Walkable design saves money, carbon emissions

If 50 percent of US housing is built in compact, walkable form in the next 20 years, families will save more than $200 billion annually in transportation costs, according to the report Penny Wise and Pound Fuelish by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT).

That report accompanied the launch of a powerful Web-based mapping tool that calculates housing and transportation costs for individual census blocks in 337 metro areas that are home to 80 percent of the US population. The Housing + Transportation (H+T) Affordability Index is an expanded version of the tool that CNT first launched for 52 metro areas in 2006.

The index also allows viewers to calculate and compare greenhouse gas emissions, block sizes, residential densities, transit ridership, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), automobiles per household, and other data that was not in the earlier version. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the H+T index will influence planning decisions — the San Francisco and Chicago area planning agencies are already using it — and it could affect the decisions of consumers and lenders as well.

The index allows viewers to zoom in on large swaths of populated areas — the corridors from northern Virginia to Boston and from Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, and 161,000 neighborhoods across the US. Metro regions in every state are included. The index demonstrates that small block sizes and higher density — the best indicators of walkable urbanism — are strongly linked to reduced transportation costs, carbon emissions, VMT, and automobile ownership, and increased use of transit.

Busting the budget
While the report and tool are good news for smart growth, a press conference that included federal and local officials March 23 emphasized negative findings of the report: Only 39 percent of US neighborhoods are affordable when transportation costs are taken into account. That’s 30 percentage points lower than the 69 percent previously considered affordable when only housing costs were taken into account.

This index shows that transportation costs increase dramatically with greater distance from central cities — offsetting declining housing costs. The highest combined costs are in distant suburbs. Ignorance of this dynamic may have contributed to the housing collapse, officials said.

“It may seem less expensive on the periphery, but [buying a house there] has proved to be a far more expensive decision,” said Ron Sims, deputy secretary of HUD. “This report demands that we address the issue of transportation costs and the built environment so people can make better decisions about where they live.”

CNT executive director Scott Bernstein hopes that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) will make this data widely available to prospective house buyers. “They can do it right away,” Bernstein said in response to a reporter’s question. “I have found NAR open to this idea. But until now it hasn’t been universally available. We’ll see what happens when it is offered.”

Likewise, the H+T index could allow for a reintroduction and expansion of Location Efficient Mortgages (LEMs) — an experimental program that was dropped by Fannie Mae when the housing crisis hit, Bernstein says. LEMs helped buyers qualify for loans in neighborhoods where transportation costs were low in a few targeted metro areas. Analyses of LEMs showed very low rates of delinquencies and foreclosures.

More broadly, officials will be able to screen policies and spending for potential impact on affordability using the H+T standard, CNT says. “Public investments should be targeted to lower the sum of housing and transportation costs by creating more location-efficient communities — through investment in transportation options, transit-oriented development, and the creation of more compact, walkable communities,” CNT said in its summary.

Retrofitting suburbs
While transportation costs, carbon emissions, and VMT are lower in cities, there are pockets of transportation-efficient census tracts in the suburbs. Showing up in H+T index maps as scattered yellow patches, the efficient areas often correspond to satellite cities and towns that have been overtaken by sprawl, Bernstein says. “There are … thousands of tiny yellow areas all over the place,” he notes. “These will be helpful for people locally to find comparables that do work better and get over their skepticism that we can’t reform the suburbs.”

The patches of walkable urbanism represent nodes where infill development can take place and where the suburbs can be made more urban, Bernstein says. “It’s possible to recover when you have the areas of small block sizes and high intersection density, even if you don’t have the residential density,” he says. “If you stick with large block sizes, it’s virtually impossible to get back to transportation efficiency. These areas [of large blocks] need to be retrofitted to make them walkable.”

The H+T index is an important tool for regional planners, says Randy Blankenhorn, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “There’s a way to use this tool that goes beyond what residents can do with it,” he says. “Our goal is to create more cost effective, efficient communities, and in order to do that, we need to think about more compact, sustainable communities.”

CNT included residential density and block sizes in the H+T index after examining dozens of variables to see which correspond most closely with transportation efficiency. Areas of high density and small block sizes are more likely to be pedestrian friendly and zoned for mixed use, Bernstein says. The index converts these characteristics to dollars and cents, he adds. “The economic data is right there for physical planners and developers who are interested in a richer environment,” he says. See http://htaindex.cnt.org