Patrick Kennedy stresses the importance of quality over quantity in residential housing by comparing houses in McKinney, North Texas, with those on Swiss Avenue near Downtown Dallas.
Kennedy discovers that home value in sprawling McKinney tanked by as much as 44% whereas those on Swiss Avenue "averaged a 10 percent increase in value since the housing peak in 2008."
Claiming that build quality, more or less, contributes to the disparity, Kennedy writes:
"[I]n order to get houses up in three months rather than 12 to 18, builders use stock plans without giving much thought to layout. Rooms are huge because that means fewer walls, and walls cost money. The lumber is full of knots, and it's softer than the old-growth timbers that were used to build houses 50 or 100 years ago. The result is that much of the tract housing stock in our exurbs won't be standing in 30 years."
"I'm afraid many exurban neighborhoods [...] face an uncertain future against shifting demographics looking to downsize," he adds.
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