Housing Plus Transit Affordability Index

Kate Hawley's been doing some very good work at the Hyde Park Herald and in Wednesday's paper there'll be a fine article on a webtool called the Housing Plus Transportation Affordability Index.  This is another excellent product from the Center for Neighborhood Technologies, who also brought I-Go Car Sharing to Chicago.  The webtool examines the level of transit services in various neighborhoods and makes the case that transit-rich neighborhoods allow residents to live more cheaply because they don't have to have a car to go everywhere.  This very simple & compelling idea undergirds the Location Efficient Mortgage (LEM).  The LEM is a pilot program in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago that allows mortgage lenders to qualify more people for housing loans in high transit areas, with the idea again being that people can save money on automobiles and therefore afford higher mortgages. 

Pretty cool stuff, eh?

Hawley quotes me in the Herald article talking about the Gray Line.  My suggestion differs somewhat from Michael Payne's in that I'm going for a more limited start-up.

Comments

[Diana Barrie]

I would like to hear an explanation of how I-Go Car sharing is such a good thing. I can see that it is cheaper than owning a car, and I guess I can see a marginal gain in possibly cutting down on the number of cars manufactured because people are sharing them, but how is that better than sharing a ride on a bus or train, or walking?

[withrow]

It's not that car sharing is better than transit or biking or walking.

Car sharing takes away one reason people have for hanging on to a car they don't use that often-- infrequent trips to a place not served by transit or where you plan to transport a lot of goods or people or something. Unless you have to drive everyday, you may very well be better off using transit most of the time and doing I-Go or Zipcars occasionally. That choice is better for the environment and better for your pocketbook (probably).

Car sharing also frees up parking spaces and the cars they use are kept in tiptop shape and otherwise enviro-friendly.

[Kate Hawley]

Thanks for the shout-out. And yes, Withrow has written about some interesting modifications to Payne's Gray Line idea. Too bad this kind of thinking doesn't seem to be coming from the CTA.