H+T News
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
Money Magazine's "best places to live" cover story fails to take into account the cost of transportation.
Money magazine’s “100 Best Places to Live in America” is the most recent, high-profile example of how we need to re-think our definition of affordability when it comes to where we live. A quick scan of the communities that topped Money’s list suggests the magazine didn’t consider the cost of transportation in making their selections. Many of the places — suburban Minneapolis, suburban Baltimore, suburban Dallas, — are low-density, outer-ring suburbs that lack transit options and require households to drive most places and own several cars.
Like the Money article, many of us fall into the trap of thinking affordability boils down to the cost of our mortgage or rent payments. That encourages a “drive ‘til you qualify” mentality, where home-hunters pass over city neighborhoods or inner-ring suburbs and choose to live in outer-ring communities where housing is cheaper. However, these people soon learn that their new community is not as affordable as they thought, finding themselves stuck behind the wheel to get to work, school and the grocery store. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 26th, 2010
Late last week Gov. Pat Quinn signed the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index Act, which will give state agencies the complete information they need to make wise investment decisions in housing.
The theory behind the bill is simple: Housing costs do not end when we sign our rent or mortgage checks. Where we live has other costs associated with getting around: to work, to school, to the grocery store. How much that costs depends on where we live and what options are available to move us from point A to point B. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | No Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
CNT has developed a new tool for individuals to find what a typical household spends on transportation in their neighborhood. “Abogo” is a more consumer-oriented extension of the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, which offers the true cost of housing based on its location, by measuring the transportation costs associated with place.
Abogo measures the money a typical household, living in a given neighborhood, would spend getting around– including car ownership, car use, and transit use. It also provides the carbon emissions associated with using a car. CNT developed Abogo so that individuals can now measure the true cost and impact of where they live in 337 metropolitan areas in the U.S., in the same way that planners and municipalities have been using the H + T Index to better understand the combined costs of housing and transportation at the regional level, for example. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | No Comments »
Friday, June 4th, 2010
Location Efficiency Trumps Sprawl, HUD’s Job is Housing AND Urban Development
At the recent 18th Congress for New Urbanism, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan made a tremendous declaration: “For the first time in the history of federal grant competitions, I want to announce today that HUD will be using location efficiency to score our grant applications”.
The energy in the room was tangible. “We’re breaking down silos”, Donovan asserted, and indeed, this commitment from HUD to weight grant applications with spatial context in mind will advance the comprehensive approach to community development that CNU, CNT and other smart growth advocates have urged for years.
Over the past year, HUD has taken on an impressive task of touring cities, meeting and listening—“from mayors and other officials of both small and large communities, to business leaders in growing regions, to governors of states that have been hit hard economically”—to design and tailor a program that reflects what communities want, with the ability to apply context-sensitive solutions that work for each community. And CNT believes that the outcome and the subsequent announcement by Donovan show a real commitment to developing tools and resources that will help regions become strong economic engines—with healthy communities and reduced household expenses. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Location efficiency, Policy, Transportation and Community Development | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
In an important step toward creating affordable communities, the Illinois legislature has adopted the measure of housing and transportation affordability as a planning tool for five agencies and as a consideration for those agencies’ investment decisions in metro areas.
Senator Kwame Raoul led the effort to pass the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index Act (SB 347) in the Illinois Senate last month, and on Tuesday the bill passed in the House with overwhelming bipartisan support, led by Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, Chief Sponsor, and seven co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.
CNT has been working with Illinois legislators since early 2009 to advance this valuable piece of legislation that applies CNT’s framework of combining housing and transportation costs to planning and making public investment decisions. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Policy, Transportation and Community Development | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Today, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing, released Boston Regional Challenge, which finds that the average working household in the Boston region spends over $34,000 a year – or 54 percent of their income – on the combined costs of housing and transportation.
The report, produced in partnership with the Center for Housing Policy (CHP) and CNT, provides a comprehensive analysis of the “cost of place” in 18 regions from southern New Hampshire to Worcester to Rhode Island by quantifying the burdens facing families in those regions to meet the number one and number two expenses – housing and transportation – and highlighting areas with extreme burdens where households spend more than 58% their income on these costs.
Read more »
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Friday, April 2nd, 2010
Or as one of our esteemed colleagues, Kaid Benfied @ NRDC said, it the “most important analysis of land use you’ll see all year”.
Of the many reviews of CNT’s recent release of the H + T expansion for 337 metros in the U.S., we thought Transportation for America’s conclusion that our research “turns the conventional wisdom about affordable housing on its head”, hit it on the head.
Indeed, our goal is to challenge and redefine the traditional measure of affordability used by planners, lenders, and most consumers.
CNT’s intensive analysis shows that only 2 out of 5 communities in the U.S. are affordable when transportation costs are added to the traditional measure of affordability.
Read more »
Posted in H+T, Transportation and Community Development | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
CNT has updated our Housing + Transportation Affordability website to now cover over 330 metros in the U.S. with expanded and improved data. And our analysis shows that only two in five American communities—or 39 percent—are affordable for typical households when their transportation costs are considered along with housing costs.
The Index for the first time examines 337 metro areas across the country—161,000 neighborhoods and 80 percent of the U.S. population—to provide the only comprehensive snapshot of neighborhood affordability by taking into account the transportation costs associated with neighborhood location and design. Read more of the findings in this brief
Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | 12 Comments »
Friday, March 19th, 2010
On Thursday, March 18, the Illinois Senate passed the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index Act, SB 374. We have been working with legislators since early 2009 to advance this landmark piece of legislation. The bill will now move to the House, which passed an identical bill last year with a near unanimous vote.
If passed, SB 374 (formerly known as SB 414) will ensure that five state agencies in Illinois take both housing and transportation costs as a benchmark for affordability into account when planning and making public investment decisions within Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) Areas around the state.
Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Policy, Transportation and Community Development | No Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Scott Bernstein, CNT’s President, recently made a presentation about the need to redefine housing affordability at the Home Depot Foundation National Partners and Federal Government Officials Convening in Washington, D.C. When people shop for home or apartments, they don’t necessarily have the full knowledge of the true costs of a location. The current definition of housing affordability is 30% of income, which does not take into account transportation costs. Our research shows that for a working family, those earning $20,000-$50,000, housing takes 30% while transportation takes up to 27% of income, and in the exurbs, transportation can easily exceed housing costs. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Policy, Scott Bernstein, Transportation and Community Development | No Comments »
