wants to build where everybody else wants to build because everybody assumes that's the (only) place to be.

Northwest Aurora (for example) has plenty of opportunity which is closer in but to date nobody sees it as the place to be. That will by necessity change at some point in time.

With respect to supple and demand, demand will find the more suitable supply depending on ones circumstances. People moving to Denver will be just as content living in Aurora, Westminster, Lakewood or Englewood etc. Isn't Englewood adding lots of medium density housing?

An affordable housing discussion.

https://denverite.com/2020/02/15/lim...ng-discussion/

“My question is, ‘Why should Colorado be growing like a weed, ruining our quality of life?'” ... roads and other infrastructure can’t keep up with the pace of development and that quality of life is suffering as a result.

With respect to Lakewood

Solving their artificial growth limits should be fairly easy to overcome. If the city would designate certain areas as "areas of change" similar to what Denver did and outside the growth limitations, then chances are high that voters would approve. Chances are that most people voting in favor of the 1% limitation don't live anywhere near where 'areas of change' would be and wouldn't care less about those areas having growth.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by SirLucasTheGreat

She exploited the economic ignorance of the masses by riding on the coattails of AOC and reviving political rhetoric which should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've tried to keep an open mind when listening to her but it is hard work navigating through her endless pseudointellectual, post-modern drivel.

Yeah, that's point on.

She's a piece of work and it appears she has little support among the rest of city council excepting an idea here and there. These halfway houses are an example where the whole council "shot first and asked questions later". They solved nothing and created more problems.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Well the little guys whining about rezoning risk and environmental risk and land price risk and [...] should go get accounting jobs anyways. They’re not ever putting a dent in affordability with their 1-2 projects per year. I’m interested in Forest City’s perspective or Revesco’s perspective. Their scale of building is what helps our affordability problem. Laniroj’s land scarcity problem is a capital and risk problem.

So I've come around to a more modest up-zoning ie 'missing middle' since it's unlikely to lead to wholesale change. It's more likely to start with the lower hanging fruit. While it's not likely to change much with respect to affordability, more is better than less, certainly.

Take (most of) West Wash Park for example. A zoning change to 'medium' density feels appropriate. Here is where NIMBY's exert too much resistance. Within Curtis Park, Five Points, etc I can easily envision carve-outs for medium density. So what if it's more of a pain.

I also would favor specific 'historical' zoning areas or pockets.

You're land scarcity points are well taken. It's like people don't even recognize the amount of land within RiNo which will easily take a couple of decades to build out. Add all these other areas that are being cleaned up etc. and again there's decades of developable land.

[twister244]

My neighborhood news letter had a nice little piece on the status of the stadium district plans. Looks like things are slowly moving forward. Nothing too groundbreaking here, but nice to see an update.

https://jpun.files.wordpress.com/202...un-feb2020.pdf

[bulldurhamer]

Originally Posted by Agent Orange

Cue the daily bulldurhamer post calling everyone he disagrees with a racist.

oh, so you get to call everyone a racist.


the reality is that you don't know what you're talking about. there's no evidence at all that a massive upzone will help poor people at all. in fact, minneapolis is starting to realize they totally fucked up and have done nothing to address displacement.


https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2019/...y-in-the-city/

[bulldurhamer]

Originally Posted by SirLucasTheGreat

She exploited the economic ignorance of the masses by riding on the coattails of AOC and reviving political rhetoric which should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've tried to keep an open mind when listening to her but it is hard work navigating through her endless pseudointellectual, post-modern drivel.

she's right about displacement and not one solution being offered here will help with any of that.

the only real solution is that we need everybody working to earn a living wage, but nobody is interested in that. we'll ring the housing crisis alarm so those poor developers dealing with such great scarcity can build build build while cirrus gets the opportunity to walk to coors field since everybody should get to live super duper close to the 16th street mall.

[bulldurhamer]

Originally Posted by The Dirt

Do you think that a goal worth pursuing is to allow nurses, teachers, waiters/waitresses, and other service workers to live in Denver? Because this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about allowing every millionaire to live in Cherry Hills. We're talking about working class individuals being able to live within reasonable distance of their jobs rather than paying a huge chunk of their paycheck to live close or live farther away and pay a lot more for transportation costs. Affordability and scarcity hits these folks first and hardest because they can't compete with higher earners. I don't know what "construction anarchy" is, but upzoning the whole city would actually release pressure on gentrifying areas and allow more homes to be built in rich areas, which have already been dipped in amber by NIMBYs. I never thought I'd be on a skyscraper page forum long enough to see a majority of folks arguing for less housing.

what actual evidence do you have that any of what you say is true? upzoning across the city will bring waitresses homes close to bubba gumps? data from a city that has done just as your proposed is showing the opposite to be true.

but you're REALLY sure about this, so i'm curious why.

[bulldurhamer]

Originally Posted by RyanD

Right! I thought I was going crazy. But this is a trending mentality. If you look at a lot of comments on news articles with high ticket items such River Mile and anything else development related, you see these comments everywhere. There's a larger-than-I-would-have-hoped-for crowd opposing things like McGregor Square, FFS. These people think that all the construction is causing rents / home prices to go up when in reality, it's pretty much a simple supply / demand market game. Rents are leveling off because of all the supply coming online.

In addition, all these buildings we said would be 'affordable housing in 5 years' are actually more affordable, what a shock. Hell, I live in one myself that we said, 'yep that'll be affordable in 5 years'. What are some other arguments? 'I'm sick of all these luxury apartments.' If all apartments are luxury none of them are, it's just the new building standard. It's all a marketing scheme. The list goes on..

What I fear most is that this crowd, and I even work with a chunk of these sad people, is that they would bend over backwards to get growth caps on the ballot. That scares the shit out of me.

#RantOver

so you admit prices have stabilized without the great upzone. interesting!

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by bulldurhamer

...the reality is that you don't know what you're talking about. there's no evidence at all that a massive upzone will help poor people at all. in fact, minneapolis is starting to realize they totally fucked up and have done nothing to address displacement.

https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2019/...y-in-the-city/

Interesting timing as I just happen to have spent time on the Minneapolis Business Journal, just curious about what was happening. As an aside Hines is going to build two towers including a 36-story apartment project on land they've owned since 2012.

Now that Minneapolis got what they wanted and they're the toast of the whole country, many are now acknowledging the fallacies and weaknesses with their supposed magical fix. What has become the "hot topic generic up-zoning fix" isn't working and isn't expected to achieve what they promised. At best it will add a few upscale options here and there but nothing approaching affordable units.

What's especially noteworthy is the analysis done by Yonah Freemark.

A 2019 study of upzoning in some Chicago neighborhoods found some truth in that critique and highlighted the long-term nature of such zoning changes. The researcher behind the study, Yonah Freemark, who is a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed housing prices and construction permits in areas where Chicago began upzoning in 2013 and 2015. He found increasing property taxes, but little change in the areas’ housing supply as as a result of the zoning changes.

BTW, our esteemed Monitor, Cirrus, lives in Northern Virginia and knows Yonah Freemark. Cirrus, bunt, wong, (and others) became buddies when attending CU.

It turns out that Minneapolis set a permitting record of $2.1 billion last year. Just as in Denver is basically all high density stuff.

Thanks for the link. That's a rather long but good read.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by bulldurhamer

what actual evidence do you have that any of what you say is true? upzoning across the city will bring waitresses homes close to bubba gumps? data from a city that has done just as your proposed is showing the opposite to be true.

but you're REALLY sure about this, so i'm curious why.

This is the greatest fallacy in urban debates -- the idea that some other city with countless differences in every way but one similarity will somehow prove something. It's the opposite of scientific method...there's no control group to be sure of the effect in the other city, and the two situations are generally different on many levels...the lesson is only anecdotal at best.

But we can see evidence of the pieces. A city with code capacity for tons of growth will have cheaper land than one with limited capacity, which will enable cheaper housing development if all else is equal.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

Interesting timing as I just happen to have spent time on the Minneapolis Business Journal, just curious about what was happening. As an aside Hines is going to build two towers including a 36-story apartment project on land they've owned since 2012.

Now that Minneapolis got what they wanted and they're the toast of the whole country, many are now acknowledging the fallacies and weaknesses with their supposed magical fix. What has become the "hot topic generic up-zoning fix" isn't working and isn't expected to achieve what they promised. At best it will add a few upscale options here and there but nothing approaching affordable units.

Building affordable units is only one way you can be more affordable. Another, which is generally far more important, is to have enough supply that the less-desirable older units become affordable. Like 1970s apartments outside of the prime districts.

The same dynamic makes things easier for middle class renters and buyers too. People who buy luxury housing are generally moving out of something else, with a domino effect that affects every level of affordability.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by mhays

Building affordable units is only one way you can be more affordable. Another, which is generally far more important, is to have enough supply that the less-desirable older units become affordable. Like 1970s apartments outside of the prime districts.

The same dynamic makes things easier for middle class renters and buyers too. People who buy luxury housing are generally moving out of something else, with a domino effect that affects every level of affordability.

I agree with the first part although location can still be an overriding factor that at least lessens what you wish for.

With respect to "scientific methods" on these topics the best you can do is make observations and draw correlations - remembering that correlation =/= causation. There's simply too many variables and miscellaneous dynamics at play.

While I'll buy the trickle down 'in theory' it doesn't always work as assumed because again location differences or other variables. It's not unlike when I assume the Avalanche will easily beat one of the worst hockey teams, they lose. Life (regardless of theories) is what happens while you're making other plans.

[mhays]

Where's your evidence that it doesn't work? (Apartment trickle-down, not the widely-discredited taxation theory)

I hope you won't say "because places build housing and still get more expensive." Obviously that's not the point...if their prices are rising faster than development cost, it's because they haven't built as much housing as demand called for.

[TakeFive]

More sales reported by BusinessDen

But it doesn't appear that the sale of the Ink Coffee building in RiNo or a sale in Whittier of the Whittier Pub building is for redevelopment, at least in the near term.

[TakeFive]

It's simply a matter of supply and demand, right?

Originally Posted by mhays

Where's your evidence that it doesn't work?

I keep hearing about a shortage of land blah, blah. I'll give you a HUGE amount of vacant land and let's see what happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapleton,_Denver

The former airport 4,700 acres (19 km2) site 10 minutes from Downtown Denver is now being redeveloped by Forest City Enterprises new urbanist project. Construction began in 2001...

Now referred to as the Stapleton Community, it contains nine neighborhoods, nine schools public/private, 50 parks, several shopping and business districts, and a visitor center. Since April 2016, Stapleton has been connected to the Denver metro area by RTD's A line, a recently opened commuter rail service.

So as Stapleton has built out and more housing units were added each year did it become more and more affordable or less affordable?

And there's the fallacy of a simplistic view of supply and demand.

Had Stapleton been required to include 25% designated affordable housing then at least it would have 25% affordable housing but it didn't require that and it doesn't have that.

Would adding more housing units to neighborhood X be a bad thing. No; and if you added a bunch of micro-housing unit-buildings then you'd likely have more affordable housing. But this is what Stonemans_rowJ said:

Originally Posted by Stonemans_rowJ

There have been lots of small 1 bedroom units and studios added, many probably vacant.

The average millennial is now, what, 32 or 33 years old, many are married or marrying, many are having children. This demographic is not looking for a 1 bedroom apartment in Sun Valley.

If you want to add 'missing middle' units that's fine but if you think that will automatically make a neighborhood more affordable you could be a pothead.