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February 22, 2001

What’s rental housing’s future? Watch TV

By MIKE SCOTT
Dupre + Scott

    The new generation of first-time renters grew up watching ‘Friends,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Felicity.’ The urban lifestyle is now glamorized nightly on television, affecting the attitudes and housing choices of both the baby boom and echo generations.

How we cope with what rental housing consumers will demand tomorrow will determine our success as a community. Young adults often adopt the cultural characteristic of their generation. We have seen the power of cultural influence dramatically shape housing consumption patterns over the past 50 years. What we want as housing consumers today has been molded in a battle for our psyche that extends back in time to our childhood.

Maxwell
Urban is not just a place, it’s a theme. Design features of new developments, such as the Fortune Group’s Maxwell on Capitol Hill, are meant to evoke a timeless urban feeling.

It was a battle that began in the 1950s and 1960s. It shaped the consumption patterns of the entire baby boom generation. The battle was waged between the claustrophobia of the Cramdens’ small, dark, and dingy urban tenement on the “Honeymooners” television show, and the open, peaceful, sunny, park-like setting of the Cleavers’ suburban home, in “Leave it to Beaver.”

Suburbia won, thanks to reinforcements from Robert Young and subliminal messaging. After all, father knows best. So what does all this mean? What can we observe, regardless of generation, about young adults living on their own for the first time?

Young adults live social, high-energy lives. As a result, many gravitate toward urban areas. We all know that. But then, we boomers moved out to suburbia as soon as we could, following the American Dream. I contend we did it, at least in part, because our cultural programming told us to.

Like lemmings, we followed that programming, literally programming by television. Along the way, we invented sprawl, not as important as our generation’s other invention of personal computers, but just as impressive.

According to the experts, sprawl is caused by affluence and population growth. That’s not all. Understanding sprawl is as easy as ABC, or NBC, or CBS. It is the result of desire, nurtured nightly by the flickering, purple glow of one hundred million television tubes.

Today, we want to limit sprawl, so we react with a number of strategies ranging from growth management acts, to location-efficient mortgages, and fixed-rail transit routes seemingly planned by coal-miners. But what exactly are we reacting against? Affluence? Population growth? Our desires? I hope not, but unfortunately I believe it’s some of each. The suburban dream, expressed by the Cleaver and Young families, won the battle for our minds in the mid-twentieth century, and has created new battles ever since.

By the 1980s, suburban bliss wasn’t enough. New television programming, featuring the Carrington family of “Dynasty” and the Ewing family of “Dallas,” taught us the value of conspicuous consumption. Following their lead, we demanded more from our housing. Up sprouted faux chateaux and McMansions all around the Puget Sound region. Billy Crystal satirized this maaaaavelous trend on “Saturday Night Live” by creating Fernando, a suave, totally self-absorbed character who repeatedly assured us, “It is better to look good than to feel good.”

The literature on sprawl is rife with sarcastic references about the spread of McMansions, like mine above. It’s not all undeserved. McMansion is a sneer word, but although these buildings are large, the sarcasm is not a criticism of spaciousness.

After all, it is not as if cramped quarters or adjoining walls are what human beings ought to prefer. There are many philosophical reasons why people might be more content with a modest or denser housing lifestyle. But these are arguments about materialistic culture and the modern soul, not about appropriate housing size and amenities. We need to be concerned with the housing demand implications of these trends.

We should be more concerned with the forces that will affect housing consumer attitudes about suburban and urban housing in this new decade. It won’t pay to stick to business as usual if that means assuming young consumers will exhibit the same consumption patterns as their boomer elders.

Many of the hottest television shows of the last half-dozen years focused on happy, successful and attractive young adults living interesting lives with lots of close friends in apartments in urban settings. The new generation of first-time renters grew up watching “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” “Melrose Place” and “Felicity.” Even boomers were targeted by some of this programming, improving their attitudes about urbanites.

The drama of the moral battle between urban and suburban living goes on. But the victor, for now, has shifted. The urban lifestyle is now glamorized nightly on television, affecting the attitudes of both the baby boom and echo generations.

Everything comes with a price tag. While network television is molding consumer taste to urban living, and achieving the urbanizing goal of the Growth Management Act along the way, it comes at a cost. The GMA also had affordability goals. Urban housing is denser, more complex to build, and therefore more expensive.

The fact that demand for higher density urban living is increasing at the same time the GMA encourages land use policies that support higher density housing is a fortunate coincidence. But it does not prove GMA right. These convergent forces suggest new opportunities at the policy development level to find new approaches to capitalize on these evolutions.

A factor driving the increase in demand for urban housing is a growing number of childless households, in large part due to baby boomers reaching the empty-nester phase of life. Convenience to work and adult amenities take on a much greater significance for these households.

The question about empty nesters is whether they will change their housing type and location or to stay put in their suburban single-family subdivisions. Following past generations, most will undoubtedly age in place. But boomers have a better attitude about urban living, so the entrenchment of the past is suspect. More will opt for urban living than ever before.

As would be expected, the changing mix of apartment renters has caused a shift in both the location attributes and the physical design characteristics of newly developed and renovated apartments. These evolutions do not, however, mean that the traditional rental market is disappearing. Indeed, the movements of the baby-boom echo into the household formation stage should result in a resurgence in apartment demand from affordability-driven households.

The affordable and lifestyle segments get all the attention. But about one-third of the market is in between these two extremes. Neither assisted, nor typically affluent, but certainly under-publicized, they always accounted for much of the demand and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Many can afford to own, but choose to rent.

Urban has taken on a new meaning. Today it is less a place than an activity or an attitude. Suburban apartments can and do create urban environments, with continental breakfasts, business centers, media rooms, courtyards, fountains, staffed reception and more upscale activities ranging from wine tastings to art exhibits.

So don’t think of urban as just a place. Urban is a theme. It is also design. We have looked at a lot of floor plans and designs for new units. There is a wave of new design features appearing in new development. Some features are meant to trigger a timeless urban feeling. The Maxwell, a new building on Capitol Hill, has a dome, not a large one, but still echoing styles of old European cities. Some new unit entries resemble brownstone style entries, conjuring up images of Manhattan’s sophisticated Upper Eastside living. An example of this is the new Avalon Bellevue.

Avalon High Grove’s advertising may indicate a budding revolution in features. They advertise “greenhouse windows and a pot balcony.” No, they aren’t catering to a Cheech and Chong consumer profile, but instead to the Martha Stewart inside each of us who wants a small herb garden, a legal herb garden.

How we cope with what rental housing consumers will demand will determine our success as a community. It’s not just about location, or product. It’s also about environment, transportation, cost and affordability. As a community, we have separate strategies to address each of these issues, but they don’t connect.

We need look no further than television once more to find the problem. Where? Why, it’s paraded unabashedly on “Temptation Island,” where only one “Survivor” can answer the question, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” To paraphrase Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is me.” Our strategies evolved from the individual desires, needs and goals of separate interest groups. Now it’s time to turn these separate agendas into true community strategies.

Mike Scott is a principal in Dupre + Scott Apartment Advisors (www.dsaa.com), a Seattle-based consulting firm that advises private and public clients on rental housing market issues.


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