Transportation as Housing Policy

According to a YouGov survey, Americans believe that housing isn’t affordable, but they disagree on why. More than any other reason, people believe mortgage rates or the costs of building materials are culprits. I know from renovating spaces recently that labor costs are one of the big reasons things, at least here in the Bay Area, cost so much after the fact that there’s just shortage of housing generally.

YouGov didn’t include institutional investors but a recent report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that corporate ownership of properties is a big part of the problem in some cities as well. Landlords have figured out how to purchase properties next to each other so they can buy in bulk in places like Baltimore. And the easy targets for these buyers are in areas where people of color and low income residents live.

But there’s something else that I believe we’re missing in this overall discussion which is transportation. Marchetti’s Constant states that people throughout history have basically averaged out commute time across the population to 30 minutes. If that is what makes people comfortable, the housing market we have now is straining against this principle.

In their paper I’ve mentioned here many times before Redfearn and Orlando posited that cities all over the United States have run out of places to build near enough to employment opportunities while highly desirable areas have shut off the ability to build more housing and kept themselves from densifying and evolving. It’s not that we’ve really “run out of land”, but as Ed Glaeser mentions in a recent paper, that housing supply has been decoupled from home prices in a way which even fast building cities and states are impacted by.

We often say the best transportation plan is a land use plan. So one answer would be to build so that more people can have access to amenities, but that is stifled by regulations and many of the reasons listed in the YouGov survey and more.

But in the absence of ramping up home building and densification, we should look to transportation as a second line of attack to increase affordability. At a conference over the weekend colleagues from Baltimore shared that there’s a lot of opportunity to build or rehabilitate housing there (Also apparently opportunity to fight institutional investors) but the city often gets overlooked and the solutions are targeted for the growing superstar cities around the country.

It’s not far from other eastern cities with job opportunities. But the sprawl and lack of quick transportation methods make commuting from there to other cities and job centers clunky. This is where our transportation system has let us down from an affordability perspective and a one track mind has locked us into our current predicament.

The solutions are there, fast frequent transit networks, reliable intercity rail networks, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and even more affordable broadband would help with some of these housing affordability issues.

When I was in China this fall, I could get between major cities in a few hours that could not have been achieved by driving. Additionally, we could get to other parts of a city fast if we took the subway and avoided surface roads. Networks upon networks integrated with each other, in addition to building up housing near destinations, could unlock affordability.

There’s an opportunity to do something great that builds value for people around the country, I just hope we take it.

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