Your Housing Questions Answered

Last Updated: November 6, 2022

We underestimated how many housing questions would come in through the Contact Us feature of the website.  We understand that many things you wonder about may be personal, but if and when you have a situation about finding or keeping a home that you can share anonymously with everyone in the world, here's the place to ask.

Near the bottom of this page, you will find a form that you can use to send us your question, as well as links to what others have asked.

An example of housing questions we receive is this: What happens when the little three-bedroom ranch like this one is no longer affordable or desirable in our community?

When you our website visitors ask a question, we do our best to provide a down-to-earth but professional answer based on the experience of the four of us urban planners who write for this platform. With housing prices going through the roof right now, as evidenced by rapidly escalating mortgage rates and skyrocketing rents, we expect that many more of you will find yourself in financial predicaments about where to live.

On the other hand, we are seeing local governments we have been working with becoming much more receptive to ways to restore housing affordability in their communities. Our consulting clients have become much more open to solutions such as accessory dwelling units, cluster housing, and urban community land trusts. You might have questions about some of these newer approaches to expanding the housing supply, building in more environmentally sustainable ways, or keeping the costs of home ownership down.

We hear questions about being a landlord, a real estate investor, a homeowner, and a tenant renting from a private landlord or a government subsidized program. 

Why the Importance of Answering Your Housing Questions Transcends Individual Household Needs

The overall condition of the housing in a community, and the arrangement of those homes within a street hierarchy, business districts, employment centers, and open spaces, determines a fairly large proportion of the success of any community.

Given that in most towns and cities residential use is by far the most prevalent land use, the role of housing as central to community development is solidified. Without a solid image of desirable housing and successful marketing of your neighborhoods, your chances of economic success as a community are much lower. In smaller towns and rural communities, you simply cannot attract the businesses that provide employments, goods, and services without decent choices of places to live.

Our own pet theory is that we place more weight on perceptions that we can understand, and almost all of us can relate to places to live that are common in our area.  From the community perspective, it's worth major attention to the appearance and functionality of your housing stock.

What do we mean?  Well, would anyone whose economic circumstances allowed options want to live in a particular neighborhood?  Are certain characteristics of the homes culturally obsolete?  For example, Americans want closets and garages, and it's hard to talk them into sacrificing those amenities.

Young people living in European town centers or old towns would be equally hard to convince that a house isolated on a cul-de-sac, featuring a garage that is closer to street than the front door, would be a desirable place to live.

Some cities and regions are experiencing either an outright severe housing shortage, or a large mismatch between the housing that is available and the amounts that households can afford to pay either to own a home or rent. If you need to research this in order to prove a point, in the U.S. the Census Bureau does a good job of compiling aggregate information about housing units.  We detail how to get started with obtaining that data on the neighborhood demographics page.

We find that housing questions are not necessarily unique to a homebuyer or a renter. Weird difficulties in trying to obtain clear title, ambiguities between the common law idea of what is a nuisance and the diminishing legal definition of nuisances in most jurisdictions, and disputes when buying or renting a home are commonplace.

Real estate development, subdivision platting, and construction of government-subsidized units in the U.S. and most other places has proceeded in waves of activity, so it's likely that your difficulty pertains to many more folks in your area.

So check out the invitation below to ask your housing questions.  It will be fine to leave your name and location blank if you wish. If we publish your question and our answer, which we will if your question is understandable to others, a new web page results, and you can use it in social media if you like.

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