A new study finds that garage parking costs the average renter an additional $1,700 per year (17 percent) nationwide. For the average carless renter, the extra cost of unused parking is $621 per year (13 percent). That amounts to $440 million in losses across more than 700,000 households. SSTI offers several useful resources that will help developers and cities build and manage parking efficiently.
affordable housing
Not so affordable HUD homes
A recent study found that 44 percent of HUD-subsidized households spend at least 15 percent of their income on transportation. When transportation costs are included, total costs for HUD-subsidized households were lowest in the most compact metropolitan areas and highest in more spread out areas.
The value of walkability
Is a home worth an $850 price premium for each additional Walk Score point? That’s the value that Emily Washington and Eli Dourado came up with using a fixed-effects model to analyze home sales across all metro and micropolitan areas in the U.S. Even with their price premium, however, homes in walkable urban neighborhoods often can end up cheaper than their suburban counterparts.
FTA pushes to link transit and affordable housing
In August, New and Small Starts Evaluation and Rating Guidance was released by the Federal Transit Administration. As part of the new guidance, FTA gives preference to projects that serve transit-dependent persons and evaluates plans and policies based on the tools in place to preserve or increase the amount of affordable housing in the project corridor.
American parking requirements: Massive (mostly), arbitrary, and costly
The large supply of parking has become a key concern in transportation and land use planning. Lots of parking makes it difficult for non-motorized modes to function, shifts costs from drivers to others, encourages SOV use, reduces available land for higher and better uses, creates stormwater issues, and so forth. One factor driving the prevalence of parking is regulation through zoning codes that impose parking minimums.
Poverty in the suburbs exacerbated by auto-dependency
A recent article entitled “Driven into Poverty: Walkable urbanism and the suburbanization of poverty,” proposes that, “Due to the scarcity and cost of urban housing, low-income people are being driven away from walkable urbanism and into auto-dependent sub-urbanism”. This follows a report by the Brookings Institution, which found that by 2008, the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country was located in the suburbs.
Losing Ground: The Struggle of Moderate-Income Households to Afford the Rising Costs of Housing and Transportation (Center for Housing Policy and the Center on Neighborhood Technology, 2012)
The combined costs of housing and transportation in the nation’s largest 25 metro areas have swelled by 44 percent since 2000 while incomes have failed to keep pace, according to a new report from the Center for Housing Policy – the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference – and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The report details the challenges that American households face as the combined costs of housing and transportation consume an ever-larger share of household incomes.
CNT unveils updated Housing + Transportation Affordability Index
Last week, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) unveiled its updated Housing and Transportation Affordability (HTA) Index. HTA provides a comprehensive measure of affordability by quantifying the combined costs of housing and transportation in communities across the U.S. The updated HTA Index provides a wealth of economic, demographic, geographic and environmental data to support improvements in equity and economic well-being through better transportation options and reductions in transportation-inefficient development.
FTA proposes shifting the focus of transit investment evaluations from commute time reduction to ridership and other metrics
The Federal Transit Administration’s proposed changes to the way it evaluates transit investment funding under the New Starts and Small Starts programs would shift the focus from travel time reduction to projected ridership and the …