Housing and Transportation Affordability Index

Ever wonder how really affordable your house or apartment is? So have I and the Housing and Transit Affordability Index will show you the numbers. Based solely on rent cost, my apartment is fairly affordable, at 17% of my income. However, if you add in transportation costs, it more than doubles, to 40% of my income.

H+T Affordability Index: Seattle–Bellevue–Everett, WA: Comparing Housing Costs, % Income for Renters to Housing + Transportation Costs, % Income for Renters The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index is an innovative tool that measures the true affordability of housing based on its location.

© Copyright 2003-10 Center for Neighborhood Technology
2125 W North Ave, Chicago, IL 60647 · Tel: (773) 278-4800 · Fax: (773) 278-3840

If I compare the annual cost of driving to work versus the annual cost of transit, I find that I’m saving a ton by working from home and taking the bus whenever I can. The difference is amazing: $51 for transit a year, versus $2,048 for a car per year. The cost of transit is spread out across all riders, while the cost of operating your car is solely in your hands and your pocketbook. It costs more to own a car than to take the bus.

H+T Affordability Index: Seattle–Bellevue–Everett, WA: Comparing Annual VMT Cost ($) to Annual Transit Cost ($) The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index is an innovative tool that measures the true affordability of housing based on its location.

© Copyright 2003-10 Center for Neighborhood Technology
2125 W North Ave, Chicago, IL 60647 · Tel: (773) 278-4800 · Fax: (773) 278-3840

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Media: The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome

The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome:
Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream

John F. Wasik
Bloomberg, 2009

207 pages
US$24.95
ISBN 978-1576603208

John Wasik, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the Huffington Post, has written a book that examines the recent period in our history when homeownership actually made many people poorer. They have been forced to tap their home equity, go into debt to finance their unsustainable lifestyle, and contributed little to retirement investing because of the misguided assumption that home appreciation would fund their future years. Basically the period of time when homes stopped being a place to live and raise family, and became a temporary abode for a migrant family that changed residences every 5 to 7 years.

As John Wasik himself has said on his Cul-De-Sac Syndrome website:

After a lifetime of research and observation, an agonizing decline of the housing market, publication delays and collapse of the stock market, my Cul-de-Sac Syndrome has braved all odds to be published.

Why should you care about this book? It’s about our homes and communities and how we need to re-invent, re-envision and re-build the American Dream if we want to survive in this contentious century. Economics meets ecology in this radical new look at what we’ve taken for granted as a birthright.

The plight of the housing market writ large. The unsustainable “spurbs”, Wasik’s name for car-dependent sprawling urban areas, dot the land. I lived for a time in Colorado Springs and had friends who lived in one these spurbs. They had a twenty minute drive to get to the nearest grocery store, and the neighborhood was more a fenced-in plots of anonymous neighbors, than a community.

The City of Kenmore has a chance to make itself a more livable city, a more walkable city. It also needs to make itself more attractive to more manufacturing and office jobs, since retail and other service oriented businesses just isn’t enough.

Decide for yourself, you can pick up a copy of his book from my Sustainable Living Store.

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Tear down the Seattle Viaduct and replace it with…?

So, what would happen if the City of Seattle where to tear down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and not replace it with anything?

According to most pundits: Gridlock!

But according to the Braess Paradox: Better traffic flow and less traffic.

This is the conundrum presented in the Infrastructurist post “Huh?! 4 Cases Of How Tearing Down A Highway Can Relieve Traffic Jams (And Save Your City)”, where four case studies are examined and show that removing roads can actually reduce traffic in a city.

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Media: What’s your transportation footprint?

In the online Atlantic Magazine’s The Daily Dish article Taking Up Space, writer Richard Florida posted the following photographs which illustrate the amount of space taken up by different kinds of transit – bicycle, bus and car:

Image via SUNY Stonybrook Department of Geosciences (h/t: Ian Swain, Martin Prosperity Institute).

 According to the article each transportation footprint is:

Bicycle - 90 sq. m for 71 people to park their bikes.

Car - 1000 sq. m for 72 people to park their care (avg. occupancy of 1.2 people per car).

Bus - 30 sq m for the bus.

Some food for thought…

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Media: Impact on Land Use of Light Rail

The folks at Arnold Imaging, together with Kansas City Public Television, produced this 11 minute movie on the benefits of light rail on land development. This video shows how it helps encourage walkable development wherever there is a light rail station. It helps reinforce how light rail is a positive change in a community.

In a way, this meshes with a previous post in the Living Sustainability Blog: Smart Transit Oriented Development.    

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Media: City of Kenmore – Transit-Oriented Development

The City of Kenmore’s Downtown Task Force is having a meeting about Transit-Oriented Development in Kenmore.

Date: April 22nd
Time: 7 PM
Where:  Northshore Utility District
6830 NE 185th Street
Kenmore, WA 98028

Transit systems including bus service can provide a convenient transportation option and may help reduce traffic congestion. Successful transit systems require development patterns and community design, i.e. “transit-oriented development”

Photo by Mike Lydon

 (TOD) that support transit use. Interested in finding out more about TOD, asking questions and providing your vision of what this might mean for development along the SR522 corridor in Kenmore?

The City Council and City’s Downtown Task Force want your input on TOD. Please come and listen to a presentation and participate in a discussion led by Dr. Mark Hallenbeck on Wednesday April 22nd, 2009 at 7 p.m. at the Northshore Utility District. 6830 NE 185th Street, Kenmore, WA 98028. 

For more information about the Downtown Task Force discussion of TOD please visit the City’s website www.cityofkenmore.com or contact Debbie Bent, Community Development Director at 425 398-8900 or dbent@ci.kenmore.wa.us 

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Media: Contested Streets: Breaking NYC Gridlock

In the latest issue of the World Carfree News E-Bulletin, comes word of the New York City based Transportation Alternatives, a group whose mission is to reclaim New York City’s streets from the automobile, and to be an advocate for the concept that bicycling, walking and public transit are the best transportation alternatives. They produced the documentary Contested Streets: Breaking NYC Gridlock, a film that explores the rich diversity of New York City street life before the introduction of automobiles — and then goes on to show how New York can follow the example of other modern cities that have reclaimed their streets as vibrant public spaces. The following trailer gives you a taste of the full documentary that’s available for ordering from Transportation Alternatives.

As we can see, cities for most of their existence were for people and performing their business and day-to-day activities. Then at the turn of the 20th century accommodations for the mass-produced automobile had to be made. Prior to the introduction of the automobile, streets were laid out for pedestrian and horse drawn vehicles, including the first omnibuses.

Before the advent of the mass produced automobile, large cities like New York, London, Paris, and others, created working and viable public and private transit systems. After the introduction of the mass-produced automobile, the allure of the trolley and the train faded. Some accuse General Motors of conspiring to kill off the public transit systems in many cities, but in the end their most effective method of killing off public transit systems was simply to sell America on the myth of freedom through automobile ownership.

So what do we do? Obviously this is something we can’t do overnight. We can’t force people to leave the suburbs and move back into cities or a denser urban region around cities. But we have to do something. It will take some thought and planning to rebuild our shattered communities. It took a century to break them, it well may take a century to fix our communities. We shall see.

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Media: Carfree Barcelona: 1908

This wonderful little film was made in 1908 by by Ricardo de Baños (1884-1939). The camera was mounted on top of the driver’s cabin as the tram traveled through 1908 Barcelona. It shows much of what we have lost over the years to the car. It shows that the streets are full of people, walking and living in a community, not driving around in their own personal isolation cells, AKA automobiles. What vehicles there are on the road, are more of an impediment to the pedestrian and the trams that are moving through the city.

As you can see in this film, the streets are narrow, crowded with people, and full of life. Not like most American cities, where the only reason why the sidewalks are crowded is that they are too narrow, so as to make room for more cars on the roads. Life then was slower, a bit more relaxed, so you didn’t need a trolley that could do 40mph, just one that moved at the speed of bicycle or a running man.

Of course I’m not painting it to be a utopia, it was far from that. Infant mortality, sickness, discrimination, the lack of rights for women, it was far, far, from a utopia. But in terms of community life, in terms of being a place to live, instead of a place to sleep between driving to and from work, it was and is far better than what we have today.

[Edit: Another film to contemplate]

I found this version of the above film and it intercuts shots of 2008 Barcelona along the same roads that the original film traveled along. 

The contrast between pedestrian friendly, carfree Barcelona and modern day, car centric Barcelona is amazing. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are no people on the streets! The population of Barcelona has greatly increased in 100 years, from 533,000 in 1900 to 1,673,075 in 2006. Where are those extra 1,000,000 people? Not on the streets it seems. 

If there is any better evidence for what our car culture has done to destroy community and civil living, I’d like to know what it is. In 1908 we had a vibrant, living city, and then 100 years later, a ghost town inhabited only by a handful of people and lot of cars.

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Smart Transit Oriented Development

In Washington State, two bills failed to make it out of committee, House Bill 1490 and Senate Bill 5687. Both bills were aimed “to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through land use and transportation requirements”. The gist of the bill was to encourage more transit oriented development (TOD).

Photo by Mike Lydon

The main bugaboo about this kind of development is that it brings density to cities and towns outside of Seattle. My own town of Kenmore is wrestling with this very issue. Density would be limited to the corridor along SR 522 and up 68th Avenue for about half a mile or so. (My apartment is within that area.)

Yet at meetings with my neighbors there is talk about keeping Kenmore from growing and to somehow stop growth. Which you can’t unless you turn your entire community into a closed, gated citadel, keeping the barbarians out. Hopefully not everyone wants to do that.

You can’t stop growth, the only thing you can control it and direct it to areas where you can stand to grow. If you don’t, growth will come and grow where it damn well pleases. And that’s the old model of development. We need a new model that makes it easier for residents to make use of different transit options and also turn your standard “bedroom community” into a real community.

For instance in King County is starting a pilot program of water taxis across Lake Washington, with stops in several cities, Kenmore included. The proposed dock for this water taxi would be near the densest portion of Kenmore, population wise. It would be a boon to each city, bringing more people to their waterfronts. The problem is that most of the waterfronts are… industrial in nature for Kenmore and Renton. Currently, as far as I know, Kenmore does not have a plan to build a waterfront, so I’m not very confident that the water taxi service will really benefit Kenmore as much as our city fathers (and mothers) think it will.

Still, it is a step in the right direction towards making Kenmore a greener and more livable city. However, just building next to the Park and Ride or bus stop does not a transit oriented development make. You need more than that; you need to turn your community into a place for families and other people to congregate at, not just visit. Most development puts expensive boutiques in the retail space on the ground floor, and then wonder why no one shops there.

One of the major roadblocks to the development of the Kenmore Village by the Lake project here in Kenmore is that the contractors cannot find an “anchor store” for the project. The problem with that is any “anchor store” that they bring in to the project will probably be a franchise store and kill off any local businesses that could compete with it.

You want to promote local businesses, who will put their profits into the local economy, not into the franchise’s Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. That’s the real goal of transit oriented design: Making the local community more livable and inviting, and not turn it into a strip mall with apartments on top.

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Factoid: Buy Local, Think National

In today’s Crosscut article, Buy Local, Think National, it’s author, Floyd McKay, reports on the upswing of buy local organizations, highlighting the Bellingham, WA, group, Sustainable Connections, as one of the shining examples of a successful organization.

In many ways, this highlights the shortcomings of other regions in Washington state when it comes to encouraging local businesses. Many cities and towns, my own included, need to encourage the buy local ethic, and they need to encourage local businesses, either through tax incentives or by creating a business incubator for new local businesses. 

Now,we do have more than our share of farmers markets in the Puget Sound region, but they are very seasonal so that you only get a window on locally grown produce, fish, and meats. But we could do better. 

One common complaint I hear about my town, Kenmore, WA, is that while you have plenty of choices for lunch or dinner, or to have a drink, you can’t buy new shirt or underwear within a 20 minute drive. And drive is the operating word here. There is only one of two places I could go to without changing buses, the rest either take one or two bus changes and/or switch to a different transit company. 

The problem with that sentiment is that a business that sells clothes like that is typically not a local business, but a chain store. The reasons why are well known: chains can buy in bulk, substantially reducing the end cost of a good to the consumer, while local, mom & pop stores only buy lots of ten or twenty, thus paying a higher cost for the same goods, and passing on a higher price to the consumer. And consumers want low prices, despite the fact that it’s bad for their local economy and way of life. 

Can we turn the clock back to where it was more economical to buy everything locally? No, not unless we experience another major crash of the economy, one greater than the one we’re currently experiencing. 

Speaking of the current economy, one of the big problems most people cite about buying locally is that the prices are higher than for items shipped in from other countries. It’s one of those vicious circles: People don’t buy the local product, so that the local producer reduces the amount of that product he produces. Prices go up because now there’s fewer of the that product on the market and the producer has to cover his costs. People don’t buy the product because the price has gone up…

Eventually the local producer goes out of business because the cost of production just a few items is far higher than the return he gets selling the items.

One solution is to buy more of that locally produced product and encourage the local producer to make more.

That has it’s own nasty side effect. Take produce for instance. The sustainable farmer sells out of all his produce, so he opens up those fields that he had lie fallow or, more realistically, buys new fields and increases his yield for the next season. He may be able to lower prices and if he does well, he may expand again, if he can. And the demand for his produce increases.

The sustainable farmer is now faced with a dilemma: Not expand and maintain his current market or become a commercial farmer and drop sustainable farming in favor of production farming, using chemical fertilizers and non-ecological farming techniques. We all can hope he doesn’t choose the latter.

In the end, all we can do is to try to support those local businesses that we can and try to live a sustainable life.

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