Ali Sahabi of Optimum Group, LLC
President, Building Industry Association (BIA) Baldy View Chapter
The reason we devote an entire month to celebrating National Homeownership Month is because it presents an opportunity to illustrate those benefits that extend far beyond those accruing, to individual homeowners and their families, to those that benefit the entire community.
Today's new homes are constructed by the best-educated, most sophisticated and highly-trained building professionals according to the highest standards in the history of homebuilding. So when most people think of home-building professionals, we think of carpenters, plumbers, landscapers, bricklayers, architects and mortgage experts – the people who actually construct the homes.
However, here in the Baldy View Region, building the finest new home and new home communities in history requires a vast number of ancillary professions and scientific disciplines: anthropologists, hydrologists, engineers, geologists, botanists, lawyers, and title agents. Building today’s new home communities supports numerous government and regulatory professions such as building & safety inspectors, community development officials, planners and public safety experts who ensure that new home communities are designed to be the safest and most environmentally-friendly communities.
More importantly, building new home communities and remodeling homes makes a huge contribution to the overall economy. According to the 2014 update of The Economic Benefits of Housing in California prepared for the California Homebuilding Foundation Center by the Strategic Economic Research Center, the housing industry generates over $320.9 billion in output and supports almost 909,000 jobs throughout the state. With over nine percent of total state output, housing is California’s second largest industry, ranking above some of the state’s most recognized industries
Over one-half of the economic output was directly the result of new housing construction with billions more generated by those sectors which supply goods and services to the residential construction industry.
Because new homes have an assured longer life, appraisals are generally higher than on comparable resale homes and new homes are more likely to sell for a comparatively higher value in the future. This results in enhanced property tax revenue streams for our cities and county. Today's new homes are built as part of new home communities equipped with new infrastructure such as streets, parkways, and light standards guiding traffic flows, making new home communities safer and maintaining their value and the property values of existing homes and businesses surrounding them.
New home community builders construct or contribute to parks, libraries, state–of–the-art new schools and donate huge tracts of open space in environmentally–sensitive areas. New homes harmonize with the environment to protect our precious resources and keep your energy and utility costs as low as they can be. New homes are designed to use as little energy and water as possible by using these resources with the utmost efficiency.
More importantly, the designs for your home and your new home community are drawn up in collaboration with the widest possible range of organizations and agencies committed to the security of today's homeowner. In fact, before the designs of your home were submitted to your City Council for approval, your local public safety agencies such as your fire, police and building department all worked together with your homebuilder to ensure safety from the structure itself to the community and the environment. When today's new home-builders install the storm drains, streets and other infrastructure that makes up today's new home communities, they are designed to ensure that public safety personnel can respond to any event in the shortest time possible and to offer the greatest possible protection against fire, flood and seismic events. Extensive use of fuel modification zones or landscaping surrounding new hillside communities provides a significant buffer to prevent life or property loss to wildfires.
With the resources these professionals offer, your homebuilder has invested years of inspections and painstaking scientific study to ensure the safest, highest quality living location from your front yard to the open space surrounding your community - making today’s new home the best in history and giving all Californians much to celebrate in June.
