Gainesville chooses existing homeowners over everyone else
In reversing previous moves to increase housing development while voting down even modest proposals to make more homes, the city is actively making housing more expensive in town.
I own a house. Single family detached house. Can I tell you something about that? It’s been pretty great because I’ve haven’t done a whole lot to the house, but my property values have shot up by an absurd level in the last few years. That is great for me, the homeowner, at least in the short term. It is not great for anyone who wants to become a homeowner. As my home’s valuation has gone up, so have other houses in the city. Some at an even more absurd level. Wages, especially in a place like Gainesville, have not even come close to keeping pace. Which means that for folks looking to buy a home, what was previously possible is now out of reach. I suspect this is not sustainable because it seems so obviously not sustainable. In the long run, that means it’s also not great for existing homeowners, at least the ones who care about their city1.
Let’s back up and talk about the wage issue because it’s an important part of things here that often gets overlooked in the discussion of housing supply and demand. Gainesville has one very large employer – The University of Florida and its hospital system. After UF, the next largest employers are the city itself, Gainesville Regional Utilities (the much maligned utility company), and the county government. There are not a whole lot of high paying private sector jobs in town. We don’t have those few major private sector employers that almost every thriving small city seems to have. We don’t even have one of those. This is one of many reasons why when people make a Gainesville to Austin comparison, I can’t help but chuckle and shake my head a bit. We wish! We wish we had the problems that come with booming industry here. Austin has problems of a rapid infusion of wealth and distribution discrepancies of that wealth. Gainesville has a median household income of roughly $41,000 and a 28.5% poverty rate. We have the problems of a lack of wealth. Austin, by comparison, has a median household income of roughly $79,000, nearly double that of Gainesville with a poverty rate of 12.5%. We wish we had their problems.
Against that backdrop, it seems almost impossible that home valuations could be rising so much, but they are in part because of a lack of diversity in housing supply. If you’re a person with kids and are lucky enough to have a good paying job, there are options for you. Gainesville, especially out west, has some perfectly fine cookie cutter houses that serve that part of the population well. If you’re a student with some wealth in your background, there are some good options for you as well2. What if you’re someone with a good job but no kids? Or someone with kids but not a great job? Or someone with a partner but no kids and no need for a 4 bedroom house? Or a retiree looking to downsize once your kids have started families of their own? Or just someone poor? With a 28.5% poverty rate, that last one covers a lot of folks in Gainesville. What’s available for them?
Those are the questions that city policy should look to answer because we know those questions pertain to a lot of people in town. We have single family detached homes, some are pretty large, but that’s not a fit for a lot of people. We allow for mobile homes, which are historically much cheaper than what’s consider a traditional single family house, but only in a small section on the outskirts of Gainesville. Single room occupancy units? Despite some well reasoned arguments even by people not inclined to normally support density, those are in short supply in Gainesville. As an aside, if the city were ever to get serious about eliminating homelessness, they could pour money into building or subsidizing SRO units instead of directing police to clear homeless encampments. Large sections of the city are zoned for single family lot areas of 6,000 square feet or more. Some of the areas where we allow some mixed single family and multifamily are in historic neighborhoods, which tend to be more expensive to live in because of the supply and demand issues and more restrictive and expensive in how you can modify your house. Some of those historic neighborhoods have old multifamily and small family houses only because that’s what we used to build before zoning got really restrictive. We were smarter back then.
To his credit, City Commissioner Bryan Eastman recognizes this is an issue. He put forth a modest proposal that kept single family zoning intact where it previously existed in Gainesville but allowed for smaller lot sizes and setbacks to encourage the development of more starter homes. People claiming that density advocates were waging a war on single family homes should have welcomed a proposal to allow for more single family homes. Yeah, that would mean a consistency of ideology and principles, not just a vibes-based position based on keeping everything frozen as is now and for the foreseeable future. Obviously that’s not happening here. The city commission voted down the Eastman proposal to encourage more affordable and diverse single family homes to be built everywhere in Gainesville by 4-3.
Folks, if there’s a common thread to what I write about housing in Alachua County, it’s this: We’re not serious about the issue here. We’re just not. We talk about it some. We have some workshops. Then we allow for existing homeowners and landlords who are benefitting greatly from a lack of supply to sway ill-informed or just unprincipled politicians to support preserving the status quo. The same status quo that allows for a 28.5% poverty rate and increasingly expensive housing costs. The same status quo that enriches existing homeowners while punishing aspiring ones, all because well, they were too late. They came to Gainesville too late or they finally had enough money and credit to buy a home too late. Sorry, wait until the next housing crash to buy a house I guess and hope you’re job isn’t lost in that recession. That’s a hell of a message.
The status quo in Gainesville sucks. It sucks for renters. It sucks for single people. It sucks for young professionals. It sucks for couples without kids. It sucks for retirees, especially those on a fixed income. It sucks for people don’t want to live in a detached single family home. It sucks for people who want something in a walkable community. It especially sucks for the poor. For those others, there are less ideal choices they can make and be ok by and by, although the lack of diverse supply means their demand drives up home prices across the board. For the poor, there are very few choices. And that, unfortunately, is by design in town.
Eastman’s proposal wasn’t going to fix all that. Even he would admit that if you asked him. But it was a step in the right direction – the one step forward after Gainesville’s 10 steps backward when the city voted to reinstate exclusionary zoning. But the city can’t even manage that one small step without falling backwards again.
Coming back to that Austin comparison, we are making some of the same mistakes Austin made when it was booming. Austin preserved single family housing zoning at the expense of its working class and ultimately its character. Now imagine making Austin’s housing mistakes and having Austin’s housing costs without having Austin’s high paying jobs. That’s Gainesville’s current track and yes, it sucks.
In the long run, even homeowners will suffer, at least the ones that care about wellbeing of their city. As housing gets more and more unaffordable, people will move out further from the city. They’ll drive more because we lack good alternatives. We’ll have more traffic and worse air quality. We’ll have more traffic-related deaths. Local artists won’t be able to afford living here so they’ll move somewhere else. Gainesville will get boring. This is not a good outcome even for homeowners who benefit in the short term.
If you’re a student who is not wealthy, the city and the University of Florida are failing you at the moment. One common argument that NIMBYs have in town is that UF should be building more on-campus housing for students. You know what? They’re right in this case! UF absolutely should be building more dorms and on-campus apartments. They certainly have both the room and the money for it. UF houses some 23% of students on campus, or roughly 11,000 out of 48,000 total students. Not great, UF!