[quote=AN][quote=The-Shoveler]That is the biggest complaint I hear from bay area workers, retirees don’t move!!
You do not hear that as much in LA or SD but there is a lot of I am staying until they carry me out here as well.[/quote]I think that’s because SF has been built out for awhile now. Add on to the fact that RE price has drastically increase (well above your average owners from awhile ago), which created this situation. I’m betting that SD will be in a very similar spot 50 years from now if population keep on growing and SD is fully built out. I see some of that now in Mira Mesa. There are a lot of houses around me that have owners who bought 15-30 years ago and either have very little mortgage left or are completely paid off. Those original owners are your blue collar workers who could afford Mira Mesa 15-30 years ago. If they sell today, they can’t afford to buy a bigger place in Mira Mesa or better. So, they just stay put.[/quote]
SD County would have been “built out” at least 20 years ago if our “esteemed leadership” hadn’t given away the key to the store to their cronies in Big Development, thereby allowing them to run amok over each and every hill which could be bulldozed and flattened (future financial detriment to cities be damned). If SD County’s (and its cities’) leadership hadn’t sold their resident homeowners down the river in this fashion, existing homes in SD County circa ~1992 would be worth a h@ll of a lot more today. The vast majority of the residential distress resulting from the popping of the millenium boom bubble occurred in housing built since 2000. A lot of this distress has had a significant detrimental “spillover effect” on property values in the same or adjacent zip code which were situated in much more established areas (with little distress). These areas are only just now recovering their 2003 values.
OTOH, SM and SC County officials didn’t give away any keys to their store. They did what was expected of them by their constituents and dutifully minded the store so as not to disturb the pristine environment which was so carefully preserved by their predecessors. Not ALL of the open space in SF bay peninsula is National and state parkland. Portions of this valuable land was set aside by county leadership in the past several decades for current and future ecological preserves.
Except for Alameda County, the other 6 counties surrounding SF Bay have elected to preserve their open space to maintain their quality of life (and 4 of them have even dedicated more open space in the last 20 years) instead of “selling out” to endless Big Development concerns.
Contra Costa County has managed to do an exemplary job of preserving wide swaths of their open space, while having much of the same type (grassy, hilly) open space that San Diego County had (past tense) but whose leaders have since managed to approve subdivision permits on into oblivion. Thus, CC County has a very high quality of life and its well-established SFR stock has steadily increased in value, accordingly.
Hence, the higher RE values in the close-in bay area cities and counties are a product of good planning … and consistent follow-through under the stewardship of their successive leadership.
In sum, (excepting Alameda County, whose leaders sold out their open space corridor east of I-680 to Big Development … and SF County, which was already built out), the counties and their respective cities surrounding SF Bay could have issued rampant subdivision permits over the last 3 decades (as SD County and its cities did) but chose not to. That very act of choosing not to boosted the value of existing inventory, in part, by reducing the supply of available housing but more importantly, by preserving the quality of life in those communities.
You pay for what you get in this life.
And AN, as time rolls on, I feel as MM becomes more and more dense, established SFR’s there will end up losing value due to the “hassle factor.” And due to the City of SD’s “vision” for it, MM is well on its way to becoming known as a very heavily-populated multifamily and commercial/industrial area. It is only a matter of time. SF might be able to get away with that but MM cannot (and still retain its value and livability) :=0
