Care About the Poor? Care about Transportation.
Posted by: EvanJan 24 2007, 11:57 am
At this morning's briefing on the Regional Equity Atlas (a joint project of the Coalition for a Livable Future and PSU's Institute for Metropolitan Studies) it became crystal clear that the costs of transportation are becoming a huge issue for lower and middle-income households.
According to Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder, the regional government has found that for households up to twice the poverty level are spending an average of 37% of their income on transportation, compared with 30% for housing. This echoes other recent studies as well that demonstrate the huge burden households have to simply get around, and many believe the trends will continue, as oil prices continue to rise.
This is a multifaceted problem, but a few ideas came out this morning:
First, the affordable housing movement needs to become the affordable living movement. We must redefine the movement for affordable housing to encompass all the costs of housing choices — including the transportation costs from being located in an area far from jobs, shopping, schools, and good transit.
Second, we must create better information for those making housing choices about the true costs of transportation. Whether the messenger is realtors or mortgage lenders, government or nonprofits, we need to help people, who are simply failing to realize their true transportation costs (insurance plus payments plus repairs plus gas plus parking plus opportunity cost of not investing money elsewhere, etc.) Ideas like location-efficient mortgages that factor in the costs of transportation to the housing loan equation should be expanded. Smart lenders might start to see cars not as assets–but cost centers.
Third, we need to internalize transportation costs and link housing and transportation thinking. When senior centers and schools locate on the edge of the region because land costs are lower, they're creating new transportation costs that are imposed on everyone else. The market should reflect those costs. Similarly, huge transportation projects must not ignore housing impacts of those projects.
This is just a start of the discussion. After publishing the Atlas, CLF will be leading the creation of a Regional Equity Action Plan.
Land use planning in the Metro/Portland area has identified industrial/work Center location/geographic areas. Recently a debate occured in Portlnd about changing the Lenton area on the Willamette river to allow housing and that was beaten back.
What is needed is affordable and reasonable access from housing to work, from housing to schools, parks, stores, medical care, day care and the main stream of our society.
Public transit is and should be the first choice in affordable housing areas. I have a concern with the term and concept of a "Affordable Housing Area" as if it is an area that is different from other areas of housing and our society. We must integrate everyone into society equally. Yet at the same time we must provide opportunities for a class of people of need to find affordable housing in a manner that integrates everyone in an equal manner.
Right now we have Industrial NW Portland identified as a "Work Center". We also have the PDC "River Gate" industrial and commerce areas that are dedicated as "Work Centers". We have Swan Island setup as a "Work Center". Of these areas only Swan Island" has a person dedicated to reasonable transportation alternatives for all who work in Swan Island.
In the other two area's we have limited transportation choices and alternatives to get to work other then by car.
Creating new transportation corridors and alternatives into these "Work Centers" has to happen. We must make it more reasonable for people to get to work.
There is a proposal to replace the Interstate Bridges with a new wide replacement I-5 bridge that crosses the Columbia River at a price tag of between $2-$6-Billion Dollars. Is this the highest priority of money to be invested into our region. With approximately 6-lanes, it makes the problems of cars even worse, but the real problem is that it does not get people close to their jobs/work centers.
In converse a plan that would get people close to their jobs and work centers would be a new BNSF RR bridge replacement with an alternative multi-mode Bi-State arterial corridor and double deck bridge that would run next to the NNSF tracks and North Portland Street from Vancouver to the west side of the Willamette River in and through Portland's "industrial Areas and Work Centers". This would open up this new alternative corridor to transit options like Rapid Bus Transit, High Capacity Transit, Bike and PED all happenin a manner that does not congest the I-5 corridor.
This option has been KILLED by the CRC Task Force and that is wrong.
Yeah, gotta be careful about things called “Affordable Housing Area�.
In New Orleans they're called "wards" and are literally more dangerous to Americans than Baghdad. Seriously, they ARE BAD places.
Mixing low income by social engineering and force just degades EVERYONES quality of life. Setting up special places creates "ghettos".
The real solution is to help people out of those areas and create their own communities. Creating forced and subsidized housing isn't the solution.
But I digress, either ya have learned from European and American history or one hasn't.
I do not hod out any hope that educating lower income people that a vehicle is a cost center and they shouldn't own one is going to work. People either choose to make the lifestyle changes to live within their income or they don't – the former isn't going to own a vehicle anyway (and many of them may not even need low income housing) and the latter is just going to continue to buy their $500 beatermobiles and drive them until they fail, then abandon them by the side of the road.
My feeling instead is that the entire funding mechanism for affordable housing needs to be revamped to give the people that administer such programs far more leeway to control whether applicants to such programs are permitted to own vehicles. For example, clearly anything resembling an apartment building built specifically for lower income people and funded from public funds, and that is designed for a family with children to live in, should not even incorporate parking spaces at all. Applicants for such housing, in addition to the obvious things (like demonstrating that they indeed have children) must also agree to sell any vehicle they own if accepted, and the administrator of the property must be given the power to pull DMV records at periodic intervals for the residents to make sure they have not registered a vehicle title.
By contrast, subsidized housing for singles, such as a retired person, should be free of such a restriction. The point is that right now, the mentality is that vehicle ownership is a right guarenteed in the US Constitution and that government social workers cannot require that anyone on public assistance of any kind be required to give up their cars.
I commend CLF for the statement "the affordable housing movement needs to become the affordable living movement."
I also commend Paul Edgar from bringing up the bridge issue. Parul – you are right on!
Our transportation system is bad for everyone, worse yet for the poor. Legal barriers now make it a lot harder for one group of people to live isolated from those less fortunate. If there is one barrier that remains it is our tranportations system.
Whether it be income or sanitity, if you fall below a certain line, you are stuck in a certain place by our transportation system. If you are above a certain line, you can live in an area where you can breath clean air, be surrounded by nature, have clean streams for your children to play in, and more than anything – avoid the low-life scum and half-wits. There lies the real evil of an auto-based transportation system – it lets one group live in a habitat that is healthy, and in doing so, they degrade the habitat of another group of people. Why make dense urban areas better places to live if you can avoid such places?
What the affordable housing movement really needs to become is the affordable – read sustainable – human habitat movement. Our public transporation, water, sewer, and drainage systems all function together intergrally to create and sustain the urban landscape that functions as the habitat for most of mankind. It is a created place, with elected officials setting the policies that determine the character, livability, cost of living, and health of that place. I think that if the urban landscape is viewed for what it is – as a habitat for people – then everyone will benefit, but particularly the poor who are stuck in the most undesirable parts of that habitat and who are unable to escape on weekends and for vacations via a transportation system custom-tailored to benefit those blessed with wealth.