Housing + Transportation
CNT promotes a new and more comprehensive way of thinking about the cost of housing and true affordability by exploring the impact that transportation costs associated with the location of the housing have on a household’s economic bottom line. This research builds off CNT’s research into Location Efficiency-which led to Location Efficient Mortgages (LEMs) - reinforcing the relationship between urban form, housing site selection and transportation costs. To integrate this way of thinking into the choices and decisions made by home buyers, renters, urban and transportation planners, and developers, CNT co-developed with the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD), a groundbreaking tool, the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, that measures the true affordability of housing choice-by factoring in both housing and transportation costs in a neighborhood.
The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index is an innovative tool that challenges the traditional measure of affordability used by planners, lenders, and most consumers-which recommends that housing should be less than 30 percent of income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but the costs of housing and transportation. The Index has received much attention from policy makers for its benefits to planners and TOD advocates and is already being used for additional research.
In 2008, the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for 52 metropolitan areas became available through an interactive look-up and mapping website, located at www.htaindex.org.
Read the brief, “The Affordability Index: A New Tool for Measuring the True Affordability of a Housing Choice”, published by The Brookings Institution, January 2006.
Fact sheets are available on the Housing + Transportation data for ten select metropolitan areas:
Atlanta
Chicago
Cleveland
Columbus
Denver
Kansas City
Minneapolis
Philadelphia
San Francisco
Washington, D.C.
Funding for the Housing+Transportation Affordability Index comes from The Brookings Urban Markets Initiative, the Center for Housing Policy of the National Housing Conference, Chicago Community Trust, Energy Foundation, Grand Victoria Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Living Cities, MacArthur Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund.
