Sunday, October 11, 2009

Opinion | America's renters deserve better treatment from federal and local governments | Seattle Times Newspaper

Opinion | America's renters deserve better treatment from federal and local governments | Seattle Times Newspaper: "Goodbye to the era of homeownership as the powerful, pervasive symbol of the American Dream. Who believes any longer that owning your own house is a sure ticket to building wealth and assuring yourself an easy retirement?

So, welcome back to renting — the plain vanilla, easy-to-grasp idea that you pay methodically, month by month, for the roof over your head."

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I think the era of home ownership began winding down when CIDs became the predominant form of new housing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

CID housing is nothing more or less than an absurdly expensive form of renting. Instead of a landlord, you have a homeowner association, which is the real owner. The HOA is far more intrusive than any landlord would dream of being.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely, you have virtually none of the incidences of ownership with CID housing. The only thing you own with CID housing is the liabilities of the HOA. You don't even own the right to vote on the liabilities that the HOA is going to impose upon you. Developers have been utilizing this for decades and the management companies and HOA attorneys start where the developers leave off.

Fred Pilot said...

For the sake of clarity, CIDs (common interest developments) are not housing per se but instead as Evan McKenzie pointed a decade and a half ago in his seminal work "Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government" a form of private, local government by nonprofit corporation.

I realize I have made this point before. But this issue cannot be intelligently discussed without accurately defining its components.

The term "CID housing" however can accurately describe attached unit projects such as condos and townhomes where the CID owns and manages the actual dwelling structure and the unit owner holds title only to the airspace within the walls of the individual condo units.

Anonymous said...

I think except in the case of foreclosures, the "CID" does not "own" the actual dwelling structure nor any portion of "common area".

For condos, typically the owners have 100% ownership interest in the dwelling unit (there are some variations as to where your ownership interest starts/stops) PLUS a % fractional share in the common areas or remainder as you have described it.


There are also "site built condominiums" which look like single family homes to the unsuspecting buyer. The homeowners own the home exclusively. All the homes sit on a "common area" that all the homeowners have a fractional percentage ownership interest in. No homeowner owns the land under his home exclusively. The individual homeowners only have an area of "limited exclusive use". This approach is used to bypass county/city subdivision platting rules (there is only a single parcel of land - no lots)