Headlines are attracted to mega policy change but the barriers to actual scaled deployment of more missing middle development are increasing rather than decreasing. In my view the missing middle project is becoming desperately risky for fledgling developers. These types may have plenty of passion and energy for the outcome, but few of the weapons of war needed to win battles. Those most suited to middle success are self performing infill home builders with business continuity, trade relations, equipment such as trailers, tools and machines, and who’ve normalized the order of operations at the job site. They can layer on difficult financing requirement and middle technical challenges, and permit fiascos and massive time waste, while continuing their typical day to day operation such as building single homes and semis, or whatever their bread and butter type predictable source of survival revenue is.
New or aspiring ‘middle’ entrants will have none of this knowledge and ‘can do’ confidence to step up and tackle the middle sized jobs, which are much harder to execute thus much riskier, and likely are busy at their unrelated day job. How to transition to developing middle while undergoing some sort of personal phase change that might mean a bunch of years of hard fought experience in the business?
My reluctance to counsel first time developers to attempt immeasurably hard, slow, risky, brain damaging middle projects rises in lockstep with my own gag reflex staring into the void of my project pipeline. One glaring difference between my own plans vs those of the typical new entrant is I have the land and budget in place without requiring the services of friendly 15% loan to own money lenders. And I still can’t really be successful in the middle as the projects become more awful to permit and the bylaws more intent to ruin viability, regardless of what the happy policies are coming from the mayor. I’ve come to the conclusion that those people really in charge, whoever they are, don’t want middle development. It is a symptom of this era of too much government and too much power in the hands of those who have nothing to do but make operating harder, like an annual ritual, while being personally rewarded with lucrative benefits and compensation without responsibility to actually do anything. The power of the government is strange in the way it manifests as a sadistic nemesis always ratcheting upward its strangulation of project viability. Is there a cabal of brokers that meets somewhere to seek out new and sophisticated tactics to prevent development? How is the government so good at damaging projects while being so inept at operating within its own jurisdiction? Why does the right hand of government seek to harm what the left hand attempts to enable? All of these questions are not likely to be answered and no layer of government held accountable. It may begin to make sense to retreat from any attempt at middle development soon, given the trajectory of dealing with the government. Who is going to deliver this message to aspiring developers?