> NIMBYs worry that the mere existence of nearby multifamily will decrease their home value. In rare and unsympathetic cases ... that may be true.
It's not rare. I've known multiple people, myself included, who have decided not to make an offer on a single family home because it neighbors a gross apartment building.
The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes. I don't know where HN obsession with vertical housing comes from, maybe because the majority are young and still live in apartments, but this isn't reflective of most home buyers
The only adults I know who will even consider purchasing a condo are single with no pets and no intention of having a family. Even among most childless couples, once they live in a single family home they would never go back.
You're allowed to have preferences! You don't have to live next to a "gross apartment building". You can achieve your preferences by (a) paying more or (b) accepting a larger commute from the nearest urban center. Property values don't scale with your particular preference. Among many things, they're a function of:
* (Probably foremost, in IL at least) the perceived quality of the school districts
* The property tax burden
* The diversity and quality of amenities
Missing-middle multifamily improves all of these things.
SFZ neighborhoods and munis are locked into a death spiral on property taxes and schools: residents are incentivized to plow money into schools (attract new residents -> increase home prices; you "get the money back" you put into schools) which quickly gets you across a threshold where the only rational buyer of property in your muni is a family with children. Multifamily allows for aging-in-place (rather than moving out when your kids graduate, a phenomenon sometimes called "renting the schools") and diversifies the tax base.
Amenities scale with foot traffic and usage. Expensive bedroom communities tend to be commercially moribund. In addition to not being fun to live in, it also shift the levy towards property taxes and away from sales tax and licensing fees, which in turn depresses home prices.
The first answers you get on this policy question always seem to come from people who think it's dispositive that they and people like them don't want to live near apartments. Municipalities make policy decisions for the welfare of the entire mix of people who will reside there. When you do the math on overwhelmingly SFZ munis you sometimes realize that the people loudly complaining about multifamily are a minority interest to begin with.
Your list of drivers of property values is missing the single most important factor:
• how much can one borrow?
Mortgages drive house prices so long as demand outstrips supply: which it always does in desirable places. Demand can always increase in a healthy city - I want to have multiple houses in different parts of the city and I could even AirBnB them out to defray costs or make a profit.
I live in Christchurch, where we had a lot of houses selling at below ½-price for a while because the bank rules forbade giving mortgages on those houses. This was after our 2010 earthquake and banks would not lend on uninsurable houses. The houses were often safe and liveable but uninsurable due to fine print (e.g. require even floors <50mm drop across entire footprint). They were often economically fixable, but to fix them needed money or a mortgage! There are still "as-is" uninsurable houses on the market - the price discrepancy isn't because of demand per se but because of mortgage/insurance restrictions - although the pricing gap has significantly narrowed (flippers and cash-buyers create enough demand for the very few as-is properties that now go on the market). I bought a spare as-is property and there's reasons not to sell it (even though I can't insure against say fire).
Christchurch zoning rules were relaxed for a while plus our government was committed to more housing so Christchurch now has many more houses than a decade ago. House prices are going up even though you can effectively only get variable mortgages in New Zealand at 7%. We have more house supply but demand is outpacing that because we also have high immigration (30% of NZ population was born overseas and we still encourage immigration).
As an individual buying a house the market dynamic is visible - I borrowed as much as I possibly could to buy the best place I could afford for my home. Bank lending rules drove my pricing. The "market" price for the house did not set my price (low competition blind deadline bid - I could not know what others bid and a price could not be accurately calculated for my property). Market price is set by competition between buyers - most buyers are borrowing as much as they can.
The economically worst part is that it is a zero-sum game with everybody competing for how much money they can give to banks for interest payments. We all lose.
The graph of sold house prices in a city looks strange - a severe cut-off just below the median price. Investigate the underlying cause for that and everything will be revealed?
> We have more house supply but demand is outpacing that because we also have high immigration (30% of NZ population was born overseas and we still encourage immigration).
This is a huge part of it, as is anything that drives housing demand (for example, as more people end up divorced, more housing is needed).
And most people go to the bank and ask how much house they can buy (based on what monthly payment they can stomach), and then go looking for the best they can get for that.
But there is another floor even without banks and mortgages; the cost to build new housing. If the minimum viable house is $250,000 to build (assuming minor builder's profit, etc) than you're going to be hard pressed to find new housing less than that.
> there is another floor; the cost to build new housing
Mostly irrelevant in an older city so long as there is a large number of older less-desirable houses in the market. And new houses become old houses in 2-3 decades.
Only the people that can afford a new home need to buy a new one.
Building prices do drag up prices, but I don't believe they set a floor unless most everything available is greenfield.
But if you're densifying you're often knocking down those older homes. And so the only way to keep the older homes is to have newer homes being built somewhere - which fights against density.
Yes, it’s totally rational to want to live in a SFH. That’s the beauty of allowing (not requiring) other types of construction: people like me who don’t want to live in a SFH can and people who want to live in a SFH can continue to.
I even suspect SFH owners will see some benefits. Their underlying land will become more valuable as the parent explains but SFH buyers will no longer be competing against people who don’t really want a SFH but have to rent or buy one because that’s all that’s available. A lot of my friends end up doing a group house thing with 4-5 people because they have to live somewhere without apartments.
Conversely, I know several couples who have gone back, especially after child rearing.
What people want is far more complicated that "single family homes", but a range of preferences. Most prefer a detached home from any thing non-detached. Most prefer access to good schools (while/if they have school age children) opposed to poor schools. Most prefer being close to work over a long commute. Most prefer easy access to cultural/social aspects of a city over not having access. Etc. etc.
Every buying choice is a set of tradeoffs unless you are almost unfathomably wealthy (20m detached home in a dense city with a helicopter pad ticks a lot of boxes). I think a lot of focus not so much on "vertical housing" but density and "missing middle" housing is just the fact that current (US, anyway) city design is hitting some walls, and "more of the same" isn't going to work.
> The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes.
The vast majority of home buyers have a quality of life they want to achieve at a given price point, and SFHs as built in America fulfill the requirements (other than costs) better than the MFH that gets built.
Moved out of a townhome into my current house when we had a kid, I actually looked at quite a few condos and townhomes first but multi-family housing in America is, ironically, not built for families.
The townhome community I had live din actually had a lot of families in it, but my particular unit was not conducive to family life.
The complex had 2 yards, one huge field for hosting parties complete with a fireplace, lots of tables and chairs, and bathrooms right off the court yard. Kids are playing together outside all the time! The other smaller grass patch was for people with dogs to take them out.
After moving into a house, my yard is now smaller than what I had before, go figure. Also there are fewer kids running around on my block than at the complex I moved out of.
Unfortunately those nice lifestyle complexes aren't being built anymore, instead what you get is 8 or 12 narrow townhomes scrunched up together with the government required minimum amount of greenery outside.
IMHO the 4 story town homes that are being built all over the place are foolish on many fronts. They aren't good for babies (stairs) they aren't good for anyone over 50 (stairs) and they waste a ton square footage (on all the stairs).
But if I could buy a 3 (+ den) or 4 bedroom flat in a large complex that had huge green spaces and places for activities? Sure! The QoL of living in a well managed complex is better than doing all the home owner stuff myself, and it turns out when services are being ordered for 100 households (window cleaning, pressure washing, deck cleaning, etc) you can get some good group discounts!
The large complexes that I do see being built around my city (Seattle) are all rental units, which has a ton of down sides - bad for the local economy, money doesn't stay in the community, residents don't build value in their house, prices go up dramatically year over year, etc.
It's not rare. I've known multiple people, myself included, who have decided not to make an offer on a single family home because it neighbors a gross apartment building.
The vast majority of home buyers want single family homes. I don't know where HN obsession with vertical housing comes from, maybe because the majority are young and still live in apartments, but this isn't reflective of most home buyers
The only adults I know who will even consider purchasing a condo are single with no pets and no intention of having a family. Even among most childless couples, once they live in a single family home they would never go back.