This week, the Atlantic hosted its “Future of the City” conference in downtown D.C. The speaker list included a roster of heavy hitters like Valerie Jarrett, Volkswagen Group President and CEO Stefan Jacoby, the Brookings Institution’s Christopher Leinberger, and the obligatory high-charisma appearance by Richard Florida.
Among the best speakers at the event was Shaun Donovan, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He made the crucially simple yet often ignored point that the future of urban living (or any living, really) depends on one thing: We need affordable housing near workplaces.[SButtonZ button="digg"]
If anything, he argued, the economic crisis has highlighted that when Washington fails to address our sprawl epidemic, all the problems that result – obesity, congestion, foreign oil dependence – share a common element: There is a fundamental mismatch between where we live and where we work. Whatever we do to address these problems, he stated, the U.S. must find a way to attach housing to jobs.
The figures he gave to illustrate this point were stark: The costs of commuting to work in the U.S. have gone up 1000% in the past few decades. In Atlanta, the costs of driving totals 61% of family income in Atlanta, while cars eat up to 70% of family budgets in parts of California. Meanwhile, many cities face a huge shortage in affordable workforce housing.
But Donovan didn’t dwell on the depressing figures — he also offered up some solutions and signs of hope:
1. We must continue to recognize that cities and suburbs share an economic future – right now, cities house more than 80% of our population, and have a major economic impact. Chicago produces more than three quarters of Illinois’ GDP, and houses two thirds of the state’s population. Metro areas large and small are where the action is.
2. People are abandoning sprawl by moving back into central cities and inner-ring suburbs — and governments are responding, through measures like expanding transportation options and preserving the affordability of neighborhoods.
3. Challenges we once associated only with cities – like homelessness – have moved to the suburbs, and communities are coming together to deal with them. Recently, the first ever federal strategic plan to reduce homelessness was introduced, and it needs a real movement at the local level in order to be successful — particularly since the economic crisis led to the family homelessness growing 51% in a single year.
It’s exciting to see such a simple but critical issue finally get some attention! Affordable housing near work is getting harder to find all over the country, and its costing us, with families paying more for housing, transportation and energy, and spencing more time commuting than living their lives. Check out some of the work we’ve been doing on this issue across the country: http://www.nhcopenhouse.org/2010/06/nhc-and-nar-seek-solutions-for-working.html
Really?!?! 70% of household budgets go to cars? People who play with numbers should know you don’t mix average with median. That sounds like an average money spent on cars pushed up by Schwartzenegger and his ilks’ 5 hummers each applied to the median household income of $71,000 or so who drive Honda Civics.
Where do Donovan’s figures come from? They seem highly unrealistic. If you buy a new car for $20,000 every ten years, the payment is about $400 for five years, or $200/month on average. Throw in $125 for gas, $75 for insurance, and perhaps another $100 for maintenance, fees, and tolls, and you get about $500 per car per month, or $6000 per year. The median family income in the US is about $50000, which implies that a typical family with two cars is probably spending about 30% of its after-tax income on automobiles. That is a lot, but surely not 60 or 80%! Of course, one could argue that a lot of families earn less than $50000…but they probably don’t a new car every five years, either.
That being said, I lived in Japan a few years ago, and spent only about $150 per month on regular travel…not much more than what a normal American spends on gasoline alone here in the states. Oh, and their train system actually makes money while providing such a good deal.
I’m skeptical of those numbers, too. They just don’t seem plausible.
Having said that, years ago, I happened to move to a neighborhood (in a city famous for sprawl) that had all my basic weekend needs within walking distance. I didn’t even notice the situation when I moved, but what a pleasure it was to come home Friday evening and not touch my car until Monday morning! It made a believer out of me of all this stuff. The city planners who are doing this are definitely on the right path.
I moved to live v close to a city centre a few years ago so we can now walk or cycle to work, shops, scoops and play spaces. Great trains to get around the country and a good pay-by-the-hour hire car service within minutes of the house means we got rid of the car. So much happier, especially with morning commute of half hour cycle along a canal…
This is London, so obviously have had to trade square footage of living space, but is far more human and sociable to live in a community you walk around.
[...] on that point, apparently commuting costs in the United States have risen by 1000% over the past few decades. The staggering figure was shared at the “Future of the City” [...]
Donovan’s numbers come out of his ass. For figures that are true instead of truthy, see a national breakdown from the New York Times, which has transportation at 18% of the average US household’s budget, or a metro area by metro area breakdown from the Center for Neighborhood Technology that says the national average is 19.1% and the highest metro area average (Houston) is 20.9%. In Atlanta, the average is 18.7%.
This is a factor-of-3 distortion in numbers. For the record, I’ve called Wendell Cox a liar for a factor-of-2 distortion. Not knowing about Donovan’s history I’m not going to say he lied, but if he didn’t, then he’s severely clueless.
Even the signs of hope Donovan is citing are crap. Points 1 and 3 are standard urbanist boilerplate, and point 2 is just plain wrong. In old metro areas, the trend in the last 10-20 years has been for growth in the city center and the exurbs at the expense of the suburbs, including most of the inner suburbs.
[...] reported by Infrastructurist, Donovan discussed how many of our pressing issues – obesity, foreign oil dependency, and air [...]
@Chad – actually, I agree with the author’s figures; and your numbers are, I think, underestimated. Those days only a few people pay “$200/month for car, $75 for insurance…” Most people are talk to pay way more than that. On average, he monthly insurance are $150-200 per month, $250 – for lease. When you add gas, parking, violation tickets (unfortunately there’s pretty much no way around, except for a few lucky indidivuals), the cost per month can be easily $500-700. Now, we can multiply that by 12…
> We need affordable housing near workplaces.
Huh? That’s exactly the opposite of what we need! Urban centers are filled with affordable housing and public transportation.
The problem is the middle-class families have left the cities BECAUSE they’ve turned into slums of low-income housing. We let the urban planners run wild in the 60s and 70s, tearing down single-family houses and destroying neighborhoods to build Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings, quickly occupied with welfare queens and gangs.
Get the property values UP in the inner cities. STOP subsidizing housing. You lament the high commuting costs in metro areas, those people on the freeway are middle-class families commuting from the burbs to their office building downtown. They don’t need or want low-income housing in the city. They want safe neighborhoods and good schools and single-family homes. Suddenly if you have people with jobs living in the city, all the crazy lightrail and commuter rail ideas might make some sense.
While I wasn’t at the event yesterday, several folks I work with were. There’s a chance Donovan misspoke, but what he was talking about wasn’t that transportation costs amount 61% or 70% of income. He was saying that transportation PLUS housing – ie, “cost of living far from work” – leads to those high expenditures.
And the second point above is not wrong, it’s dead on. Many inner-suburbs are struggling, but by and large they are doing much better than neighborhoods with 40 minute commutes: http://www.nhcopenhouse.org/2010/06/dealing-with-death-of-pleasantville.html
Look at a map of foreclosures in major metro areas, and you’ll see a stark ring: its the far suburbs that are getting hit.
Steve: urban renewal rarely destroyed single-family houses. It mostly destroyed high-density, low-rise apartment blocks. Those were deemed slums, and people were denied mortgages in them even if they were qualified to borrow; the redlining formulas ensured that for most middle-class Americans, single-family suburban houses were the only places where they could get a mortgage.
NHC and the Center: go to the CNT study I linked to. What you’ll see is that the sum doesn’t get close to 70% of income – it tops at 57.7% in Tampa. You’ll also see that the cost of housing isn’t the cost of living far from work; transportation and housing costs are opposing forces. Living close to work gets you the high rents of Manhattan and San Francisco, which are then balanced by the low cost of public transportation.
The foreclosure number is a different issue from where people are moving, which is how this blog post presented Donovan’s argument. Foreclosures are rampant in areas that had a housing bubble with high population growth in the low- and middle-income brackets. In terms of vacancy rates, the Manhattan condos are suffering as much as the Inland Empire sprawlburgs, but because they cater to higher-income residents, there aren’t many foreclosures; developers take haircuts on profits instead.
Again, this is not the same as saying people are moving to the inner suburbs from the exurbs, which is false (compare Westchester’s population growth with the Poconos’). People are moving to city centers, but that’s an entirely different thing; what happens in the West Village has little bearing on what happens in Leonia.
While I agree with most of the article, three quarters (75%) of driving in US is not job commute related, but occurs when people drive to stores, recreation, schools, etc. Sprawl and its implications for cities, energy and economic policy is examined in an advance chapter for the Post Carbon Reader that I wrote: “The Death of Sprawl: Designing Urban Resilience for the 21st Century Resource Crises” http://www.postcarbon.org/report/109840-cities-the-death-of-sprawl
[...] This story is full of insights that seem glaringly obvious, but, given the last sixty years of policy, apparently aren’t. Studies show that a long commute is the factor most deleterious to happiness, but people persistently underestimate the effect of a lengthy drive to and from work on their state of mind (similarly, people have a tendency to overestimate the impact of a big house on their happiness). [...]
[...] This story is full of insights that seem glaringly obvious, but, given the last sixty years of policy, apparently aren’t. Studies show that a long commute is the factor most deleterious to happiness, but people persistently underestimate the effect of a lengthy drive to and from work on their state of mind (similarly, people have a tendency to overestimate the impact of a big house on their happiness). [...]