By Brian Skeele, on June 28th, 2011
Arthur C Nelson is coming to town!
He’s the go to guy that has been pretty accurately predicting how the housing markets are evolving.
This coming Friday, June 30th, he’ll be in Santa Fe and hopefully shedding light on the latest trends.
Here’s my take. As us Boomers get to 65, retirement, we tend to sell our homes and downsize and/or relocate. The problem is there’s a smaller pool of buyers who can afford to buy the homes… Hispanic and African-Americans populations, though growing, haven’t been graduating from colleges in the numbers required to acquire the salaries necessary to buy our homes.
The American Dream of home ownership converting into our retirement nest egg has taken a hit. …401Ks have evaporated, massive numbers of tornados are whipping through the US; life is getting weird. In reponse, the average family size has increased, as more adult children are boomeranging back into their parent’s homes.
Interest rates on mortgages are low, but the downpayment required is now 20%.
So many trends are sloshing around, it’s hard to predict what is what, and where it’s going. Here’s a summary of Arthur Nelson’s thinking as of May 2011
The last half of the 20th Century and the first half of the last decade were characterized by a series of aligned trends that supported the housing industry, including increasing population, declining household size, rising homeownership, easier credit, ever bigger houses with more features, and back-to-back generations that sought suburban living — especially during child-raising years.Population will keep rising. The census bureau expects it to reach 341 million by 2020, up from 308 million in 2010. But all of the other trends are in reverse.
Despite the general bad news for the housing industry, some sectors will flourish — especially transit-oriented development, rental units, and multifamily and small lot housing. Some new urban development will support the continued revitalization of cities, but much will be in the suburbs, Nelson says. How and why these sectors will flourish will be covered in Part 2 of this report.
Sustainable Urban Villages are a growth sector amongst all the collateral damage from suburban sprawl. Share your ideas here! What would make a sustainable urban village, 3-4 story, mixed use, mixed income neighborhood so excellent, so compelling and supportive, that you’d move in??!!