H+T News
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
CNT provided the analysis for the new Transportation4America report, Aging in Place, Stuck Without Options, out today on the cities that have worst mobility options for seniors. Large cities with the poorest transit access for seniors included Atlanta, Riverside-San Bernardino (CA), Houston, Detroit, and Dallas. A whopping 90% of seniors in Atlanta will lack transit access in 2015. Medium-sized cities (1million-3million) with the poorest transit access for seniors are Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth-Arlington, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. By 2015, 88% of seniors in Kansas City will have poor access to public transit.
Where does your city rank? Are you planning to stick around there as you age? Read more »
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Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
CNT has been recognized for its innovative work in promoting urban sustainability. The U.S. Green Building Council –Illinois Chapter presented CNT with a Natural Leaders Award at its 6th Annual Emerald Gala on May 21st. CNT’s president Scott Bernstein was recognized recently by Planetizen, one of the most respected websites for the city planning, design and development profession. Planetizen’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, Chris Steins, included Scott in his list of 25 leading thinkers and innovators in the field of urban planning and technology. CNT’s website has also been acknowledged as one of the best resources for urban planning, design, and development. We are grateful for all this recognition. Read more »
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Thursday, April 21st, 2011
We’ve launched a new tool on our Abogo® website that shows how rising gas prices could affect household transportation costs at a given location. Users can type in an address to see average transportation costs for a neighborhood and then select a gas price to calculate how it would affect transportation costs at that location. Auto-dependent locations see their transportation costs increase dramatically as prices move up along the slider, but transit-rich locations have more modest increases. Read more »
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Monday, March 21st, 2011
How can we protect households and communities from the impact of higher gas prices? What can local officials do avoid the brunt of high gas prices and reduce the cost of living this year?
In today’s Planetizen, CNT’s President Scott Bernstein says that the most effective solution is to reduce the demand by creating “location-efficient” communities. In 2008, when gas prices hovered around $4, our research showed that households in “location-efficient” communities were less vulnerable to the gas spike. Residents of the most location efficient communities—cities and suburbs served by transit—were able to hold down their costs partly by increasing their use of public transit, and in fact those places saw the greatest increases in transit ridership. Communities with poor transit access had the lowest increases (or even declines) in transit use over that period. Read more »
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Friday, November 19th, 2010
CNT’s involvement in the USGBC’s annual Greenbuild conference this week was a resounding success, capped off by U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan highlighting CNT in his closing plenary remarks. To the crowd of more than 25,000 attendees, Donovan said:
Right here in the Chicago Metro area, a diverse consortium including the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, local business and civil rights leaders, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which has done extraordinary work on housing and transportation costs, have proposed a plan to create jobs, more walkable neighborhoods and affordable housing by capitalizing on this region’s rich public transportation system.
Using a $2.3 million grant from HUD, the partnership estimates the transportation savings of 2,500 households living in housing near transit will add over $6.8 million per year to the wealth of the region, with energy-efficiency measures and improved building codes reducing household expenses even further. Read more »
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Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
CNT applauds the proposed Transportation Housing Affordability Transparency (THAT) Act, introduced recently into the House of Representatives by Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon (HR 5824).
CNT supports the THAT Act unequivocally! We hope HUD will take advantage of several years of CNT research that culminated in the creation of the H+T(R) Affordability Index. CNT’s H+T Index would serve as an excellent base for the index that the legislation calls for, with the added benefit of funding for expansions, refinements, updates, dissemination, and technical assistance for implementation. Read more »
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Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
Our H+T Index ® is up for a Chicago Innovation Award, which celebrates the creative spirit of the Chicago region by recognizing and honoring the city’s most innovative new products and services. The Index is revolutionizing how planners, advocates, policy makers and consumers think about housing affordability. You can also vote for the Index in the People’s Choice Award until October 14. Vote for CNT>>
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Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
CNT’s dedication to producing ground-breaking data has earned us a ‘Data Innovation Award’ by the Metro Chicago Information Center for the ‘outstanding achievements CNT has committed to making data accessible, understandable and actionable in the Chicago region.’
We believe that people who have good information in a comprehensible format make good decisions. From our early work in the 80’s—creating the Neighborhood Early Warning System (NEWS) to make housing data on Cook County properties widely accessible to the H+T Affordability Index (a “datafest even by wonk standards”, as reported by The Washington Post)—CNT has been committed to compiling high-quality data, synthesizing and displaying in smart and meaningful ways for a variety of users.
Our newest tool, Abogo, powered by the H + T Index, lets consumers dig down into the nitty-gritty of housing and transportation costs while displaying the information in an easy-to-understand method. Today’s New York Times explains the necessity of the tool, “When you’re shopping around for a new place to live — whether you’re buying or renting — it’s easy to overlook how much it will cost to get around in your new neighborhood.” These are the sort of gaps in information that CNT has been striving to fill. Read more »
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
A new report by the Grand Rapids Area Coalition to End Homelessness uses CNT’s Housing + Transportation Affordability Index (H+TSM Index) data to illustrate the dearth of affordable housing in the region. The report, part of the coalition’s decade-long plan to end homelessness, aims to re-shape how leaders in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan, think about and address homelessness.
Highlighting the impact of transportation costs on affordability, the report incorporates CNT’s first ever rural analysis of housing and transportation costs for Grand Rapids and eight nearby counties, including Allegan, Barry, Ionia, Kent, Montcalm, Muskegon, Newaygo, and Ottawa. Read more »
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Monday, August 16th, 2010
The popular website that gives you a score based on the walkability of your neighborhood will now include CNT’s ground-breaking transportation cost information to its suite of consumer-oriented tools.
Walk Score, which allows users to obtain a “walkability” rating for a specific location based on the number of nearby amenities, is using data from CNT’s Housing + Transportation Affordability Index to provide a better sense of the transportation costs and environmental impact for a neighborhood. Adding the H+T Index to Walkscore will further illustrate how choosing to live in walkable, transit-connected neighborhood can lower household expenses and one’s impact on the environment. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | 1 Comment »
