How to make Smart Growth affordable

[marmar]

from Grist:



How to make Smart Growth affordable

by Jonathan Hiskes
4 Aug 2010 3:04 PM


Let's say you want to live in one of those fancy Smart Growth developments that green urbanists are always going on about. Let's say you want to live in any neighborhood with transit service and a grid that encourages walking and biking.

Great. Living in a walkable, transit-connected neighborhood can save you money on gas and car maintenance, and maybe even eliminate the need for a car altogether. But it will cost you too, because housing in dense areas is pricier on average than housing in spread-out suburbs.

Mortgage lenders could help make walkable urban homes more attainable by offering location-efficient mortgages (more on those later) -- but it would take a concerted effort from the Obama administration to make it happen.

The problem

The auto-dependent suburban housing style has dominated the nation's home construction for the last ... oh, six decades. But research suggests only about half of Americans want to live in those subdivisions. A 2004 National Association of Realtors survey found that 55 percent of respondents said they would prefer to live in Smart Growth-style neighborhoods rather than suburban ones. So while the supply of new housing in compact urban areas is low, demand is high.

"When you look at the supply side, even a town like Seattle has at best 10 percent of its housing stock in a walkable urban environment," said Christopher Leinberger, a University of Michigan real-estate scholar and the author of The Option of Urbanism. "You've got huge pent-up demand and that pushes up prices." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08-04-location-efficient-mortgages-smart-growth-housing-affordability

[marmar]

1. Self-kick

:kick:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. When I lived in Portland, I found that the alleged "savings" of renting in the burbs

were more than offset by the expense of owning a car.

People kept telling me that I was paying too much for rent living only ten blocks from downtown and that I could save $200 a month in rent by living in the suburbs, but I did the math and found that I was saving over $400 a month by not owning a car (which I would have had to buy at that point).

People think they "need" a car for grocery shopping or if they have kids. It is possible to raise kids without a car, especially if you don't feel compelled to enroll them in every after-school activity you can find. Kids actually LIKE riding buses and trains, and they are quite capable of using public transit by themselves at the age of about ten, which gives them more freedom than being strapped into the back seat of a car and forced to depend on adults for rides. As for grocery shopping, I've found that those megatrips to big box supermarkets leave me with loads of stuff that I don't use before it goes bad, so now I buy everything on an as-needed basis, which is how the rest of the world shops. (I live just a short walk from a food co-op, which helps.)

Here in Minneapolis, it's difficult to live without a car, especially if one's relatives ALL live outside the reach of public transit. But even though I received a "free" car when I moved here, I still lost $3000 a year in disposable income by driving.

[marmar]

5. Great point.

nt

[rucky]

3. Some of these developments are being built in the 'burbs, too.

There's one in Carmel(?), Indiana I visited. I don't know enough about the Indianapolis transit system to know how commutable it is without a car, though.

If transit extends to the 'burbs, why couldn't they exist there, too?

[marmar]

4. Yep. Converting 'burbs to the more centralized smart growth model is key.....

..... The sprawled exurbs are in real trouble, though.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. But even they could be retrofitted to a certain extent

and that would be a better use of our "national defense" funds than blowing up the Middle East.

1. Put in pedestrian bridges at all traffic lights

2. Ban the use of chain link fencing between commercial properties, which impedes walking. Is McDonald's going to invade Best Buy?

3. Build bicycle and pedestrian paths between residential areas and commercial areas

4. Require all new commercial and residential construction to have parking behind, beneath, or on top of the building, not in the front.

5. Accommodate the elderly and disabled by having free vans circulating to major residential and commercial areas.