We can’t afford wishful thinking

Many a fortune has been made in real estate development. These days, we are often left to wonder how, when so many of those who are involved seem so removed from the changing picture and the emerging new reality.

Mintbrook, which the board of supervisors is set to vote on after a public hearing on Dec. 8, is one example.

We are of the firm belief, more deeply rooted all the time, that the large, single-family homes which represent the majority of the 475 proposed dwelling units there do not now and will not in the future have much of a market.

They are too far from jobs, the vast majority of which are and will be much closer to Washington. The commute is increasingly impossible because we can no longer afford the roads, we cannot afford the automobiles, and we cannot afford to depend on oil that is so inherently undependable.

The single-family homes will very likely be too big, by far. A recent study by Trulia, an online real estate analysis site, found that 6 percent — 6 percent — of Americans say that their ideal home is 3,200 square feet or more. For most of us, the ideal home today is much smaller.

“This,” Trulia notes, “dovetails with other reports from recent years that so-called ‘McMansions’ are becoming both unfashionable and economically unsound.”

By the standards of just a few years ago, it’s unlikely that the homes at Mintbrook will be McMansions. But our sense is that they will be too big for the new market that is developing here and across the country.

“...states, cities and counties are ill equipped to deliver their contribution to the American dream,” commentator Jim Bacon wrote recently.

“Nowhere is the crunch more evident than in the cluster of issues associated with ‘growth management’ -– the ability to accommodate growing populations with affordable housing supported by roads, transit, water, sewer, fire, police, schools and other public services. Just as Americans had come to expect an endless list of benefits from the federal government without fully paying for them, they developed entirely unrealistic expectations about what state and local governments could afford.”

Fauquier County cannot afford Mintbrook. Not to pick on one developer, it can’t afford all the other residential developments it is considering or has recently approved, either.

Bacon goes on to note that middle-class Americans wanted to live in Mintbrook houses, once upon a time.

But “the paradigm that guided growth and development for six decades has hit a dead end,” he argues. “State and local governments can no longer afford to build infrastructure for and deliver services to a population scattered over hundreds of millions of acres in scattered, low-density, disconnected human settlement patterns -– commonly referred to as ‘suburban sprawl.’”

The Commonwealth of Virginia can’t afford Mintbrook, either.

That builders and developers still clamor to create these outdated projects reflects their hope — a hope shared by many — that the glorious, free-spending days before the recession will return.

There is no returning to the way things were, Bacon opines, and we reluctantly agree.

“Banks will not renew the reckless lending of the 2000s any time soon,” he writes. “State and local governments will experience fiscal stress for years to come. The cost of automobile ownership will continue rising. The suburban growth model of the post-World War II, based on scattered, low-density development and segregated land uses, is shattered beyond mending.”

We’d all be better off if we had a lot more thinking of the forward-looking variety and a whole lot less of the wishful kind.

We need that in our developers, to be sure. In our supervisors, it is a pressing urgency.