But it's important to note what GVA Marquette
measures--and doesn't. It is a seven-county survey, according to GVA
web site, rather than the 11-county area that Chris Johnson thought.
Steve, it was your co-writer Jim Buchta, or some other staff member at the Star Tribune that got the GVA measure wrong. In the Saturday, July 12 Star Tribune Business Section, column 1, above the fold, front page, Jim Buchta's story on the rental rates starts. On page D-2, column 1, bottom of the page, first paragraph, second sentence, he writes, and I quote:
"According to GVA Marquette Advisors, the average vacancy rate in the 11-county metro area rose from 6.5 percent during the first quarter to 6.7 percent last quarter, ..."
I await your apology. :-)
7 or 11, it makes little difference. It's clearly a very different number than for Minneapolis proper.
More important to Minneapolis, GVA Marquette surveys only "rental communities with 10 units or more." I assume that means that the single-family, duplex, fourplex and eightplex buildings common in Minneapolis neighborhoods are below the survey's radar. Presumably this omission is for reasons of efficiency. It's easier to get more data more quickly by surveying larger complexes. But this at least leaves open the possibility that the low-end market is tighter than market levels, as advocates assert.
And those would be the interesting numbers, to me.
Chris Johnson asks about the dividing line for low income or affordable housing. I'm not going to repeat the commonly accepted definitions here because I've printed them in the paper so many times. The Family Housing Fund has good calculations based on the commonly accepted definitions at this web site: http://www.fhfund.org/dwnloads/working_d.pdf
That document is interesting, and is certainly fuel for the argument that there is still a shortage of affordable housing. It does not directly answer the question as to what current rent level would be considered affordable. From the numbers given in that document, one could estimate that below $700 a month in the year 2000 was affordable, but that assumes one agrees with the 30% of one's pay as the top limit for housing expenses. I won't argue that one way or the other. I just wanted to know if the vacancy rates were grossly distorted by higher end rents, resulting in too many vacancies for many landlords, but yet still not enough affordable units for the people who need them on the lower end.
That's a far more interesting issue to me. A landlord who has a high vacancy rate of 7 %-9% on high-end units doesn't make me worry about the state of the market in Minneapolis. On the other hand, that kind of rate on a large number of affordable units is a scarey thought.
Chris Johnson Fulton
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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