[Electronic-lan] The Pace of Apartment Constructi

[Kirk McClure]

LAN Members –

Please see the attached analysis that I prepared addressing the long-term overbuilding in housing.

The real estate industry is prone to overbuilding.  This is true in all sectors, residential, retail, office, industrial, hospitality, etc.  This is true nationwide and in Lawrence.  The industry needs the public sector to regulate the pace of development.  Too much development is bad; overbuilt markets hurt existing space and older neighborhoods.  Too little development inhibits healthy turnover and the correct pricing of space.  The goal should be managed growth, which means growth in supply in close correspondence with the growth in demand.

Managed growth does not happen without concerted effort by the local government guided by instruction from staff planners.  Long-range planners should present annual reports to the Planning Commission.  The reports should include the type of analysis that I sent to you.  The analysis should be expanded from just housing to retail (comparing growth in inflation adjusted retail spending to growth in retail space); to office (comparing growth in office sector jobs to the growth in office space; etc.  The report should establish a sense of the Planning Commission’s past performance (are the various submarkets overbuilt? Balanced? Underbuilt?) and a sense of objectives for the next year or two (e.g.: Lawrence is expected to add 140 new renter households and needs x new rental units to absorb this growth).  Without these benchmarks, the Planning Commission is letting developers set the pace of growth, and we have seen this fail time and time again.

I suggest that LAN as well as neighborhood organizations push for growth management to be included in the updated Horizon 2020.

All the best,

Kirk


Kirk and Jeannie McClure
707 Tennessee Street
Lawrence, Kansas 66044-2369
785.842.8968
mcclurefamily at sbcglobal.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ku.edu/pipermail/electronic-lan/attachments/20171216/7ee433da/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Lawrence Housing Market Growth 1990 to 2017 notes.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 91783 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ku.edu/pipermail/electronic-lan/attachments/20171216/7ee433da/attachment-0001.pdf>