Prices Are Rising for New Homes, and the Land They Are Built On

Already, developers report that the cost of land in the most desirable areas is double what it was two years ago. At least three golf courses in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are being carved into millions of dollars’ worth of residential lots. The race has even sent builders back to outer suburbs like Otsego, 30 miles from downtown Minneapolis, where bulldozers are laying the groundwork for four-bedroom houses with three-car garages, in subdivisions bordered by cornfields.

“Lot buyers and sellers!!!!!!!!” Mr. Felix’s Web site reads. “It is time to get moving again....!”

Or past time. The latest land rush is in full swing, as developers realize that they have failed to feed the zoning, permitting and mapping pipeline, which can take months or years to turn raw fields into buildable lots. They are realizing another thing, too: they have been sorely missed.

“For the first time, I’ve seen cities want to work to help figure it out, rather than doing us a favor all the time to let us develop,” said Scott Carlston of Hunter Emerson, a development partnership. Hunter Emerson won a victory when the city of Eagan, a suburb of Minneapolis, allowed Parkview Golf Club to be converted into a high-end single-family subdivision.

The hunt for dirt is not limited to the Twin Cities. After builders across the country spent decades feeding acre after acre of raw land into the maw of demand for single-family homes, the housing crash left them with a land surplus so large that lots were selling for pennies on the dollar. At the peak of supply, in 2009, there were enough lots to last almost eight years, according to MetroStudy, a firm that tracks housing data. Now there is less than four year’s worth, and only about a quarter of that is in the more desirable A- or B-rated locations.

“We have gone from a situation where five years ago everyone was saying, ‘There’s too many lots,’ to today, builders are literally crying on our shoulder saying, ‘There’s not enough lots. We can’t find any,’” said Bradley F. Hunter, the chief economist at MetroStudy.

The shortage of lots is slowing the housing recovery, the National Association of Home Builders said last week. In August, 59 percent of builders surveyed said lot supply was low or very low, the association said. Housing is a critical driver for the economy, not just because of the jobs and supplies needed to build homes but also the appliances and furnishings that new occupants buy.

At the peak of the housing boom, builders were finishing more than 1.6 million single-family houses a year. That number plunged to less than half a million during the recession. This year, the industry is on track to complete more than 570,000 homes, still substantially below the level considered necessary to replace aging homes and provide for new households. A return to more normal rates of construction would substantially lift the economy’s anemic growth rate of about 2 percent over the last year.

Mr. Carlston said some cities in the Twin Cities area had adjusted their rules to allow fewer parking spaces or smaller lots. Otsego has lowered some of its development fees and allowed a developer to change an approved plan so that a partly built town house project could be finished with more salable detached homes. Rick Packer, a land development manager for Centra Homes, said some suburbs were relaxing requirements that homes be made of brick or stucco.

Even the Sierra Club, which once placed Minneapolis among the top 10 sprawl-threatened cities, has backed off a bit. An annual bike ride by the local chapter, once known as the “Tour de Sprawl,” has been given a less pejorative name and refocused to include not just threatened green space but what the group considers model development and transportation projects.

Mayor Mike Maguire of Eagan, a co-chairman of the Regional Council of Mayors Housing Initiative, said one reason his city had approved a land use change for the golf course was that so little new housing was built in the last few years. “When there’s no new development, you have stock that’s increasingly out of date and that tends to bring your home values down,” he said. “That was one of the things we were hearing back from Realtors, was they had people who wanted to move to Eagan but couldn’t find the home they wanted.”

Last year, Hunter Emerson agreed to pay $8.6 million for the golf course, wagering that the city would approve the land use change. The partnership sold the property to a national home builder for $13.1 million, Mr. Carlston said. The houses will cost from $400,000 to $700,000, he said.

The excess left from the boom — land in various stages of development ranging from untouched to what builders call PVC farms, named for the hard plastic plumbing pipes that, with electrical lines, were virtually all that was on the lots — is quickly being absorbed. Developers have gone from buying foreclosed acreage from banks to buying from farmers, family trusts, manufacturers and even homeowners with outdated homes on single lots.

“What we’ve seen is the inner ring of the suburbs, all those areas have come back,” said Rod Just of Key Land Homes, a Twin Cities builder. “The outer ring, they’ve taken just a little bit longer because of gas prices, but they’re going to come back.”

For builders, there is even a sense of déjà vu. “The new lots that are coming out,” Mr. Just said, “are almost the prices that they were in 2005 when everything crashed.”

Amma’s Multifaceted Empire, Built on Hugs

THERE are entourages — and then there is the retinue of Mata Amritanandamayi, a 59-year-old Indian guru known simply as Amma, or “mother.” On Friday, she began a two-month North American tour during which she will be accompanied by 275 volunteers. They plan to ride in four buses across the continent from Bellevue, Wash., to Marlborough, Mass., visiting 11 cities, including New York. And at each stop along the way, Amma will sit on stage for 15 hours at a stretch, greeting her thousands of devotees.

An Amma embrace at the ashram.

Amma is best known for literally embracing the masses; she has hugged millions of people around the world, a feat that has earned her the nickname “the hugging saint.” Her status as a spiritual therapist has attracted a large following in the United States. In India, however, what Amma offers is far more significant and complex. She has built a vast organization that is the envy of both India’s public and private sectors. As Oommen Chandy, the chief minister of the state of Kerala, told me: “From nothing, she has built an empire.”

I first heard about Amma roughly a year ago, when I was living in India teaching journalism as a Fulbright scholar. People kept telling me about a former fishing village in Kerala, in southern India, that was now a utopia in the jungle. Visitors talked about a mega-ashram, complete with a modern university and free health care, and described it as a gleaming cityscape where foreigners in pristine white uniforms swept the streets and scrubbed bird droppings off park benches. The entire community supposedly worshiped a middle-aged woman whose devotees came by the thousands, hailing her as a demigod.

They said she performed miracles, diverting storms and turning water into pudding. They said she’d built a place where everything, from light switches to recycling plants, worked as it was meant to — and, in India, this was perhaps the greatest miracle of all.

Lured by these tales, I decided to visit this place, called Amritapuri, to see for myself. To get there, I rode in a taxi through the backwaters of Kerala, past villages where bare-chested men fished from dugout canoes, a landscape that, unlike much of India, has changed little in centuries. When I saw high-rise buildings jutting above the canopy of palm trees, it was clear we were getting close. Traditionally, ashrams are quiet and secluded — much like monasteries — but Amma’s ashram was so vast and built up that it resembled a small metropolis.

After exiting the taxi at the main gate — there are no cars within the ashram itself — I set out on a series of footpaths that wound through a 100-acre campus containing the buildings of Amrita University (also founded by Amma) as well as dormitories, temples, restaurants and shops. I eventually reached a great hall where people were gathered, waiting patiently to meet Amma.

With the sort of effort required to navigate a New York City subway car at rush hour, I made my way through the crowd toward Amma, who was perched on a cushioned chair on a stage. One by one, people dropped to their knees and let her cradle them. In a span of roughly four minutes, she consoled a sobbing woman, chatted with an aged man and conducted a wedding. One of Amma’s many attendants, a volunteer who served as her press aide, helped me nudge, wedge and high-step my way to a coveted spot of honor at Amma’s feet.

I asked Amma how she maintained this pace. She smiled. Then she pinched my cheek and began to tickle me — the way a mother might tease a troublesome toddler — and said through an interpreter, “I am connected to the eternal energy source, so I am not like a battery that gets used up.”

In fact, Amma has energized an entire organization that often fills the vacuum left by government. When a tsunami devastated parts of southern India in 2004, it took the state government of Kerala five days merely to announce what it would do by way of aid and relief. Amma, however, began a response within hours, providing food and shelter to thousands of people; in the following years, her organization says, it has built more than 6,000 houses.

How Amma’s efforts are paid for remains something of a mystery. Her organization raises about $20 million a year from sources worldwide, according to a spokesman, but in India, the finances are not public. And the M.A. Center, her United States organization, is registered as a church and thus doesn’t have to disclose its finances the way secular tax-exempt groups do.