Planning Commissioners Journal

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.

Eco-Municipalities Step Forward Naturally

• a power plant fueled entirely by a city's own solid waste.
• only bicycles and pedestrians allowed in the city's downtown center.
• an eco-industrial park built to minimize energy consumption.

That's just some of what makes Umea, Sweden (population 110,000) an eco-municipality, planner Sarah James pointed out during the annual meeting of the Vermont Planners Association.

James, the co-author with Torbjorn Lahti of The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices, has focused much of her consulting work on helping municipalities develop approaches to reducing local energy needs and become more environmentally-conscious.

Screenshot from the Umea Energi web site of their Dava power plant.

Eco-municipalities seek to weave long-term sustainability into the fabric of their community. It's an idea that's taken hold in Sweden (click on the British flag icon for English), but is starting to catch on in the U.S.

At the Upper Midwest Planning Conference last November, Anna Haines, Director of the Center for Land Use Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, described how twelve Wisconsin municipalities in the rural Chequamegon Bay area have moved towards becoming eco-municipalities.

Local residents have taken the lead in advocating for their city or town to adopt a resolution designating itself as an "eco-municipality." The process usually starts with interested individuals meeting in weekly "study circles" to educate

Surplus Home Center

Attitudes on Development

From Wayne Senville, Editor, Planning Commissioners Journal:

What do Americans think of development in their communities? That was the focus of a nationwide survey of 1,000 Americans conducted this past Fall by the Saint Consulting Group (for more on what this consulting firm does, as posted on their web site).

According to the Saint Group, it's "the first [survey] of its kind to quantify and track the politics of land use, spotlighting who actively opposes and supports real estate-related projects and why."

But perhaps the most revealing finding of the survey (referred to as "the Saint Index") was the strong level of interest residents have in local land use issues. One of the first questions in the survey was:

"When considering candidates for county and local office, how important is their position on new development and growth?"

The responses:

• Very Important ........... 54.7%
• Somewhat Important .... 34.2%
• Not Very Important ......  7.0%
• Not Important at all......  2.4%
• Don't Know ................. 1.6%

The survey asked individuals to rate their level of support or opposition to a range of hypothetical projects. Here's the way these questions were worded:

"I am going to name some real estate projects. Please tell me how you would feel if each project was proposed in your community ... Single family homes / Apartment buildings or Condos / Office building / Grocery store / Large shopping plaza or mall / Landfill / ... " [and several other possible land uses].

The Wild West Today

Note from Wayne Senville, Editor, Planning Comm'rs Journal. See my trip report, Dodge City Places Its Bet; and take a look back at Dodge City's history.

The Changing Climate of Smart Growth

From PCJ Editor Wayne Senville:

It wasn't all that long ago that when you heard talk of smart growth, it focused on reducing sprawl in order to preserve farmland and open space, reduce infrastructure investment costs, and develop more walkable, livable neighborhoods with a mix of uses. Certainly, that's still integral to smart growth. But one new element seems to have come to the fore of the smart growth agenda: climate change.

Yes, minimizing energy consumption has always been part of smart growth's aims, but if this February's national Smart Growth Conference in Washington, D.C., is any indicator, climate change and global warming are now an important way of "framing" the benefits of smart growth.

The Conference's opening plenary session, titled "Let's Change the Climate," was specifically oriented to how smart growth can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This was immediately followed by a session headed up by Conference honoree Dr. Richard Jackson on "Climate Change, Public Health and Smart Growth." And many other conference sessions also paid attention to the link between climate change and smart growth.

During the Let's Change the Climate panel discussion, Steve Winkelman, the Transportation Program Director for the Center for Clean Air Policy (and co-author of Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change) directly made the point that framing climate change as the major issue we're facing as a nation can help promote smart growth principles. Or as panelist Jemae Hoffman (head of Sustainable Transportation and Climate Change in the Seattle Dept. of Transportation) put it, "climate change is another good [reason] to do what we all want to do," adding that it is also "putting pressure on us to move faster on transportation issues."

Indeed, putting climate change on the front burner elevates the focus on transportation policy, especially efforts to reduce vehicle miles traveled. After all, it is the transportation sector (through motor vehicle fuel use) that is in most places the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, during the Conference sesssion Winkelman noted we'll soon "need to get to vehicle miles traveled taxes."