Ernest Kimme: How many houses do we need?

The Urban Land Institute wrote a report last year that generated a lot of controversy in the development community.

The report predicted that future house buyers will be less interested in typical suburban houses and more interested in condominiums and townhouses. The report has lots of numbers, but there are two main trends.

The first is the aging baby-boomers, those born from 1945 to 1960. Many are grandparents now, retired and living in large empty houses. They have no need for all those extra bedrooms in their typically large suburban home and they want something smaller and easier to maintain.

The other trend is the Gen Xers, those 20- to 35-year-olds who came to age in a different world than their parents. Many of them are rejecting the large suburban home as the ideal and are interested in smaller, more compact houses. They are shopping for zero-lot line houses, townhouses and condominiums. They prefer living closer to work, and within walking distance of good restaurants and shopping. They may be planning a family, but it is a small one, just one or two children.

According to the Urban Land Institute, these trends, if ignored, are going to result in declining demand (and declining prices) of typical suburban houses. Correspondingly, there will be a large demand for quality townhouses, close to dining and shopping.

This report has generated controversy. The Northern California Building Industry Association rejected it out of hand. "I flatly reject the assumptions," said a spokesman quoted in the Sacramento Bee.

Yet demographers agree that the trends are real. They believe the shift began about five years ago, but it has been hard to get a good statistical verification on the trend because the housing market has been so slow in the last few years.

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) has also predicted this. Vacaville in the past has built, on average, 300 to 400 new houses a year. ABAG predicted that would drop, just from population changes, to about 150 a year during the next 20 years.

However, ABAG also wants to change its housing policy, directing more residential building into the core cities: Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. This would mean that outlying cities, such as Vacaville, would need to build even fewer houses: about 75 a year.

Vacaville has two large suburbs, Southtown (with 750 houses) and North Village (with 2,000 houses) still to be completed. Lagoon Valley (1,000 houses) has not even been started. We're considering building another 900 houses in Vanden Meadows and another 5,000 houses east of Leisure Town Road. Are we going to need all them?

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