Housing + Transportation Affordability Index

The blogosphere’s buzzing with the “Housing + Transportation Affordability Index” put out by Brookings institute. It’s a pretty interesting interactive site, showing how transportation costs affect housing since you are implicitly choosing a commute when you are picking a place to live. Affordability is defined as 45% of median area income spent on housing + transportation. Erica Barnett at Slog shows that central Seattle neighborhoods can be more affordable when transportation is factored in.

I spent some time looking at my old haunts in famously expensive San Francisco and was mildly surprised to find that two of the three places both places I lived were actually were affordable considering how well served by transit they were. See the map above, the light sections are affordable, and the blue sections are not. The first was right around the I-280 sign, a block from a Caltrain station and two blocks from a Muni rail line, the second was right around the 24th and Mission BART stop and the last was near right in the middle of the blue area north of “2nd and King”, and that was not affordable, and it didn’t seem so at the time either.

Well, at least where I live now, Capitol Hill, is affordable!