No one wants to miss out on making a small fortune by selling their house. Except the ones who do.
As Marin grapples with out-of-control housing prices — the median single-family house here is $1.675 million, a slight dip but still — and battles against any kind of affordable housing being proposed, I had an idea. A harebrained idea, perhaps. Not my first, just my latest.
“Maybe,” I proposed to a friend, “we should limit how much an existing home can be sold for, just like we do with affordable housing resales. They can only be sold at lower than market rate, so other moderate- and low-income would-be homeowners could afford it.”
My savvy friend promptly told me not to be ridiculous.
Housing is how people cash in on all the equity they’ve amassed so they can retire and downsize, he chided me. It’s also how many families pass down generational wealth. No one wants to miss out on making a small fortune, which is why there’s such pushback in Marin whenever there’s any potential threat to their property values, like when transitional housing to ease the growing homelessness problem is presented in a residential area. Homeowners fret, “What will it do to property values?” even though all the research indicates that property values not only do not plummet, they actually rise.
I’m certainly cognizant of what I would make whenever I fantasize about selling my house and downsizing or living overseas. My house is worth twice as much as I paid for it nearly two decades ago. It’s a teardown for sure — built in 1945, it has none of the amenities today’s homebuyers want, such as a grand bedroom and bathroom, and walk-in closets. But someone would likely snap it up and I’d walk away with a pretty penny.
Who wants to lose money on an investment, especially the biggest investment we’ll ever make?
So it seemed a bit rich when, at the marathon Mill Valley Planning Commission hearing on the Richardson Terrace project at East Blithedale and Camino Alto, residents wanted to know why the developer, Phil Richardson, doesn’t make the entire project affordable housing instead of just six of the 25 units.
There’s been similar chatter on social media, too.
Some suggested all the units should go toward the city’s teachers, firefighters and police, and indeed the Mill Valley School District is considering purchasing the six affordable units to rent to teachers and staff. Others suggested that the developer — actually all developers proposing privately built housing around here — could be less greedy and make a little less money. He could be a kind of local hero!
Obviously, I’m not the only one with harebrained ideas.
“In order to pay for those affordable units,” he told those at the meeting, “I’ve got to build something on which I can make some money.”
Who can blame him? Richardson has been trying to build at that location for nearly two decades. And if Marin residents get into a tizzy over any potential hit to their property values, it’s pretty clear they personally aren’t interested in being less greedy, making less money and becoming some sort of hero. Why do we expect others to be more altruistic than we are in some sort of woo-woo kumbaya way? Capitalism doesn’t work that way. Not for developers and not, apparently, for homeowners.
And yet, some people actually are willing to be better.
Retired preschool teacher Bobbi Loeb recently decided to sign over the Point Reyes Station bungalow she bought more than three decades ago — the house in which she raised two children — to a land trust, at half of what it’s worth. And here’s what Community Land Trust of West Marin will do with it: convert it into an affordable home for someone like Loeb, a lower-income resident, and pay it forward.
In exchange, the 81-year-old longtime West Marin resident gets to live in her home for the rest of her life without paying a mortgage. She gets to age in place, what many elders want to do but often struggle to do, especially around here, if they are house rich and cash poor.
She’s not losing anything, but her two children will. But they’re totally onboard with her plan, Loeb told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“This is my community. I want to do what I can,” she says. “I don’t see how this town can survive without affordable housing. And I mean, that’s my legacy, right?”
Imagine that! Three people putting the needs of their community above their own. Oh, her kids will still likely inherit what Loeb made from the sale. It just won’t be as much money as they could have made.
My idea may be harebrained — I’m not really convinced it is — but we have an affordable housing crisis in Marin and elsewhere. Do we really care? Loeb does, and so do her children. I wonder how many other Marin NIMBYs are willing to do the same.
Vicki Larson’s So It Goes opinion column runs every other week. Contact her at vlarson@marinij.com and follow her on Twitter, if it’s still a thing, at OMG Chronicles.
