From the Philly Inquirer:
As numbers of poor in the suburbs rise
Despite its goal of creating an indivisible nation, America has always been divided by economics, race and class.
Throughout our turbulent history, nowhere have our divisions been more persistent than in our cities and suburbs. The 20th century saw a process in which richer Americans (mostly white) began in or near cities and then moved where they could live together in comfortable and relatively safe suburbs, while our poor (minorities and immigrants) have been locked in teeming tenements, facing poverty, crime and destructively high unemployment.
At least, that’s the story so far – that’s the way we’ve gotten used to imagining America. But that may be about to change.
A new five-year study by the Brookings Institution in Washington reveals that – perhaps for the first time – the numbers of poor have outstripped the wealthy in some suburban communities.
By 2005 the total number of poor Americans living in the suburbs outnumbered their city counterparts by at least one million. The trend developed for several reasons, including high costs of housing, food, and transportation in the cities, and often inadequate schools. Many city residents were driven to the suburbs, where they took up residence on tree-lined streets on the periphery of cities.
Six years ago, very few poor families used food pantries and charities to stretch their meager grocery budgets. Today, the number of families using everything from food pantries to food stamps has dramatically increased. Much of the expansion has hit the Midwest and the Eastern United States, including places outside of Philadelphia such as Riverside, Edgewater Park and Mount Holly in New Jersey.
Some communities that once were havens from big-city problems now host poor and immigrant families in search of better lives for their children and themselves.
Several communities not far from Philadelphia have seen in the last six to eight years a gradual increase in poor and immigrant families. The trend continues, and a few problems have developed, as suburban schools have grown more crowded and as some habits developed in the city have been exported to suburban areas.
Some poor families have moved to the Poconos for improved schools and housing. Parents sometimes commute 90 minutes daily to New York City or Philadelphia to improve life for their children and themselves.
Can’t we keep these people out of our towns with high property taxes…this is why I moved from Staten Island
you’re trying to make some kind of a bad joke with that comment, right?
Location location location.
That must be the River Edge way of keeping their town prestigious…keep property taxes so high that the low class people (anyone making under 200k a year) are kept out. It is a good thing those who bought before the year 2000 had the financial foresight.
#4thatbigwindow: lots of smoke and mirrors, and denial in River Edge.
And all those apartments in that are now occupied by famlies with children, which has out a strain ont own services such as the schools, which leads to higher taxes, but we do not talk about that.
BBB: It is a shame. Born and raised in River Edge, would have loved to live there and keep childhood home in the family. Don’t want to know what the property taxes will be in another 20 yrs…
Toll, Centex, Lennar Join `Moron’ Speculators in Land Grab Bust
By Bob Ivry
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Brian Tuttle owns so much land that he paid $3.6 million to get rid of 125 acres ready for development in the middle of Florida’s Palm Beach County.
“In 2005, I was a brain surgeon, and in 2006, I was a moron,” said Tuttle, who walked away from his deposit on the land rather than lose even more money buying it and building homes on it. “The only good news is that I’m not alone.”
The worst housing slump in 16 years made a lot of smart money vanish. D.R. Horton Inc., Pulte Homes Inc., Lennar Corp., Centex Corp. and Toll Brothers Inc., the five biggest U.S. homebuilders, said plummeting land prices cost them a combined $1.47 billion in the fourth quarter.
Builders paid more for land during the boom because home prices were rising, too. They didn’t realize speculators were pumping up demand by buying houses to sell quickly. When prices reached a point where speculators quit buying, homebuilders were forced to abandon so much property they helped create a glut that drove down land prices more than 9 percent last year, according to data compiled by New York-based research firm Real Capital Analytics Inc.
“Homebuilders allowed their own enthusiasm for price increases on houses to affect their decisions on what they would pay for land,” said Mike Inselmann, president of Metrostudy, a real estate research firm in Houston.
The decline in land values reveals the role short-term buyers played in the housing boom, when the median U.S. home price rose to $276,000 last June from $177,000 in February 2001. Industry executives, including Toll Brothers Chief Executive Officer Robert Toll, estimated that about a quarter of their houses were bought by people interested only in flipping them — buying and selling quickly rather than moving in.
`Dried Up’
Louis Genuario Jr., a regional builder in Alexandria, Virginia, said speculators may have made up about 40 percent of housing customers. In some new condominium complexes in suburban Washington, every buyer was a speculator, Genuario said.
“When land came on the market, you competed against national homebuilders who were flush with money and speculators who were jumping into the market and trying to resell it immediately,” Genuario said. “The price was high and the supply became limited. Then the market stopped when you couldn’t get people to buy because it exceeded their ability to pay. Now we see land that’s been on the market for months.”
These days, the speculators are looking foolish, too. In Florida, where they helped inflate land values as much as 10-fold from 2000 to 2005, prices have dropped by as much as 50 percent.
“The land market has dried up,” said Alex Barron, an analyst at San Francisco-based JMP Securities LLC. “Most builders are on the sidelines because they expect prices to go down another 30 percent.”
Florida Market
Read more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=home&sid=aA90FVv3DDrY#
tbw #6 Sad,and nobody seems to care, but in reality I think many people are afraid to say any thing different as they do nto wnat people to think that they cannot afford to live there.
I shudder to think about this years tax increase, with the new school addition coming on line in Sep7 07.
BBB: It seems the people in town who don’t have young kids in the school system are the ones who make it known they can’t afford it anymore. I guess caring what people think about you diminishes with age…
#9 Very true, but the reality is that I am sure many younger families are struggling with these taxes,and in many cases are less able to afford it then a good few of the seniors and those whose kids are done with the school system.
Sadly they are brainwashed into believing that if they do nto approve every school related expenditure, their children will suffer and their property values will decline.