Transit Oriented (affordable) Development

In case you missed it, the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University dropped a bombshell of a report about Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) back in October. Key finding:

"Rising incomes in some gentrifying [Transit-Rich Neighborhoods] may be accompanied by an increase in wealthier households who are more likely to own and use private vehicles, and less likely to use transit for commuting, than lower-income households."

Ironically, they found that enhancing transit infrastructure can actually make ridership go down (and car ownership up) in the neighborhood it serves. That's a puzzling dilemma that deserves some attention.

TOD advocates have understood for a while that infrastructure and design need to be carefully coordinated to produce successful results. Just plop down a new station without changing any of the zoning codes in advance, and you're guaranteed to end up with a park and ride lot surrounded by much of the same 20th century stuff. There's transit, and there's development, but the orientation part is missing entirely.

Back in 2003, Patrick Seigman published a handy and oft-cited TOD checklist,"Is it Really TOD?"

"A true TOD will include most of the following:

• The transit-oriented development lies within a five-minute walk of the transit stop, or about a quarter-mile from stop to edge. For major stations offering access to frequent high-speed service this catchment area may be extended to the measure of a 10-minute walk.
• A balanced mix of uses generates 24-hour ridership. There are places to work, to live, to learn, to relax and to shop for daily needs.
• A place-based zoning code generates buildings that shape and define memorable streets, squares, and plazas, while allowing uses to change easily over time.
• The average block perimeter is limited to no more than 1,350 feet. This generates a fine-grained network of streets, dispersing traffic and allowing for the creation of quiet and intimate thoroughfares.
• Minimum parking requirements are abolished.
• Maximum parking requirements are instituted: For every 1,000 workers, no more than 500 spaces and as few as 10 spaces are provided.
• Parking costs are "unbundled," and full market rates are charged for all parking spaces. The exception may be validated parking for shoppers.
• Major stops provide BikeStations, offering free attended bicycle parking, repairs, and rentals. At minor stops, secure and fully enclosed bicycle parking is provided.
• Transit service is fast, frequent, reliable, and comfortable, with a headway of 15 minutes or less.
• Roadway space is allocated and traffic signals timed primarily for the convenience of walkers and cyclists.
• Automobile level-of-service standards are met through congestion pricing measures, or disregarded entirely.
• Traffic is calmed, with roads designed to limit speed to 30 mph on major streets and 20 mph on lesser streets."

But is there anything missing?

We're seeing that having a mix of incomes is not just a bonus policy goal, but something woven into the success of a TOD on it's own terms. On the one hand, attracting the professional class is realistically the only way to generate the capital needed to spur substantial redevelopment. But the service-sector workers are the ones who are more likely to forgo car ownership, use transit more frequently, and actually walk to work in that cool, mixed-use cafe. Both the urban design features the architects want and the return on investment the transit planners want depend on a healthy mix of incomes.

Many cities now seek to capture some of the value generated by their public infrastructure investment into land-banked supported affordable housing. Groups like Denver's Urban Land Conservancy carefully anticipate any market changes along transit corridors and grab some of the land before it becomes prohibitively expensive. Then innovative housing models, such as community land trusts, can be used to hold down the value of the land to a level affordable to low- to moderate-income households indefinitely. When these units are built they'll be doubly affordable, in both housing and transportation costs for the residents.

"Density, Diversity, and Design" is still the operative catchphrase, as long as by diversity we mean the people as well as the structures and uses.

Smart growth and fiscal responsibility

I noticed that Geoff Anderson, President and CEO of Smart Growth America, has come out in favor of the recommendations submitted this week by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, at least the ones pertaining to tax reform.

"Unbeknownst to most, the federal government plays a massive role in the real estate market by subsidizing and enabling all kinds of development in our communities. With ballooning deficits, now seems like a good time to revisit these subsidies and make sure they are achieving a legitimate public purpose -and not, in the commission’s words, 'creating perverse incentives.'"

The smart growth movement has a long history of focusing on fiscal responsibility, dating back the the Costs of Sprawl published in 1974. This makes sense. Those of us who are too frugal to throw away the ketchup bottle before it's completely drained, cringe at the sight of underused parking lots being given over to weeds while far-off greener pastures are built on. It was all the more frustrating to watch this being done around the country with money that didn't actually exist. "Can we really afford this?" has been asked all along by John Norquist and James Howard Kunstler (albeit in very different ways!), and now finally this question is gaining some traction at the federal level.

The Home Mortgage Interest Deduction stands front and center in all of this. The deficit commission wants to limit the deduction to mortgages of $500,000 or less on primary residences. A healthy debate has been occurring among urbanist blogs about whether the HMID, in general, leads to a dispersal of housing. I'll dive in: I think no and maybe, depending on the region, but that there may be an important inter-regional impact to consider. My take on this is heavily influenced by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko's book Rethinking Federal Housing Policy (free pdf here).

In supply-constrained regions (like San Francisco), the extra money infused into the housing market by the HMID is swallowed up almost entirely into the prices of existing homes. There are few options for more development, so existing homeowners can simply raise their sale price to account for the buyer's willingness to spend more. This doesn't effect the built environment but it does mean housing affordability is compromised. In fact, the lower middle class takes a double-whammy with this. They pay taxes but don't make enough to use the deduction at all. Then they have to compete in a housing market inflated by the wealthier people who do benefit from the deduction. In these situations, the HMID may actually push people away from homeownership - the exact opposite of its stated purpose.

In elastic housing markets (like Houston or Detroit), the HMID probably does effect the built environment and drive down home prices to some degree. However, Glaeser and Gyourko's research indicates that the deduction is still not inducing much homeownership, because the subsidy is only available to wealthier households who are not usually the ones on the margin between renting and owning. They would buy anyway. Instead,

"A more important effect probably is on the quality of the home consumed, with people living in bigger and better homes than they would otherwise."

They question the wisdom of this tax incentive,

"In the old world of dumbbell apartments in dilapidated tenements, there may have been a case for government policies to improve quality and size. That case seems to much harder to make in today's world of suburban McMansions."

This is why I guess "maybe" for these regions. The quality improvement could mean either nicely-built craftsman bungalows or subdivisions of cavernous and disposable homes, but the HMID itself would not have much impact on the land costs - and that's what determines the spatial distribution of housing throughout the region.

What about the national scale? If the HMID pushes home prices higher in San Francisco and, at the same time, makes houses bigger for the same price in Phoenix, it's not hard to imagine some people who are considering a relocation to choose Phoenix partially on account of this effect. So the HMID may not make a region more sprawling than it would be without it, but it may help redistribute the national population away from places that are condensed to places that historically have been sprawling.

Bottom line: the HMID is essentially a one hundred billion dollar program for giving bigger homes to wealthier households in places that don't have much of an affordability problem anyway, all the while exacerbating the affordability in places where it already is a problem. It's not surprising that a group like Smart Growth America may question whether this is the best use of taxpayers' money in an era of overwhelming deficits.

UPDATE:  Here's a recently published study on the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction that puts some empirical meat on the bones I've described here. The Modeled Behavior blog summarizes the results:

"Using national data from 1984 to 2007 they found that the MID did not increase overall homeownership. In areas with light land use regulation they found that homeownership among higher income families was increased, and in tightly regulated housing markets homeownership was decreased for all income groups except the lowest. The effects, both positive and negative, generally range from 3% to 5%. Regardless of the regulatory environment, homeownership among the lowest income group was not affected at all by the MID.

The authors estimate that it each additional homeowner created by the mortgage interest deduction costs the government $53,590, a number they rightly call “staggering”.

An important implication of the findings is that in urban areas, where land use regulations are typically more restrictive, homeownership is likely to be negatively impacted."

Is the Broadacre City Worth Reviving?

Charles Waldheim of Harvard Graduate School of Design showcases a few historic architectural visions for those who wish to explore integrating agriculture into cities. However interesting this question is, a bright red flag shows up right away in his approach to the issue.

"The categories of agrarian and urban are usually understood as distinct. Across many disciplines, and for centuries, the country and the city have been defined in opposition to one another. But today, in striking contrast, design culture and discourse abound with claims for the potential for urban agriculture. As environmental literacy among designers and scholars has grown, so too has enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities. Fueling this trend is rising public interest in food and its production and distribution in a globalized world."

Maybe if it's reiterated "across many disciplines, and for centuries" there's something to it. As I’ve argued on Grist, the urban and the rural should become oppositional again (not to be confused with being opponents - they need each other). Synthesizing both together may have the sort of Hegelian appeal that’s drawn in some academics over the last century, for whom transcending accepted dichotomies is a way of life, but it’s less clear whether having one’s cake and eating it too works as well in the real world. Sprawl, which is the result of the union, happens to be much less romantic when you're parking your car at Target. So, first of all, I don’t know why a simple proposal like growing and distributing food within metropolitan areas has to carry with it such an iconoclastic dismantling of traditionally recognizable forms, but he seems to assume this from the outset.

Frank Lloyd Wright Displaying Broadacre City

Waldheim goes on to review some of the prominent modernist attempts at decentralizing the city from the American Frank Lloyd Wright, the German Ludwig Hilberseimer, and the Italian Andrea Branzi. Wrights’ utopian scheme of the Broadacre City is probably the most familiar. American settlements would be organized around a network of highways and (underground) power lines, with each citizen-farmer tending to his own acre. A benevolent architect would oversee the arrangement of the whole county. Wright considered cities, as they currently existed, debased beyond all possible reform. They could only dissipate into the countryside. Since Waldheim never comes out and declares a value judgment for any of these 20th century proposals, I couldn’t quite tell if he was raising them as fruitful considerations to be built upon or as warning signs, a set of reductio ad absurdum arguments against pureeing our low-density rural and our high-density cities into a mush of placeless mediocrity across the landscape.

A quick background check on Landscape Urbanism suggests that he may seriously be hoping to revive the Broadacre City. When we thought Jane Jacobs had thoroughly shellacked the whole decentralist train of thought back in the 1960s, a few academics have apparently determined that the dictates of avant garde subversiveness actually swing them back into the direction of auto-dependency and vigorous fragmentation of land.

Michael Mehaffy describes, on Planetizen, this curious position,

“The Landscape Urbanists, like many free-market defenders of sprawl, seem to think that sprawl is the result of inexorable forces, and did not arise as a result of comprehensible historical choices – choices that can be understood and thereby, to some extent, changed. Indeed, both groups share a remarkable consistency in their laissez-faire attitudes to what is, and what cannot be changed through concerted public action. 

Yet the historical record is clear, in the writings of Le Corbusier and others: sprawl was the result of designers' visions of their future, working with industrialists (or, less charitably, as apologists and marketers for industrialists).

Indeed, the Landscape Urbanists' shallow "understanding" of the forces that generated sprawl seem more aimed at constructing a "grand narrative" that declares that nothing is to be done, except to create art. History, precedent, typology – all of these are irrelevant now, and the only relevant force is their own imagination: "avant-gardist architectural practice, an interest in autonomy authorship."

Add to this the fact that the kind of art under consideration here is one that cannot, as a rule, use the term beauty. The ultimate purpose is to challenge preconceived notions, which works for you if you are trying to establish a niche in the global architectural pecking order. But if you happen to be someone living within the scheme, you may just prefer something beautiful and functional as a backdrop to your life - whether or not it has been done before.

Let's go with pictures. Here’s two places in my region from the last month:

There's an aesthetic presence to each of places that would be lost if they were mashed-up together. Downtown Charlottesville benefits from the vibrancy of human interventions, and the vineyard in Albemarle county from the relative lack thereof.

Frank Lloyd Wright conjured up Broadacre City during the Great Depression, when widespread automobile ownership was just starting to take hold. Perhaps he can be excused for forgetting to draw the acres of parking lots his ubiquitous highways would necessitate, or for undercounting the hard limits, in terms of land and energy resources, his spread-out settlements would run up against. But those of us with the benefit of hindsight should think twice before dusting off the old Broadacre City.

Developing a YIMBY mindset

Suppose you’re a homeowner in a nice, classic inner suburban neighborhood. There’s a little bit of vacant land down the street from you, and rumors are going around that some developers have their eyes on it for new homes. Your neighbors are looking into their legal options for stopping any construction from happening before it’s too late. They ask you to sign a petition they are bringing to city hall. You hadn’t thought much about this issue before, but now the question is sitting right in front of you with a pen and ink. Do you sign it?

You already like where you live – that’s why you chose it – but you wonder why it couldn’t become an even better neighborhood. You want to show solidarity with your neighbors, but there’s a selfish voice in the back of your head saying: maybe I want a few more homes or even a store on my street. It’s true that the residents of these new homes may be criminals, but that’s not very likely. Most people are decent. Maybe you’ll borrow a hedge-trimmer from them, or they might even host a block party in a few years. You could gain some new friends. You realize that it’s far more likely these new neighbors will call the police on someone breaking into your house than actually try to break into your house themselves.

You know the neighborhood coffee shop where you stop in the morning runs on a thin profit margin, and you would hate to see it close down during an economic down cycle. It occurs to you that a few more homes nearby means a few more daily customers. Maybe with more revenue coming in, your shop could justify serving bagels and cream cheese, giving you more breakfast options. Same goes for your friend’s dental practice on the other side of the street. Economically vibrant surroundings benefit you in a number of ways.

Then there's traffic. That’s the big one. The thought of more cars speeding by your home does give you pause, but this is where you have to consider the long-term effects. The residents of these new infill homes will probably drive less than they would if they were forced out the exurbs, meaning less overall congestion. And the more people who move in the more likely this is to be true. Maybe some will even eschew their car altogether. More people also means more political clout to get neighborhood amenities like better transit, traffic calming, a nice playground, whatever it is your neighborhood wants. And there may be a way to influence the design of this new development to reduce the chance that the new people will bring motor vehicles with them.

But what if you are just odd? Everyone else seems to resist more density, not embrace it. Remember, your property values are determined by what some anonymous future buyer wants in a neighborhood, not what you want in a neighborhood. Maybe you should just join the angry crowd at the public hearing, if only to protect your largest financial investment and keep your options open when it's time to move. But here’s the bewildering paradox: for all the resistance, there’s actually a huge latent demand for walkable urban neighborhoods not unlike what yours could become. New neighbors and services are more likely to help then hurt your nest egg.

Everything points to a yes-in-my-backyard response, and you haven't even gotten into the moral heroics of saving the region from sprawl or allowing more people an affordable and accessible place to live (or recognizing property rights, for that matter). These are just your own wishes for seeing your own neighborhood change for the better.

The Reluctant Suburbanites

Rod Dreher, a social commentator who writes under the self-titled banner “crunchy conservativism,” shared on his blog an interesting confession about the suburbs. Not interesting because it’s strange, but interesting because it’s so altogether normal. Despite his long-standing preference for, or at times even a philosophical commitment to walkable urban neighborhoods, he thinks he just might choose the opposite kind of house next time he moves. A conventional suburban home. Why?

“Whenever we get ready to buy our next house, it's not going to be in the city -- here in Philly, there's a four percent tax added to your wages -- but in one of the suburbs. I'd be lying if I said schools weren't a big part of it. We can't afford private schools where we live now, and the urban public school in our neighborhood leaves much to be desired, for the usual reasons. … Besides, life with kids is just easier in the suburbs. I hate to admit it, but it's true. The older I get, and the older my kids get, the less tolerance I have for the kinds of things that I didn't much mind when I was younger and in love with city life.”

Looking through the lens of personal morality or rationality or whatever, who can begrudge Dreher this decision? Let me immediately distance myself from those who reflexively cast judgment on suburbia and all who inhabit it like hurling a ball of fire down onto Sodom and Gomorrah. Let the record show, suburbanites are not evil. Yet whatever honesty Dreher reveals in this personal question, there’s still a structural tension in his mind. He can go on to say in an update,

“I think any place that makes you car-dependent is bad for your soul and the community's soul. The way we built suburbia in the 20th century was foolish and destructive in a number of ways. But we are where we are, and the flaws of suburbia don't obviate the flaws of urban life for middle-class families in the year 2010.”

Very obviously, his ideals are clashing with the reality of how things happen to have been built in America.

This is exactly why you should immediately distrust anyone (ahem … Joel Kotkin)  who insists that because people are “choosing” to live in the suburbs, in fact, the suburbs are their market choice - that the silent majority has spoken with their actions. As the logic goes: if everyone seems to be buying cookie dough ice cream then it means they must really like it, so somebody should go ahead and make more cookie dough ice cream. It's only the pistachio-craving elites who urge otherwise. Ok, but buying a home is different:

First, every home is a bundled good. You’re not just buying the roof that keeps rain from hitting your head and a patch of grass. You’re buying the educational options for your children, the transportation access to your job, the character of the neighborhood and the status it confers, membership into a jurisdiction (or HOA, for that matter) and the services it provides, a perception of safety, and on and on. You can’t always just disaggregate these parts, like ordering a Soy Mocha Half-Caf latte at Starbucks, at least not if you need to fit it into a middle-class budget. This is why people like Dreher may have to compromise on neighborhood form for, say, good schools.

Which gets to the second point. Real estate supply is always constrained in some way, whether by geography or land use controls (yes, Houston too).  Even in metro areas with plenty of vacant land, there’s only one piece of land with that house on it. That’s just the nature of space. No two places are alike. Because the market price responds to these inevitable supply constraints, consumer demand does not always win the day. Middle-class families like the Drehers can be priced out of even preference bundles that seem logically reasonable - like a modest home on a small lot with ok schools near some neighborhood amenities.

Thirdly, transitions in the housing stock move painfully slowly - as they should, because these are really durable goods. But there are other reasons the supply does not hasten to meet new demand. Infrastructure built to support an old model is hard to readapt, vested financial interests try to maintain property values through land use controls, and well-worn development business models seem less risky. As a result of these forces of inertia, a lot of us are living in houses built for the preferences exerted a generation or two ago, maybe even if it was just built five years ago.

Fourthly, homes have traditionally been investments as well as consumer goods. You’re not supposed to just buy what you want, but you also have to buy what you perceive others to want. This can lead to a self-perpetuating bias for the status quo and an over-emphasis on quantitative measures like square footage. But maybe as the investment side fades these days, we can feel more free to exercise our own desires.

Finally, there’s a long-standing mismatch in most metro areas between the resources for social services and those who need them most. Over many years, the demographic categories have sorted themselves out geographically and circumscribed themselves with political boundaries. This is part of the reason for the extra tax burden Dreher is referring to. Many suburban areas have absolved themselves of having to pay this by ensuring that the region’s share of the poor are not within their borders. Making a personal decision to buck the trend usually does carry a cost.

The point, maybe hidden in here somewhere, is that there has to be many Rod Drehers out there, albeit most of them without the time or ability to wrack their brains over the urban planning implications of their choices. For every household choosing the suburbs as suburbs, in all their backyard-grilling, kid-shuttling, lawn-mowing glory, there’s another household who grit their teeth and accept this spatial arrangement because it happens to be the only option available at their price point. This is hardly an argument for building more of them.

Thanks to Architecture and Morality for launching a discussion on Dreher’s housing thought process.

A housing director who understands the full cost of housing

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was interviewed on the financial costs imposed on individual families by lower density housing patterns. Ever since the Costs of Sprawl report was published in 1974, the talking points have mostly hovered around the increased fiscal costs to taxpayers of sprawl - you know, the pipes and roads, public services, environmental clean up, and so forth. Lately this story has been filled out with a more precise understanding of what individual Americans pay for this arrangement not just in taxes but in the everyday effort to balance the household budget.

Consumers need full disclosure of transportation costs

If Walkscore put walkability on the real estate map (it's getting better all the time, by the way), the new online tool Abogo might do the same for transportation affordability. Just type in an address and the home gets placed on a map showing average transportation costs for the surrounding neighborhood and the region. This is what you can expect to pay on a monthly basis if you choose to live here. Seeing this number in black and white may help diffuse the old drive-til-you-qualify myth - that you can find more house for the money the further from the city you move. Living in lower densities may pose less up-front costs per square foot, but the ongoing cost of getting to where you need to go on a regular basis is real and likely much higher. Abogo puts a number on that reality.

 The site is developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, who have been amassing an armful of data on transportation and housing for years now. Their Housing and Transportation Affordability Index presented this data last spring to tell the story of affordable living choices from a metropolitan area perspective, and the H+T Index site has already been incorporated into plenty of policy discussions, including the federal Sustainable Communities Initiative. Abogo is the next logical step, because it narrows the story to the consumer level where any real change in the marketplace will have to occur. Markets work best when information is available. As a homebuyer, the basic housing cost information is in your face. You literally have to write the check for your mortgage. Transportation costs are more nebulous, hidden in gas prices, insurance costs, saving for the next vehicle, parking, etc. Because of this, they have not typically figured into the home purchasing decision to the same degree.

I wanted to see how I stacked up out of curiosity. As a new homeowner, this tool is less useful to me now than it would have been a few months ago when we were looking, but it does put my home location in context. Abogo lists my block group as $830 a month in transportation costs for the average resident. We happen to keep meticulous budget records, and, from what I can tell, we’re  spending around $200 per month for transportation. This includes amortization on the vehicle, which is oldish and no-frills. We’re a family of three – pretty average on that account.  The difference probably arises out of the fact that I bike to work, and neither of us use the car every day. When we do drive – to the grocery for instance – it’s usually just a mile or so. Then there’s the occasional out of town trip.

I guess this means we have an extra $630 in our pockets each month just for some of these simple lifestyle tweaks. (Or it could mean the models are out of whack, but I've read through the methodology and it seems sound to me.)