Suburbs and Sprawl

Is Rail On The Wrong Track?

A new report on The Impacts of Commuter Rail in Greater Boston [PDF link] by urban planner Erin Beaton reaches some surprising conclusions about the efficacy of fixed rail train systems. Tom Keane lays it out in the Boston Globe—

One would think, for instance, that new commuter-rail stations might encourage development nearby. It turns out they don’t. Areas around train stations are only modestly more developed than anywhere else. One would also think that new stations might encourage more use of public transit. That is also untrue. The number of people using transit to get to work is largely unchanged by the addition of new stations.

Those results may seem counterintuitive but, upon reflection, make enormous sense. Take a look at the MBTA’s lovely color-coded maps of its rail system. All lines run into Boston. That would be smart planning if Boston were where all of the employers were. However, though that may have been largely true a century ago, today just a quarter of the jobs in the metropolitan region are downtown. Instead, you’ll find them along the beltways – Route 128 and Interstate 495 – and at office parks in between.

Besides, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a typical worker holds a job for just four years. So, when it comes time to buy a house, there is little value in getting something close to a rail station. After all, most jobs can’t be accessed from one (try, for example, taking the T from Medway to the Westborough Technology Park – it can’t be done). And even if your current job happens to be downtown, the odds are that your next job will be elsewhere.

There’s more. Commuter rail is skewed toward serving the affluent. Unlike buses or subways, rail largely connects well-off suburbanites to downtown jobs in high-paid fields such as finance and law. Moreover, new rail stations have a trivial effect on automobile use, meaning they do little to help the environment. (In fact, according to the MBTA’s own data, commuter rail – which relies on diesel-powered trains – often increases the emissions of nitrogen oxides, which can contribute to the formation of smog.) And travel by rail is not as inexpensive as its advocates would have you believe. If you own a car already, the cost of driving may actually be cheaper.

Monday Quick Hits—Proximity for Better or Worse

—Congrats to the Tigers for the win last night, but the World Series won't help Detroit very much, and the Super Bowl back in February didn't either.

—More coming this week on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's purchase of the Chicago Board of Trade to create the world's biggest exchange.

—Old fashioned physical proximity still matters in Silicon Valley, while Wall Street looks to Pennsylvania to back up, spread out and spread risk. (More at WallStreetWest.org).

—Speaking of spread-out New York, Brookings finds exurbia ascendant north of the city.

—On the left coast, Witold Rybczynski looks at San Francisco and when bad architecture happens to good cities.

—Back East, The Boston Globe is on track for its first unprofitable year ever, and Julia Vitullo-Martin compares Philadelphia to Boston and finds Philly's culture wanting. (Of course Boston being THE university town, with a built-in high tech sector as such, also helps).

—And Harry Siegel in the New York Post on how Governor Pataki and his fellow incumbocrats hollowed out New York's GOP.

Kotkin Omnibus

With the three hundred millionth American here, ubiquitous and insightful urbanist Joel Kotkin is thinking ahead to the next 45 years, and how to house the hundred million additional Americans expected by then. He thinks that both the smart growth set and the free marketeers are "doomed to fail."

He accuses the smart growth planners of being, "driven more by wishful thinking than practical realities," arguing that, "the idea of enforcing density… suffers from a fatal flaw: only ten to 15% of Americans want to live in a city." On the other hand, "a blind faith in market forces [amounts to] sprawl, with all its attendant ills: long commutes, excessive fuel consumption, pollution, and the proliferation of formless, soulless communities."

(While Kotkin is right that sprawl is primarily population-driven, it is not entirely a free market development. As public policy consultant Linda Morrison has noted, public highway and infrastructure subsidies push sprawl beyond where the market would otherwise extend.)

Kotkin argues for a new model, a network or archipelago of self-sustained, mixed-use Suburban Villages that would function as communities, not strictly residential commuting bases. Telecommuting, which allows the dispersed village to stay connected to the broader culture, allows for "a return not to the streetcar suburbs of the industrial revolution but to the older tradition of scattered self-sufficient, self-governing townships and villages."

Continue reading   Kotkin Omnibus

An Exceptional Distortion

Consultant Wendell Cox has an astute essay questioning the methodology of the Heavy Load report on the high combined cost of housing and transportation for working families in urban areas by the Center for Housing Policy. (Here's our post on the report last week, where we expressed some doubt about the numbers used).

As we noted, the Center implicitly argues that people who move farther away from their jobs to save on housing end up spending most all of the would-be savings on transportation. Cox points out that they backed into their numbers by using a "peer-reviewed" modeling technique to end up with transportation costs more than twice those cited in the readily available Department of Labor figures, and minimizing housing costs (this making more dramatic the cost of transportation as compared to that of housing) by using 2000 Census data, thus missing the dramatic jump in urban housing prices over the last few years.

While advocacy groups back into their numbers all the time, it is exceptional to see an affordable housing group, whose mission is to lay "the groundwork for the development of concrete and politically viable policies and programs that can be used to promote affordable housing across the country," use a methodology that minimizes the cost of housing.

Mortgage vs. Motor

The Center for Housing Policy, an affordable housing group, has a new report out called A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families, that's worth a look. Following up on earlier research by the Center that shows "a clear trade off between the housing and transportation costs of Working Families" (note the capitalization), the report shows that while working families in the 28 metropolitan regions studied spend about the same percentage of income on housing as most families (27.7% for working families against 27.4% for all households), their transportation costs are nearly 50 percent greater.

There are some methodological problems here, particularly in the study's definition of working families as those with annual income between $20,000 and $50,000, without adjusting for pay variations between regions. And of course the report is intended to push a chronic affordable housing crisis.

Still, it's striking how little variation there is in combined housing and transportation costs between regions, with working families spending an average of 57% of total income on housing and transportation (against 47.6% for all families), ranging from 54% in Pittsburgh to 63% in San Francisco. There are much greater variances in the housing-transportation split, with St. Louis at 23-32 at one end, and chronic outlier San Francisco at 35-27 at the other.

The Center pushes the claim that apparently affordable housing is often illusory, with all savings and then some eaten up by car and commuting costs. The data doesn't seem to go quite as far, but there's an excellent point at the end of the article linked above—"A three-car family puts a lot of money into depreciating assets, instead of into mortgages and college educations."

Sorting out our Citizens

Redefining Property Values
By Design, Status Seekers and Tree-Huggers Don't Have to Commune
By Stephanie McCrummen Washington Post Sunday, April 16, 2006

At Ladera Ranch, now a thriving community of more than 16,000 people, various villages are tailored not simply to practical needs, but to what marketers call different "values subcultures.""We were trying to characterize the lens through which people see the world," said Brooke Warrick, who heads Ladera's marketing firm, American Lives. "A community is a collection of symbols and images. And we wanted our symbols and images to be better than the other guy's."As the largest building boom since the 1950s continues across the suburban frontier, the story of Ladera Ranch offers an extreme example of how developers are using the kind of sophisticated market research more commonly used to sell Hummers or Cornflakes to build the very places people live, and in a sense, to try to socially engineer community.
(realestate/suburbs/sprawl)