Planning on selling your rural McMansion to finance your retirement? You might want to rethink that plan. Your home may not be as valuable as you hope when the time comes.
More than half of Americans would be willing to pay more for a home closer to the city and mass transit than one further out. The Millennial generation is definitely making their interest to live an auto-free life known. They are much less willing to put up with traffic congestion than Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers. Nearly 70 percent of Millennials want to live near an easy access transit line into major employment and entertainments areas, such as downtown Seattle.
Developers have been aware of this shift in housing interest for some time and have been focusing on building Transit Orientated Developments (TODs). These urban villages are generally mixed use developments that include apartment or condo style housing and retail spaces for restaurants, shopping and personal services.
Fifty-Five percent of Americans favor changes to land use zoning to allow for more urban villages built along transit access lines. The trick purchasing might be to figure out where mass transit is going to be in the future and invest there before it becomes popular.