The Starbucks Effect

"It was on the way to nowhere, [but] it had a Wal-Mart distribution center, and then a Wal-Mart was built there," says Vaughan, who bought two new homes in Hermiston in 2005, paying $114,000 and $120,000. By 2006 Hermiston had both a Home Depot and a Starbucks. And even as housing prices have fallen in many places, Vaughan estimates he could get at least $135,00 today for each of his properties, which are also delivering tax deductions while he rents them out.

Of course, as both Starbucks and Home Depot have infiltrated so much of the country (and perhaps become a little too ubiquitous in some places), this strategy becomes far less useful. When my wife and I bought our house in the Massachusetts suburbs in 1999, there was no Starbucks nearby; now there's one within two miles, but that's probably true in most areas where we'd consider living. Epstein, the store location wizard, can't help laughing when I ask about Starbucks locations near his home: he lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where the chain seems to have a location every few blocks down Broadway.

Alas, there is no Starbucks within the immediate vicinity of my brother-in-law's new Washington row house. But the neighborhood next door has two of them, he says, each less than a mile away. I plugged his new address into the "coming soon" feature on Starbucks store locator, which gives locations of stores that are on the drawing board. Nothing yet, but give it time. Sooner or later, Starbucks, Home Depot and the general housing market will begin to turn around, and then real estate obsessives can return to the peculiar hobby of mapping store expansions as a way to get rich quick.

Daniel McGinn is a national correspondent at Newsweek and the author of " HOUSE LUST: Americas Obsession With Our Homes ".

© 2008