Rising real estate prices are diluting our neighborhood’s personality.
In the early ’90s, the building across the street from me was selling apartments for $25,000. I didn’t buy one. Today, those apartments sell for five or six times that amount.
This demonstrates two things. First, I know nothing about real estate. Second, I’m not sure anyone else does, either.
The one indisputable fact about home prices in Lakewood and East Dallas over the past decade is that they have soared, skyrocketed and gone through the roof. What’s much less clear is why, and, in the long term, what it means to the neighborhood.
Coldwell Banker’s Ron Burch, who humors me by showing me houses he knows I’m almost certainly not going to buy, gave up trying to explain what was going on five or six years ago, when prices on Lower Greenville went to $100 a square foot. Today, 1950s old-lady ranch houses go for $150 a square foot, homes in the M Streets go for $400,000, and if there is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house with closets below Northwest Highway that isn’t falling down for less than $200,000, I’ve yet to find it.
It’s not popular to say anything untoward about this sort of price appreciation. The county and city like it, since they can increase property tax revenues without increasing property taxes. (And as hellish as the school finance problem is, how much worse would it be if home values hadn’t doubled in the past decade?) Homeowners like it, since they enjoy the increase in equity without doing anything other than being in the right place at the right time. And what’s wrong with being rich?
Which is, of course, not the question to ask. Rather, we need to ask what the consequences of all this high-rent real estate might be. Certainly, there are concerns about a real estate bubble, and those of us who were here 20 years ago and saw houses lose value — in many of the same neighborhoods that are so hot today — are well aware of the possibility. But the experts say there’s a difference between what’s going on now and what happened then, and since I don’t know anything about real estate, I have to believe them.
The consequence, instead, is on display on the other side of Central Expressway, where a starter home can cost $650,000, and the only people who can afford to move in there these days are those F. Scott Fitzgerald called the very rich — whom, he pointed out, are quite different from the rest of us. A 20 percent down payment on a home that pricey is $130,000, which is double the median family income in the United States. Or, in more practical terms, eat dinner at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in the Lakewood Shopping Center, and then go eat at the Mi Cocina in Highland Park Village. You don’t have to be a sociologist to notice the difference.
Lakewood and East Dallas are vigorous and healthy neighborhoods, and the reason is not real estate prices. Rather, it’s about young and old, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers, people who are odd and people who aren’t quite so odd. It’s about people like me living more or less next door to people who are not like me in any way, shape or form, and both of us respecting the other. That makes us a genuine community, not a bunch of rich people who are buying schools.
But what happens if home prices keep rising the way they have? I was in the grocery store recently and overheard a younger fellow with long hair complaining that he had to move, since he couldn’t afford to live over here anymore. Twenty years ago — even 10 years ago — that never would have happened, and we’ll be worse off if it keeps happening.
There are already plenty of neighborhoods and subdivisions in the Dallas area where everyone is middle-aged, owns two SUVs, and plans their life around their 3,000-square-foot house. The day that happens to us, we won’t be us anymore.
