Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:03 and sunset is 5:14 for 10 hours 11 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1919, in Paris the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce are signed by the United States and France signaling official recognition of the new republic.
In Whitewater, a university town, one often hears that a large percentage of residences are, understandably, apartments. A large number of these apartments are student apartments. The university is large in proportion to the whole city, and so no one should be surprised by this.
This environment produces a claim from landlords and a few other special-interest men that is closer to a mantra than an ordinary economic claim: 71% of Whitewater’s residences are apartments, and so there should be no more apartments. To people who are captivated more easily by a number than the economic realities that underlie the number, the 71%-but-no-more assertion must seem powerful, almost indubitably true.
It’s not. It’s not no matter how often repeated.
Here is the sensible, economically rational question Whitewater faces:
Will current and projected households be adequately housed — at reasonable costs — without leaving many residents paying too much while a few reap high rents or mortgage receipts?
That’s it: from where we are, what makes the city’s residents more able to live within the city without exorbitant amounts of their income going to rent or housing costs?
Student housing, and that’s what most of the apartments in Whitewater are, can inflate the apartment share without telling you much about whether non-students can find places to live.
Student and non-student apartments are not the same, and no one not self-deluding thinks they are. We do not have a fungible, universal type of apartment in this city designed generically for anyone. There are landlords who have built student apartments, and some who have built a few apartments for elderly residents dependent on federal assistance, but far fewer residences of any kind for a middle class resident who might want an apartment or a house.
That’s why any given percentage — even 71% — means far less than what people wielding the figure think it means. Consider: If 71% of the coats in a store are size Small, the store still fails if most customers wear something else. A percentage tells us what’s on the shelf but doesn’t tell us whether the shelf matches demand.
Part of the problem of large-scale home construction in Whitewater is that one or two large landlords think any smaller home that is similar in square footage to a middle class apartment might also be a threat and should be opposed.
A few landlords come close to a residential oligopoly over apartments in Whitewater, and they assert an anti-growth, anti-market agenda to preserve the first-mover advantage they have inherited from an earlier generation. They insist that the easier first-mover conditions of a generation (or more) ago should apply today to anyone building in the city in today’s more difficult conditions of affordability.
These are like men who were admitted to school when standards were easier, and now insist that all current students should meet standards they themselves did not, and probably could not, ever meet.
This maintains their near-oligopoly on existing student-rental apartments directly, but also denies the city middle-class, non-student options of rentals or home ownership.
This is also why vacancy rates in conditions of a near-oligopoly of student-rental landlords are deceptive vacancy rates: part of that vacancy rate comes because those student-rental apartments are not desirable (or even suitable) for middle-class rentals.
That’s not what a middle-class market wants. These student-rental landlords built for only one segment (when they thought that was the only market that mattered). Now they want to keep anyone else who would supply a middle-class market from building (either by outright prohibition or by imposing limitations not suited to suppliers’ and consumers’ present-day conditions.)
Whitewater’s solution should include more missing middle housing (apartments, duplexes, townhomes) to broaden the non-student market with flexible standards in parking and design rather than a blunt rejection of anything.
That’s the difference between a self-intested incumbent landlord and a free-market advocate. The self-interested incumbent will fight for his profits (student-rentals, senior-citizen apartments) even if the rest of the community gets little or nothing for itself.
The free-market advocate will advance proposals that uplift the general good, acknowledging that today’s proposals are more difficult to achieve than the first-mover conditions of fifty years ago.