Quote:
Originally Posted by glowrock
I have a bit of a hard time with Avondale's population loss, with the only explanation I can come up with being the continued deconversion of 2 and 4-flats into larger units. Anyone else have a possible explanation?
Aaron (Glowrock)
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As other have said, this is typical of early stage gentrification. Let me give you an example of a buddy of mine. Salesforce tech bro, wants bigger house after renting cramped one bedroom in Edgewater for five years. Moves over by me to a two bedroom that used to have two old Polish dudes living in it. That's -1 for Avondale.
Then decides to buy a few years later. Purchases a three flat with duplexed up top floor. All three units were occupied by families of 4-7 people before the bank foreclosed. The bank kicks all of them out (I know because we toured it before the bank completed the foreclosure) and sells it to my buddy empty. He renovates and keeps the top duplex for himself, rents the first floor to a hipster couple and rents the garden unit to his GFs brother.
So let's say the two single floor units had 4 people each and the top had 7 before he moved in. The building that was previously housing 15 people now houses 4 people, 5 if you count tech bros GF...
That's a loss of 10 residents in a single three flat. Now extrapolate that across hundreds of properties. This is what Carlos Rosa is encouraging by banning new construction. He doesn't want other outlets for people like my buddy to move in and apparently thinks they just won't move in if they can't buy a new condo. What he doesn't get is that every new unit he refuses to allow means one more tech bro loose on the streets to gobble up existing naturally occurring affordable housing and turn that extra unit they can't be bothered to rent out into an Airbnb. You can't stop this, there is no legal way to prevent real estate transactions on the private market. When you don't allow the private market to create new supply, existing supply is rapidly decimated as people take existing buildings and upgrade them to suit their needs.