TOD in San Francisco's SOMA, photo by flickr user LA Wad
On my way home from work the other day I caught this Marketplace program about the increased demand for housing near transit. As may seem obvious to the audience of this blog, but there’s a massive sea-change afoot in consumer demand for housing near transit, but this is likely news to the typical Marketplace listener.
I got to thinking about the numbers. Exactly, how much does transit availability specifically effect real estate prices? Is there a similar effect for walkable neighborhoods? Are we doing enough to keep supply in pace with this increased demand? What second-order effects does transit construction and the demand emanating therefrom have?
Rather than write 4000 words on the economic data around TOD, I’ll focus on just the first two questions today, and I’ll visit the others in future posts. I apologize in advance for all of the links and quotes. Continue reading “Demand for Housing Near Transit”
West Seattle Blog has a roundup and full video (part 1 is above) of last night’s event. It was a blast to participate, and I was pretty pleased with the things I had an opportunity to say. I’d also like to thank whoever it was at Sustainable West Seattle that decided to distribute copies of Oran’s frequent transit map, which turned out to be a useful prop.
I didn’t have a particularly good response to Tom Rasmussen’s second question to me, about RapidRide, parking, and business interests, but fortunately everyone else on the panel (including Tom) and several audience members covered the points I would make upon further reflection.
You’ll have to go to WSB to get the other two portions of the video. West Seattle Herald also has a summary of the event.
Charles Royer has a thoughtful essay on the future of Pioneer Square, which is worth reading. It contains this aside about obstacles to development:
But there’s a catch called Incentive Zoning. To get 60 percent of the increased height, the developer has to include within the project a certain number of housing units that are affordable to a person making 80 percent of area median income. And to get the remaining 40 percent of the increased height the developer has to contribute to open space, green streets, or other specific amenities.
Many developers say these requirements, on top of the additional difficulties of building in Pioneer Square, probably mean no market-rate housing will be built.
Of course, developers would say that about what amounts to a tax on their business. There’s a certain logic to using developers to achieve some other public goods in the built environment. Finding the right balance between achieving those goods and maintaining incentives to build is a genuinely difficult problem, especially because there are few honest brokers to assess the impacts of each regulation.
On the other hand, infill development is very much in the public interest. It’s crazy to place a tax on something desirable while so many undesirable things (carbon emissions, congestion) go untaxed. It would be far more efficient to actually fund the other public objectives through a different revenue source. Tax increment financing, although it has its drawbacks, will potentially be enabled by a bill in Olympia and would be superior to simply taxing development.
That’s not to say that the City should immediately repeal the requirements*, because the alternate revenue sources don’t yet exist. But in the long term, it would be a healthy thing for the city.
* Although one could argue that supply of affordable housing is not an issue in Pioneer Square.
I just don’t understand the enthusiasm for $100 electric-vehicle fees, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) taxes, and all the other workarounds for simply raising the gas tax. It’s true that gasoline usage is declining, but gasoline is far from disappearing from our economy. Indeed, from an environmental or balance-of-trade perspective that would be a great problem to have, and one that can be addressed when it arrives.
Gas tax increases are unpopular, but less so than the alternatives. License fees have been a continual initiative lightning rod; VMT taxes require a transponder to track movements, which requires a whole new infrastructure and will have privacy advocates up in arms.
If you’re going to tax something tax something undesirable. Gas usage is a good choice, and so is driving at congested times. But merely owning an electric car, while not exactly benign, is well down the list of negative externalities.
It’s sort of obvious that congestion is bad and makes people’s lives worse. But what actually causes congestion? I promise you it isn’t bad drivers. I’m going to try to explain a little bit of the economic theory that shows just how it makes people’s lives worse – known in economics speak as “reducing welfare” – and why charging people to drive makes society better off.
If you like images of road destruction – or you like construction photos – you might enjoy this photo series from WSDOT of the First Avenue On-ramp to SR-99 demolition.
[UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, riders who access Link by bus will generally not be “new to transit”, but will not count among the 1.2m “lost” from buses. For reasons described before, I don’t think this is a particularly big group. Nevertheless, we should add this to the 7/36/39/106 riders described below and consider 5.8m rides to be a ceiling on the new riders figure.]
Towards the end of this Erica Barnett takedown of the Washington Policy Center was this tidbit:
Metro attributes [reduced ridership] to several factors, including the loss of 87,000 jobs in King County during the recession, four fare increases in four years, lower gas prices, and the opening of light rail, which lowered ridership by 1.2 million rides a year.
That’s out of a total of 6.96m rides on Link in 2010, implying over 80% of Link trips are new to transit. I asked Metro Planner Jack Lattemann, the source of the figure, how this quick-and-dirty estimate was computed, below the jump:
Our February Community Forum will be held in the Senior Center of West Seattle, on SW Oregon St. literally around the eastern corner from California Avenue SW.
The panelists are Seattle Councilmember Tom Rasmussen, Constantine staffer Chris Arkills, SDOT director Peter Hahn, Brice Maryman from SvR Design, and yours truly. So that’s three insiders, a professional, and an outsider with a big mouth. Should be fun.
