Believe it or not, but the average 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house in
Bakersfield, according to Randal O’Toole’s new study, is overpriced by
$68,699 due to existing smart growth planning. But also believe
it or not, this is the lowest for all of California. The same
house in San Jose is smart growth overpriced by $513,002. So the
mayor is on to something. He does not want Bakersfield, the home
of the late great Buck Owens, to go the way of the rest of
California.
It is still not too late for NC. Only, you guessed it,
Asheville and Wilmington have smart growth overpricing, $13,901 and
$21,675 respectively. But the smart growth advocates are very
busy in the state. Davidson, for example, considered a
restriction that would require developers to preserve 50 percent of any
project as open space and put high density housing on the other 50
percent.
See Randal O’Toole’s study “The Planning Penalty: How
Smart Growth Makes Housing Unaffordable” at
http://americandreamcoalition.org/penalty.html
And don’t miss his Shaftesbury speech Wednesday, May 24th at Noon.
