As car commuting demand changes, highways and parking lots give way to development

Urban highways and plentiful surface parking lots, once considered essential, have outlived their promise in many large U.S. cities. Observers see growing interest in dense urban living, with some mobile segments of the population opting out of car-dependent suburbs. Bold cities have been redeveloping the areas opened up by highway removal, and developers are poised to profit from the development of surface parking lots within revitalizing urban cores.

Highway and LRT nodes have similar impacts on home values

Both highway exits and light rail transit stations appear to generate similar impacts on single-family home values. These results are in keeping with the researchers’ hypothesis that the negative disamenity effect around transport nodes is relatively small and fades quickly with increasing distance, while the positive accessibility effect is larger and declines more gradually with distance.

Growing public interest in walkable communities, but public sector decision-makers still lag behind

Walkscore, the first website to offer easy-to-use walkability ratings for cities, neighborhoods, and individual properties now has some competition. Walkability, a rating system released this month targets private businesses, particularly those in the marketing, social networking, and real estate sectors.

The New Real Estate Mantra: Location Near Public Transportation (APTA, National Association of Realtors & CNT, 2013)

This analysis investigates how well residential properties located in proximity to fixed-guideway transit have maintained their value as compared to residential properties without transit access between 2006 and 2011 in five regions. Across the study regions, the transit shed outperformed the region as a whole by 41.6 percent.