How Should The Government Fix Affordable Housing?

Many American cities are experiencing a shortage of affordable housing. It’s a big problem that needs to be addressed, but there’s little consensus about how to address it. Add to that the NIMBY attitude that many people seem to hold toward affordable housing projects, and we’re looking at a problem that is both complex and politically charged.

Housing costs in San Francisco have skyrocketed in the past few years and it doesn’t look like they’ll stop increasing any time soon. One of the reasons for the price increase is because discretionary permitting prevents the housing supply from increasing rapidly as the population grows. Some such as the blog Market Urbanism believe that reforming regulations so that development is less restricted would go a long way in addressing the issue. On top of that, creating a land tax would encourage denser development, and funding housing vouchers with that tax money would ensure that the amount of funding increases when housing demand goes up and drives up the cost of land.

Los Angeles is suffering from a lack of affordable housing as well, and some feel that the local government should be doing far more to address the issue. Some suggested solutions to LA’s affordable housing issue include overhauling the zoning code so that it’s easier to develop, offering incentives to developers for building affordable housing, and preserving the current stock of affordable housing.

All of these proposed solutions include some form of government intervention. However, we have seen that some government responses, like rent control and subsidized housing, have not exactly solved the affordable housing problem in the past. If that’s the case, how should the government intervene in affordable housing issues? Whichever way we choose to address the problem, it’ll be important to understand the housing market, as well as acknowledge the shortcomings of our previous solutions.

Talking Headways Podcast: Free Ranging Kids and Uber Data

Hopefully we'll start to see more posts after quite a long hiatus around here. In addition to Kelly's posts from The Direct Transfer, we're going to be also posting my weekly podcast that Streetsblog hosts. Unfortunately my co-host Tanya is not going to be podding with me every week (She'll be back as a guest), but we'll have some sweet guest hosts talking about all things transportation and cities.

This one below is the last full pod from Tanya and me. In it we talk about free range kids and whether the Uber data dump is just a PR move or will actually help transportation planners. If you haven't been listening to us, hopefully you will enjoy it. You can find us on iTunes and Stitcher as well if you wish to subscribe.

The Debate Over Whether Gentrification Exists

Editors Note: Kelly Wong has been collecting articles from The Direct Transfer that tell the story of different urban issues.  Her posts from the Direct Transfer Blog will also appear on the Overhead Wire.  If you wish to subscribe to The Direct Transfer Daily Email, a project of the Overhead Wire please visit here.  To see Kelly's previous posts, you can find them here.

Gentrification is most commonly debated about in the sense that people disagree on how to counter its negative effects. However, there are also some who debate whether gentrification is actually harmful at all. Some people think it’s is one of the biggest urban issues in the developed world, some acknowledge that it’s not good but feel that there are bigger problems to worry about, and others deny that the negative effects of gentrification are nearly as abundant as the media make them out to be.

 A recent Slate article argues that for the most part, the negative effects of gentrification are hugely exaggerated, to the point where gentrification is more of a myth than an established urban phenomenon. After all, gentrification in which a previously poor neighborhood becomes overtaken by upper and middle class residents is extremely rare, and the article argues there is little proof that displacement happens in gentrifying neighborhoods any more than it happens in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. Socioeconomic status of most neighborhoods is quite stable over time, and neighborhoods that have had rises in average income actually reap some benefits from it.

 Others vehemently disagree. Looking at New York, which is one of the most illustrative cases of gentrification, we can see a definite and dramatic change in racial and income demographics over the last couple decades. The black population in many neighborhoods decreased while the white population increased, along with an increase in income. Subsidized affordable rentals are far more likely to convert to market rate in gentrified neighborhoods, driving out lower income residents who will no longer be able to afford the cost of housing.

 This City Limits survey shows that while some people think that gentrification is a good thing, the majority of readers feel that gentrification is problematic, though they vastly disagree about how to counter it or whether it can even be remedied. If there’s one thing the debate over gentrification shows, it’s that the issue is complex and nuanced, and that no easy answers will be appearing anytime soon.

Do We Have a Choice?

This really irks me... 

"I absolutely believe in choice," said Wendy Danks, director of marketing for the Builders Association of the Twin Cities. And she thinks consumers will choose to buy what they have bought in the past. The advantages of single-family homes -- good prices, good schools, family-friendly yards -- will continue to attract buyers, she said. 

Do we really have a choice?  I don't think so because the price of urban housing is nowhere near the cheap price of sprawl.  This needs to change, and it needs to start with these Builders Associations realizing that they are part of the problem, actually believing there is a choice.

Too Long for Twitter or Why We Lack Urban Vision in Transit

Reading this article by Conrad deFiebre I was struck by how the comments from streets.mn's David Levinson could be said about most regions around the country...

The council's draft 2040 Metropolitan Transportation Policy Plan "is not an urbanist vision," protests U of M transportation guru David Levinson in a new blog. "It is, unfortunately, not a bold vision. It is a fiscally constrained vision. It is a vision of an organization ... representing seven mostly suburban counties."

 It's too long for twitter, but too important to miss.

Is Good Urban Form Slowing Us Down?

There has been a lot of chatter recently on the issue of fast vs slow transit.  This week is the perfect time for this discussion as two major United States transit projects of differing stripes opened up; the Metro Silver Line in Washington DC and the Tucson Streetcar.

Last week, Yonah Freemark wrote a post discussing the benefits of fast transit specifically calling out the Green Line in Minneapolis for running 11 miles in about an hour.  Now, this line has parts of what people are always asking streetcars to have; dedicated lanes. "They get stuck!"  Yet this line, as well as the T-Third in San Francisco and others mentioned in the post are still "too slow".  Yonah goes on to discuss metro expansion in Paris leaving a discussion of politics and costs of rapid transit to the very end.

To me this points to the first place where urbanism and fast transit disagree with each other, block sizes and stop spacing.  By trying to maximize connections to the community, the transit line has to stop more often, slowing speeds.  And if built into a legacy urban fabric, this also includes negotiation with tons of cross streets where designers don't give priority to the transit line.  This happens in Cleveland on the Health Line BRT as well as the Orange Line in Los Angeles, even though it has its own very separated right of way.  The Gold Line Light Rail in LA and the Orange Line originally had the same distance, yet one was 15 minutes faster end to end. A lot of this had to do with less priority on cross streets given to the Orange Line, not because it was a bus or rail line.

We continue to talk as if dedicated lanes are magic, but its a suite of tools that helps speed transit along inside of our wonderful urban fabrics.  Transit is directly affected by urbanism, if we let it be.

But then there is the other side of this discussion.  Transit's effect on urbanism.  Some New Urbanists believe that slow transit is necessary for building better urbanism.  Rob Steuteville of New Urban News calls this "Place Mobility".  The theory goes like this:

When a streetcar -- or other catalyst -- creates a compact, dynamic place, other kinds of mobility become possible. The densest concentrations of bike-share and car-share stations in Portland are located in the area served by the streetcar. That's no coincidence. You can literally get anywhere without a car.

In Portland parlance, this is the "Trip Not Taken".  When you build up the urban fabric of a city, many usually induced trips disappear.  That car trip to the grocery store becomes a walk and that streetcar trip to Powell's Books might be a bike trip now.  Or in the world of the web, that trip might change hands, from you to the delivery truck.  In Portland at the time they calculated a 31 million mile reduction in VMT from the housing units built along the streetcar route.

To increase the viability of streetcars in a world dominated by a "cost effectiveness" measure dependent on calculations of speed, the "Trip Not Taken" was refreshing.  Many transit lines were being built without regard to neighborhood or were cheap and easy.  But they were fast!  You can see how the "cost effectiveness" measure intervened with elevated rail through Tyson's Corner (yes I'm still annoyed) or the numerous commuter rail lines on freight rights of way in smaller regions that probably should never have been built.  But they were fast!

Yes the streetcar helps with creating place in the minds of developers and urban enthusiasts, but no it doesn't do the whole job.  The Pearl District and Seattle's South Lake Union were perfect storms of huge singular property ownership, massive investments in additional infrastructure, proximity to a major employment center, lack of NIMBYs, and a strong real estate market.  But look at the results.  It's hard to argue that the streetcar didn't help develop this massively successful district in one of planning's favorite cities.  But it's also hard to give it all the credit.

The crux of the argument is that place making should be the ultimate goal and slowing things down makes things better.  And many cities see the streetcar as some sort of fertilizer that makes it grow and a reason to change zoning code. Because of very stringent local land use opposition (read NIMBY), this makes a lot of sense.  If a streetcar can lead to the restructuring of land use or the fulcrum of a district revitalization, I see that as a benefit. But again, don't give it too much credit.   

From a safety standpoint this slowing down idea makes sense.  The Portland Streetcar has been in collisions, but no one has died or been seriously hurt, unlike a number of high profile collisions in places like Houston, where drivers can't seem to follow the rules. Our society also puts up with over 30,000 deaths a year to get places faster on interstate highways as well.

But...

Ultimately the base success of a transit line isn't in the amount of development it has spurred or the zoning it has changed.  It's the ability to get a lot of people where they want to go, in a timely fashion.  A commenter on Jarret Walker's Human Transit Blog says it best.

But the romantic impulse towards slow transit wears away quickly if you have no choice but to rely on it all the time! I don't have a car, so I rely on buses that travel excruciatingly slowly, wasting much of my time.

As someone who has gotten rid of my car and considers myself a walking, bike riding, transit loving (and sometimes zipcaring) urbanist, I find it very annoying that it takes an hour to go three miles here in San Francisco on the bus.  And if I need to get downtown, I take the Subway which is a half mile away versus the streetcar which is half a block away because time does actually matter.  We see this decision play out every day when people choose to drive cars over using transit.

But if we are going to spend so much money, we might as well figure out a way to transport the most people possible. Sometimes that might be streetcars.  Other times it's not.

But back to urbanism and transit.

In Portland, dedicated lanes on the North/South parts of the line wouldn't make as much difference because it has the same issues we mentioned with the Green Line above and narrow streets.  Streetcars have to deal with urbanism.  I think streetcars are ok as a circulator in downtowns, because these are the trips that help people get around dense places that are proximate.  You can bring your groceries on when its raining and disabled folks can load their wheelchairs with dignity. Tourists like the certainty of the tracks and little kids love the ride.  We see that even on 20 minute headways, 13,000 riders are on the line every day.  It's hard to argue with that, given it's more riders than many first choice bus lines in some major cities without rail. 

However for linear route based transit operations, we need dedicated lanes and signal priority to at least make the expenditure worthwhile and play nice with our urbanism.  Once you get outside of a district, people want to get places.  I like subways and wish we had more, but it seems politics and money seem to get in the way like Yonah mentions above.  Some might even argue that before we even think about building fixed guideway lines, we should focus on our buses.  Perhaps we should have a threshold system ridership before putting in rail, to determine whether all options for increasing ridership have been exhausted.  Houston's new network plan could be a good guide.  And personally, I don't think BRT should be special. It should be the norm. Luckily the new 5339 bus facilities funding guidance could allow for BRT and Rapid Bus funding (they are NOT the same thing). 

But there's a new report out which discusses which factors drive ridership for fixed guideway transit once we decide to go that route.  Employment and residential density around transit lines, the cost of parking downtown, and grade separation were found to be the most effective measures when put together to drive ridership according to a recent TCRP report released earlier this month. Individually employment had an r squared of .2 while the others had negligible impacts.  Only taken together as a whole did these measures drive the most ridership as seen below.

The report goes on to say "The degree of grade separation is likely influential because it serves as a proxy for service variables such as speed, frequency, and reliability that may lead to greater transit ridership."

But determining success is hard.  In fact, its so hard that of the transit projects surveyed, the only thing that transit agencies seemed to agree on (it has dots in every project below) was that the line would be cheap!  We discussed this briefly above. 

"Provide fixed guideway transit in corridors where inexpensive right of way can be easily accessed"

Which is many times why we end up with slow transit.  It's cheap. We're cheap. Streetcar costs are below that of light rail or subways and since its in a mixed traffic right of way, it will be cheaper politically than BRT.  Commuter rail on freight rights of way is the best to them though even though its the worst at creating ridership.  To me it's is even cheaper because it usually ignores the chart above with the focus on employment and residential density.

So all of this is to say that Streetcars are not the worst transit ever and urbanism will affect transit, and transit will affect urbanism.  We just need to decide what the appropriate ways are for intervention such that we maximize people's ability to get to the places they want to go and build great communities.  Let's not swing the pendulum too far to either side, it might tip the balance against us. 

Neglected Cities Push Certain Transit Because Regional Agencies Won't

In the middle of all the wrangling over the Cincinnati streetcar Peter Rogoff, who is the FTA administrator, said something really interesting in his letter to the city and transit agency. The transit agency (SORTA) is the fiduciary agent for the FTA funding pass through to the city and wants to stay on the FTA's good side since they receive other federal funding. The mayor is looking to kill the project for who knows what reasons he set his mind to, but this is really kind of an aside.  Rogoff:

Transit improvements are best deployed when they are governed and controlled 'under one roof.

He goes on to say in his letter, relayed by the Cincinnati Business Courier

While FTA has been successful in supporting transit projects that are not controlled or operated by the region's principal transit agency, we have found that there are a great many economies of scale that better serve the taxpayer when a fully staffed and experienced transit provider is involved from the very beginning

But isn't that part of the problem?  These massive regional transit agencies are typically stacked with suburban board members that don't always have the core cities needs at heart.  They are usually concocting schemes to extract money or service in some form or fashion from the more transit willing neighborhoods in the region in order to have some sort of suburb to city dream bus or commuter rail line that costs a lot, but really doesn't move the needle on changing mobility in a meaningful way.  Either that or they have to have an election that includes heavy transit opposition precincts that sink ballot initiatives that pass in the city proper.

So recently cities have been taking on the mantle of thinking up and building transit that works for them and their goals.  Portland, Cincinnati, Austin, and others have all taken up planning for more urban transit options and with much different goals.  At the start of the Portland Streetcar process, Tri-Met wanted nothing to do with it.  They were a regional agency.  Right or wrong, the city streetcar movement is a function of the neglect that center cities feel when it comes to regional transit priorities.  The core might be the economic engine for the region, but the fiscal extraction continues.

This is also a disappointing admission that transit agencies and their federal funders still don't know their role in city building.   I'm not talking about building a streetcar and waiting for housing development to come, but rather the need to economically serve, connect, and bolster regional employment centers with workers in a more productive way than the single occupancy car. 

Today an NPR story on Austin popped up with TTI's Tim Lomax stating that it wasn't building roads or transit that needed to change, it was people's behavior. 

But Lomax says his computer models show the only real solution is going to involve changes in behavior and lifestyle. "We did some modeling to suggest the kind of magnitude of change," he says. "We used a giant hammer on the travel model. We took away 40 percent of the work trips. We said those are going to happen somehow, but they're not going to happen in a car." To keep traffic flowing in his sophisticated models, Lomax plays God of Austin. "We said, instead of people driving on average 20 to 25 miles to get to work, now they're going to drive five, six or seven miles to get to work," he says. "That says there's going to be a massive shift in jobs and population."

Emphasis mine.  Those other 40% of work trips that would be needed to keep traffic flowing green (which would never happen - induced demand, duh) would come from walking, biking, and transit because the employment cores were adequately served with good transit. 

What we continue to see today is an overly regional approach to transit development based on a suburban fantasy of living where you want and commuting into work downtown.  Most people don't work downtown.  But intensification of core neighborhoods strengthens the tax base.  So what you get is like what is happening in Minneapolis.  The transit agency is trying to fund commuter service that they call light rail while the city thinks of streetcars because they don't have the funding power to do more.  But there is no talk of dedicated lane surface light rail or subways that only go to the edge of the streetcar suburbs because that doesn't fit each side's worldview. 

The FTA seems to be on the suburban side of the issue, allowing, even wanting, these commuter systems that end up being really expensive to operate (See Northstar in the Twin Cities) with somewhat limited value at this point in their transit network development.  If the FTA can't figure out the suburban leaning of transit agencies or the need to feed employment centers better, we're going to keep traveling down the same choked road, and it won't be pretty. 

My Basic Reasons Why I like a Guadalupe Lamar Alignment

While I don't quibble with the need for expanded capacity on Riverside, I will argue that Guadalupe/Lamar is a superior route for urban rail in north of Austin's core, over a possible Highland corridor.  I'll let others deal with the methodology issues in Project Connect's selection process, but for me, the data is clear that this corridor is superior for the following reasons...

1.  CORE IS CONSTRAINED

While there are many laudable goals for building urban transit including housing and office development, the main reason for building a rail line is to increase the capacity of a road such that more people can get into a constrained space.  Dan Chatman at the University of California at Berkeley  and others have found that rail's key economic development benefit is serving to increase agglomeration effects in employment centers. 

These agglomeration benefits, as the article states, basically mean the ability to match skilled workers with employers that need them.  Sometimes the definition of economic development gets reduced down to actual development of buildings, but for transit and actual regional economic development, it means much more than that.  Allowing the core to densify and increase the tax base without increasing congestion or at least making travel times reliable, leads to greater access to a skilled workforce at all wage levels.

This is currently happening in the Warner Center in Los Angeles and Tyson's Corner in Virginia.  The constraint to employment center growth is limits on auto access, so now landowners and policy makers introduce high capacity transit to get more people of all skill levels to their jobs and to increase the public and private productivity of the land.

This goal is in tandem to providing affordable housing, mixed income housing, and reducing transportation costs but ultimately it is one of the main reasons to build transit, to continue the increased benefits that downtown's economic engine brings to the city and region as a whole while giving more people access to those benefits.

So if the core is constrained, what is the best way to make travel easier to the most people such that they can reliably access jobs in the core as it grows?  In other words, how do we feed more oxygen into the fire.  Austin's current bus network does a good job of this, but certain corridors are constrained and need to be expanded.  But you can't expand roads in those corridors so you need to expand the number of people who can travel in those corridors, hence high capacity transit. 

2.  RIDERSHIP

The answer to where you'll be able to pull the most oxygen to feed the fire is where they will be the most riders. Riders matter for two reasons, first it makes your line more cost effective from an operational standpoint.  Currently the highest ridership bus line in the city by a long shot is the #1 on Guadalupe and Lamar.  According to data from the service plan 2020 report, this corridor suffers the most in terms of on time performance. In fact that 2010 report noted that the bus was on time only 49% of the time! 

But the more riders you have on the line, the more you can justify per passenger the operational cost.  Portland has done a great job with their light rail cost efficiency and has proved many times that compared to the bus network, the light rail network is a more efficient way of moving people in and out of downtown.

The second reason ridership matters is that if you're going to be seeking funding from the FTA, you're also going to be competing against every other region in the country seeking federal funds.  In the Transit Space Race report I noted that it would take 78 years to fund all the lines that are being planned with the current federal funding levels of $1.6B per year.  That number has actually been lowered because of a stingy congress, but it's still a very small number, especially when you're helping to build multi-billion dollar subways in New York and San Francisco. 

So what is the best way to win funding?  In part its selling to the FTA that you have all your land use planning in place and have thought a bit about economic development.  But they want to give a project justification rating, an overall rating, and you have to compete with lines like the LA downtown connector that are projecting 16,000 new trips out of 88,000 riders. 

I highly recommend taking a look at other projects that are ahead of Austin in line for federal funds.  Also, going back in time, the Austin line in 1999 scored very high against places that are now built including Houston and the Twin Cities - The Lamar line, which had pieces of the current Metro Rail line would have had 37,000 riders.

So what is the biggest thing that any light rail line can do to get more riders?  Connect people with jobs.

3.  THE IMPORTANCE OF JOBS

Connecting jobs with transit drives ridership.  We know this from research done by Zupan and Pushkarev, Gary Barnes, and UC Berkeley's TOD guru Robert Cervero.  Considering over 59% of transit trips are for work, this becomes an important point.

Pushkarev and Zupan in 1977's Public Transit and Land Use Policy - "Enlarging downtown size or raising nearby residential density. Suppose the options are to double the size of a downtown from 10 to 20 million square feet, or to double the residential density within a few miles of it from 15 to 30 du/acre. The former will increase per capita trips by transit three to four times more than the latter." Many more can be found in this post on the blog

This from Gary Barnes - "Using regression analysis, he showed that in Minneapolis, aside from developing residential densities, transit share can be increased by building up commercial centers. In the regression, he showed that for every 1000 people per square mile that the residential density grew, the increase in transit's share to downtown increased 2.4% versus .6% increase when people went to suburban jobs."

So what does this tell us?  That trips increase when you connect places of density in a city to a strong downtown.  But it's not just downtown that matters, it's all jobs along a line that build ridership.  I created this chart below from my TRB paper on light rail ridership.  It shows new light rail lines that were built in the last 10 years.  What makes their ridership go up?  Connections to jobs. Now in the paper I discuss many of the other issues that folks above mention as well including restricted parking downtown.  But jobs seems to be a clear cut connection that's fairly easy to see, and backed up by a lot of the literature.

So jobs matter for ridership, and connecting more jobs within a half mile of stations will get you more riders.  So ignoring the core of UT, Capital Complex and downtown, where are the most jobs outside of downtown in the northern corridors that are being compared.  Well of course on the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor.  This data was taken from the 2011 census LEHD dataset.  The North Lamar corridor to Crestview has at this present time 46,275 jobs within a half mile.  26,400 of them are people making less than $40k annually.   Contrast that with a likely Highland Corridor, and you see less than half the number of jobs.  Even with rosy projections and development on that corridor, where would 25,000 jobs come from?

This is part of the reason people are so upset at the process and selection.  Sure it's about congestion and redevelopment and serving low income communities.  But congestion is where the jobs are located.  Redevelopment actually happens on light rail proximate to jobs as well.

4.  WHERE DEVELOPMENT HAPPENS ON LIGHT RAIL

We know this because CTOD did a study called Rails to Real Estate, which looked at development patterns along three new light rail lines in Charlotte, Denver, and Minneapolis.  What this report says is that light rail doesn't just create ridership out of thin air, a lot of public policy has to take place but also that the market drives a significant pattern of development. 

There are maps in the report that show where development happened along these lines, but its best to describe it as the employment gravity well.  Basically the market for denser development is in major employment centers, and that market gets extended from the gravity well by the rail line.  It's not just downtown because Denver's line connects the Tech Center, which is the second largest employment cluster in the region, and it saw an uptick in development as well.  Take a look for yourself.  Alignments go away from downtown from left to right.

Twin Cities Hiawatha Line

Denver Southeast Corridor

Charlotte's South Corridor

This is obviously a small sample size of new lines but it is quite instructive.  The location of major employment drives development and redevelopment because the transit is extending the market, not creating it.   Putting a line up into the Highland sector might help spur a small catalyst of development, but its proximity to downtown or a major employment center that matters most.  Guadalupe and Lamar have much more employment along the corridor which is likely to give more people more options to connect with places they work and places they want to go.  But it's the straight line that matters a lot too.

5.  BE ON THE WAY

Anyone who knows Jarrett Walker's work knows that he likes transit lines to be straight.  This causes less schedule disruption and makes the line faster and more reliable.  In the back and forth on twitter he noted the jagged lines that would likely occur if we built the Highland line, especially the section through UT.  You can see in the map above how hard it would be to get from one point to the other without having to make turns somewhere.  But its not straight.

Additionally, we know from UC Berkeley's research that for people to use the train, employment is best closer to the stop, than further away.  People are more likely to use transit for work if it's within a quarter mile, while taking it from their homes is likely to be acceptable to walk a half mile.  This means the route that travels through a less used part of UT, by all the parking garages near the Capital (even though there will be a med school there) and less inviting pedestrian places like Airport Blvd, is less likely to drive ridership.  Now this might be redeveloped in the future.  But we know where people go now, because they take the #1 bus to get there. 

So this is my case. As a national transit advocate, bad decisions in locations make it harder for us to fight for more funding against those who oppose us.  Killer ridership lines are great for beating back the forces against us as well as giving future leaders support for expansion.

Remember

1. The Core is Constrained

2. Ridership Matters for Operations and Funding

3. Ridership is Tied to Employment Location and Density

4. Development and Redevelopment Happens Near Jobs Now

5. The Straight Line is the Best Line

Traffic Counts North of the University of Texas

 

Notice the traffic counts on these corridors.  Also notice how jagged the Red River/Lamar corridor is. As Jarrett Walker says, be "On the Way"

Jobs North of the University of Texas on Two Corridors

Here are the job totals north of the University of Texas along the two corridors.  Guess which corridor the local establishment chose.  Not the one with the most jobs, or low income jobs.  What drives transit ridership?  Employment.