Housing & Transportation Spending: Are They Related?

We all know that more and more people are driving longer and longer distances to get to work. But there's some surprising information I came across when, in catching up with some of my back reading, I read through A Heavy Load, a report prepared by the Center for Housing Policy, the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference.

A Heavy Load (available to download), examines "the combined housing and transportation cost burdens of working families in 28 metropolitan areas at the neighborhood level."

The bottom line, according to the report, is that working families "spend about 57 percent of their incomes on the combined costs of housing and transportation, with roughly 28 percent of income going for housing and 29 percent going for transportation." What's more, "while the share of income devoted to housing or transportation varies from area to area, the combined costs of the two expenses are
surprisingly constant."

Some of the data is downright scary. Looking at the average household budget in these metro areas, 27.4% is spent on housing and 20.2% on transportation (incidentally, those figures dwarf the 10.6% needed for food and the 4.7% spent on healthcare). But when looking at what the study defines as "working families" (with household incomes between $20,000 and $50,000) the portion of the typical household budget spent on transportation skyrockets to 29.6% (the share for housing is 27.7%).

Think about that for a minute. It's remarkable that approximately 30% of a "working family's" household's budget is going into transportation-related expenses -- and that the share substantially exceeds that spent on housing.

What's even more frightening is that since the study (which relied on 2000-2004 Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data), gas prices have sharply increased.

So what level of transportation expenses are we talking about for working families? In the 28 metro areas examined, the highest transportation costs were in Atlanta -- $10,890/year; closely followed by Kansas City at $10,872/year. At the other end of the spectrum, the lowest level of transportation expenditures were in the New York City metro area ($7,880/year), followed by Honolulu ($8,170/year). Not surprisingly, there was a strong correlation based on the percentage who take public transit or walk/bike to work. In New York, for example, 39% either used transit or walked/biked to work; in Atlanta, this group totaled just 7% (and in other relatively high transportation cost metro areas -- like St. Louis, Dallas, and Tampa -- the percentage was sometimes lower).

The study found that, in general, once the distance from home to work exceeded 12 to 15 miles, "the increase in transportation costs outweighed the savings on housing -- and the share of household income required to meet these combined expenditures rises."

Compounding the problem is the fact that both housing and transportation costs in recent years have been increasing at a faster rate than income. Between 2000 and 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index showed an increase in average income of 10.3%, while housing costs increased by 15.4% and transportation costs by 13.4%.

So where does this leave us? The Center for Housing Policy offers several recommendations that should be of interest to planners and planning commissioners. The first is to consider housing and transportation policies together. For example, building affordable housing near existing or planned transit hubs. Another recommendation, not surprisingly, is to enourage infill housing, in particular "near job centers, or with good transportation access to job centers."

Other recommendations include: encouraging more suburb-to-suburb transit; and reducing the cost of commuting by travel, through policies to promote car sharing or subsidize some of the costs of car ownership for working families. Note: we'll be reporting on car sharing programs in the Spring issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal.

A Heavy Load offers much for those of us involved in planning to think about.

footnote: How were transportation costs estimated? According to the data methods section of the report, "Transportation costs were estimated using a model which was peer reviewed and developed by a group of researchers in the Center for Transit-Oriented Development led by CNT [Center for Neighborhood Technology]. While the model has been tested previously in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area, this study represents the first time it has been applied to 27 other metropolitan areas. Household transportation costs consist of a combination of the costs of auto ownership, auto use and public transit use. ..."

The U.S. Department of Transportation also calculates household transportation expenditures. They've found a steadily growing level of expenditures. Here's their table based on 1992 - 2002 data. Note that oil and gas falls within their flexible cost category: