Thursday, December 7, 2006
What does "affordable" mean, exactly?
Posted by Harold Henderson on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 at 12:22 PM
The ratio of attitude to information approached infinity in Business Week's recent effort to locate affordable suburbs in 26 metropolitan areas. In the Chicago area, the magazine selected Lake Zurich as affordable, a choice that astonished the people at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, who have been developing tools to compare housing and transportation cost burdens in different locations and for different incomes. According to the CNT's November newsletter (via e-mail, not online, but there are lots of details in this PDF),
"Using CNT’s Housing & Transportation Affordability Index tool, which measures the combined housing and transportation costs based on the characteristics of the neighborhood and its location within the region in relation to jobs, amenities, and transit, Lake Zurich is not an affordable place in the Chicago region, or in the nation. This is perhaps an example of how their simple measure of transportation—being within an hour of a major city—does not fully account for a household’s total transportation costs.
"To accurately measure a household’s total transportation costs, all trips must be included. Commuting is only one of five daily trips. As the commute gets longer and the other four daily trips, e.g. for the grocery, school, medical appointments, and recreation also have to be made by auto, a household’s transportation costs rapidly increase. When lower property taxes and home prices are paired with long commutes and high total transportation costs, a place is no longer affordable."
CNT's tool won't useable by the public until spring, says economic development staffer Carrie Makarewicz. But she can say that if you earn less than $50,000 a year in Lake Z, you're likely to pay almost 60% of your income for housing plus transportation. Is that affordable?
The outfit behind the Business Week story, Sperling's Best Places, actually has a better Web site than the story does, allowing comparison in more dimensions. But even there, they measure a place's "transportation" cost by the average cost of gas and insurance—not by how much driving you have to do if you live there.
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The CNT report shows the percentages of working-class household incomes that are spent on housing and transportation in 28 different metro areas. The graph shows that "the combined housing-transportation cost burden for families with incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 is remarkably similar from one area to another" within the U.S. Doesn't that contradict the conventional wisdom that metro areas without rail-transit networks (i.e. Atlanta or Phoenix) impose greater burdens on working families than areas with them (i.e. Chicago or Boston)? Another graph in the report shows that combined housing and transportation costs are basically the same fraction of household income anywhere from 10 to 40 miles' distance from the workplace. Isn't that an argument that for someone working a job in Naperville, living in Aurora is effectively the same as living in Rogers park? Another graph headlined "The U.S. Metro Population is Suburbanizing" actually shows a decades-long _decline_ in the rate of increased suburbanization, and stops at 1996. If we add the 2006 percentage what does that picture look like?
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Good questions. But careful, Paul -- if you keep actually reading the reports and basing your opinions on data, you might wind up with the wrong opinions! That said, Atlanta does have a rail transit network. Reminds me of the popular claim that racism was a prime reason white people moved to the suburbs. If it were true, you'd expect that places like Minneapolis suburbanized significantly less than, say, Detroit. Didn't happen.
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