This snippet says a lot about the problems facing So Cal, even if it was written for a Boston audience:
[M]ost large groups of buyers in the near future – Generation X, new middle-class immigrants, downsizing boomers – will be looking for the same thing: a nice little place at a nice little price. There aren’t many of those around. … “People won’t be able to pay a million bucks anymore,” says Myers. “They’ll be fighting at $800,000 instead.” There won’t be a marketwide bust in Boston, but prices for the top end, at least, won’t look like they do today.
If there’s no way to save those boomer houses (and thus those boomer retirement funds), is there at least some way to make sure that prices for the smaller homes don’t go skyrocketing past the means of the middle class? “What we really need [more of] is three-bedroom, 1½-bath homes, the kind that were built for the returning vets after World War II,” says O’Connell. Here, then, is a possible future role for the home builders who are starting to see the market for “faux chateaux” evaporate: They could redirect their efforts into building more modest homes.
There’s just one problem, adds O’Connell: “Those homes are the most difficult to build, because the community doesn’t want them.” Wealthy homeowners who fund local school districts with their property taxes usually don’t want to open their neighborhoods to lower-income parents, who would reap the benefits of good schools while paying comparatively less for them in taxes.
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