Streetsblog Capitol Hill

All eyes are on Texas Gov. Rick Perry these days, the faraway frontrunner in the Republican race. But as the primary goes on (and on and on) more Republicans might take note of the fact that in a matchup with President Obama, only one candidate stands a chance of winning: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had a mixed record on transit and smart growth. Photo: Daily Caller

According to the most recent polling data, Obama trounces Gov. Perry. He makes mincemeat of Bachmann and Gingrich. Only one poll shows a winning Republican candidate, and that’s Romney, with a two percent edge over the president in a recent USA Today poll.

We took a hard look at Rick Perry’s approach to transportation last fall, when he was running for re-election. As Texas governor, Perry championed a mega-highway plan that would make the Road Gang blush. He blocked metrorail extensions and vulnerable users legislation.

But what about Romney? His record as a red governor of the blue state of Massachusetts is a little more complex, and worth exploring.

In a recent Boston Globe story comparing current Democratic Governor Deval Patrick with his predecessor, Romney emerges as the more inspired candidate when it comes to smart growth. (It doesn’t help that Patrick was caught driving around in an SUV last week while telling his constituents to observe car-free week.)

According to the Globe, Patrick has done away with a program originated under Romney to encourage “mixed-use, walkable, downtown-centered, transit-oriented growth” and counter sprawl.

Under the Romney program, communities got credit for green building, saving energy, preserving open space, and zoning reform, among many other categories. Those that scored highest went to the front of the line to receive about $500 million per year in grants and revolving loan funds for infrastructure including water and sewer projects. The idea was to put state funding to municipalities through a filter, and reward innovation in sustainability at the local level; previously the money was just doled out.

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Alex Steffen goes by the title “planetary futurist,” which makes me realize I should probably spruce up my title to something that makes me sound like I should be wearing a cape, too. What he does is write about sustainable cities, on WorldChanging.com for seven years and more recently in his book, Carbon Zero.

He just gave a TED talk about how to make cities more sustainable. And while he’s primarily looking at climate impacts, he pretty conclusively dismissed the notion that the problem can be solved with clean fuels.

“We tend to seek simple answers,” he said. And so if we assume the problem is fossil fuels, he said, we also assume that “the answer must be to replace fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. And while we do need clean energy, I would put to you that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we’re setting ourselves up not to solve it.”

With a rapidly urbanizing planet and eight billion people projected to live in or near cities by midcentury, Steffen asserts that it may just not be possible to generate enough energy to power all those cities – if those cities continue to look like the ones in the developed world today, anyway. The solution, he said, is density.

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For much of this week, the House has been debating next year’s appropriations bill for Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. The bill includes harsh cuts to many key safety and environmental programs, including the EPA’s Smart Growth Office. According to the Obama administration’s statement of policy on the bill, “The bill terminates funding for EPA’s Smart Growth program, which contributes to efforts to assist communities in coordinating infrastructure investments and minimizing environmental impact of development.”

San Francisco's Mint Plaza won an EPA Smart Growth award last year. Photo: SF Weekly

Smart Growth America opposes the cut, calling it “shortsighted” and saying it would be “detrimental to economic growth.” According to SGA:

The EPA’s smart growth programs assist communities on a diversity of projects, like creating a range of housing and transportation choices for residents and workers, growing local economies, protecting the environment and public health, and improving local infrastructure. For example, the rural communities of Driggs and Victor in Idaho received a Smart Growth Implementation Assistance award to help identify steps to redevelop their downtown economies. Hundreds of other communities across the country have received similar assistance under the smart growth program, but these economically vital efforts would come to an end under the House legislation.

Four Democrats sent a letter to their House colleagues yesterday asking them to oppose the cuts.

“The program, with its voluntary, market-driven approach, has directly assisted communities across the country, helping them increase economic development, protect the environment and public health, improve their infrastructure, and ensure efficient use of government services,” the letter stated. “The Smart Growth programs face such high demand that they are only able to help 9 percent of current applicants.”

The House has been voting on amendments for the past few days, essentially approving further cuts and rejecting anything that would restore funding.

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Despite growing demand, developers of mixed-used development face an additional hurdle thanks to outdated federal regulations. Photo: CNU

The real estate market is undergoing the most rapid period of change in a generation — and the shift is decidedly urban. A succession of recent studies have found there is an under-supply of urban-style housing — attached and small-lot, single-family homes — on the scale of about 13 million units. On the other hand, there is an estimated oversupply of detached housing in the car-based suburbs of about 28 million units.

Public policy hasn’t quite caught up with the market, say the experts at the Congress for the New Urbanism. The Federal Housing Administration and its subsidiaries, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are discouraging urban-style housing developments.

HUD lending standards dictate that the total value of mixed-use development projects can’t be more than 15 to 20 percent retail. Fannie caps retail share at 20; Freddie at 25 percent. And these standards set the tone for the private market — a tone that is consequently skewed toward single-family housing, and away from the pent-up demand for urban development with walkable amenities.

“It’s really disrupting the market,” said John Norquist, president of Congress for the New Urbanism. “It’s making it hard to developers to finance good projects.”

CNU is seeking reform. The organization has built a broad coalition including the National Association of Homebuilders, the National Association of Realtors, the National Town Builders Association, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. Together, this reform group is planning to initiate discussions with Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), of the House Committee on Financial Services; and the U.S. Treasury.

“Our sweetest dream is that the Obama administration — the Treasury Department and HUD — would say, ‘Let’s change this before the end of the year,’” Norquist said.  “The secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, has said very favorable things about this. He recognizes it.”

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Transit investment lagged in regions where MPO boards did not give equal representation to city populations, Detroit (SE Michigan) being an especially bad example. In more democratic metros, investment was much more balanced. Image: Nelson, 2003

Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government? Most Americans don’t. In fact, most people probably have no idea these agencies even exist, let alone what they do. Yet they are surprisingly powerful and play a substantial role in shaping the places where we live and work.

Led by unelected boards, MPOs and COGs, as they’re known, are a special breed among government agencies. They lack the authority to issue taxes or impose laws. As such, they go largely unmentioned in the media and are mostly unknown to local residents, outside of the most wonkish circles. But the low profile of MPOs and COGs belies their considerable power.

Despite their limitations, they represent the strongest form of regional governance we’ve got in the United States, crossing city and county lines. More importantly, they disperse hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars annually. While these agencies often distribute transportation funds more fairly than state DOTs, many of them are structured in a way that favors sprawl and undermines cities.

MPOs and COGs can be profoundly undemocratic. They are governed by boards of public officeholders, but there is no requirement that they be in any way representative of the region’s population. In fact, the general rule that governs the composition of MPO boards is “one place, one vote,” rather than the more traditional “one person, one vote.” This often produces decisions dramatically skewed toward suburban and rural interests.

For example, greater Milwaukee’s MPO, known by the unwieldy acronym SEWRPC, is governed by a board of 21 members, three from each of the counties that make up the planning region. That means that the city of Milwaukee — population nearly 600,000 — has zero representatives on the commission that distributes millions of dollars for transportation throughout the region. It is not guaranteed any votes. The city’s only voting power comes from the three seats given to Milwaukee County — and those must be spread between the central city and many suburbs. Meanwhile, rural Walworth County — population 100,000 — is guaranteed three votes.

Milwaukee is an especially egregious case. But unfortunately, this general pattern is more the norm than the exception. A 1999 Brookings Institution study [PDF] found that central cities were under-represented in as many as 92 percent of MPOs and COGs.

That bias can have a strong impact on policy, further research has shown. A 2003 study by researchers at Virginia Tech found that for each additional suburban member on an MPO board, there was a 1 to 9 percent decrease in funding for transit — with highways being the favored alternative.

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This guest post was written by Abigail Gardner of Smart Growth America.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday posed the question of whether smart growth policies and land use restrictions were to blame for the housing boom and bust. The hypothesis comes from Wendell Cox, a long-time critic of smart growth, who, in a recent paper, recycled a specious argument that land use regulations caused housing prices to increase unsustainably, creating the real estate bubble and, eventually, the collapse of the housing market. Cox claims to show that differences in how metro areas regulated development explain the recent housing crisis.

Densely built urban neighborhoods, like this one in Baltimore, fared better during the foreclosure crisis than the sprawling exurbs. Photo: The Volunteacher

Cox’s argument is full of holes. He examines a few cherry-picked cities while ignoring what happened nationally.

The irrationally exuberant housing market affected real estate prices in most of the country in the decade before 2006, with a pronounced increase after 2003. The only national variable that correlates clearly with this overwhelmingly national trend was the loosening of mortgage lending rules and Wall Street’s invention of new ways to profit from bad loans — not land use restrictions.

In contrast to Cox’s hypothesis, rates of foreclosure correlate most strongly with the year a home was built. All other things being equal, newer neighborhoods – built during the boom and financed with non-traditional loans – have more bank-owned homes now. In other words, areas that pulled out all the stops on new development suffered more than those that took a more measured approach. Rather than impacting neighborhoods that built according to smart growth strategies, the foreclosure crisis is now a much bigger problem for peripheral suburbs that sacrificed quality and access to jobs in exchange for more taxable properties.

As Chris Leinberger, fellow at Brookings and president of Smart Growth America’s LOCUS project, told the WSJ, the price decline on the “drivable fringe” was generally twice as bad during the crash, “and it was that part of the market that is the least regulated.” Walkable, compact neighborhoods essentially “held their value, thank you very much,” he said.

Communities that developed more along the lines of sprawl than smart growth are struggling to recover from the housing crisis. Recent census data show suburban growth is slowing for the first time in decades, and it’s not just the housing crisis that’s to blame. Neighborhoods without transportation choices and located far from employment centers are less attractive to home buyers and are suffering more in the downturn. Desperate developers in the far-flung exurbs are having to include free cars with home purchases in empty neighborhoods, but it’s getting harder to persuade potential homeowners to commute 60 miles each way to work. Consumers increasingly understand that buying a home with a long, car-dependent commute — especially when gas prices are hitting record highs — can lock a household into an ongoing expense that can blow up their budget.

Smart growth neighborhoods, by contrast, offer insurance against foreclosure and can reduce the combined cost of housing and transportation. Due to consistent demand for walkable neighborhoods with a mix of uses and good access to jobs and public transportation, homes in these neighborhoods are much easier to sell and
tend to hold their value. Places that invest in smart growth principles not only survived the housing crisis better, they protect their residents against spiking fuel prices as well. That is good for the homeowners in these communities as well as their local economies, and that’s news we think the Wall Street Journal should be pretty excited about.

According to AARP, 88 percent of seniors want to stay in their own homes as long as they can. But where are those homes? In auto-dependent suburbs. That’s where most Baby Boomers grew up, in the postwar era, and that’s where most of them have stayed – even as the largest (and longest-living) generation ever enters its golden years.

As baby boomers age, more of them are finding that auto dependent suburbia doesn't work for everybody. Photo: Transportation for America

However, more than 20 percent of seniors (age 65 and up) do not drive at all. In the spread-out, transit-poor communities where many of them live, seniors who don’t drive miss out on countless opportunities. According to a report released today by Transportation for America called “Aging in Place: Stuck Without Options”:

Absent access to affordable travel options, seniors face isolation, a reduced quality of life and possible economic hardship. A 2004 study found that seniors age 65 and older who no longer drive make 15 percent fewer trips to the doctor, 59 percent fewer trips to shop or eat out, and 65 percent fewer trips to visit friends and family, than drivers of the same age.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology conducted the analysis for the T4A report, finding that a large proportion of seniors lack transit access currently, and that in 2015, just a few short years away, 15.5 million seniors will find themselves without transportation options.

“My generation grew up and reared our children in communities that, for the first time in human history, were built on the assumption that everyone would be able to drive an automobile,” said John Robert Smith, former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi and co-chair of Transportation for America.

When seniors can’t get out, the local economy suffers too. John Robert Smith says when he was mayor, Meridian set a goal of recruiting retirees.

“Retirees bring their retirement funds into your communities, deposit them in your banks; they support your school systems but they don’t make demands on your school systems, they don’t put children in the school system; they are law-abiding, good citizens so they don’t have that impact on your police department, they’re just an all around benefit and plus for your community,” Smith said.

Even seniors who can still drive might find that they feel nervous driving after dark, or that their reflexes are slowing down. Still others start looking for other transportation options because their fixed incomes can’t absorb high gas prices.

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According to an analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology of 2002 mortgage data, 250 people applied for mortgages every day in Chicago, and only 150 were approved. The top reason for rejecting the other 100? Applicants had too much credit tied up in car ownership.

And mortgage lenders have only gotten more skittish since then about overextended borrowers.

Once you've filled your three-car garage you won't be able to afford this house anymore. Photo: El Gato Painting

Transportation and housing are inextricably tied, but many people are slow to realize the full implications of this link. CNT President Scott Bernstein says that although lenders understand the link when it comes to rejecting applicants who are overextended on car payments, they don’t include transportation costs in their mortgage underwriting. (Changing this practice was a key recommendation of the Congressional Livable Communities Task Force’s “Freedom From Oil” report.)

“The mortgage crisis was more intense in less location-efficient areas,” Bernstein said at a panel discussion on regional transportation planning for equity at the National Building Museum Monday. “I’m not saying car ownership caused it. But a precipitating factor was a lack of flexibility to tinker with your household budget because you had fixed costs for transportation.”

Transportation options, he said, could be an antidote to future recessions. They helped cushion the blow in urban areas, which saw an overall lower rate of foreclosure, even in poor neighborhoods. A 2010 study by NRDC found that in Chicago, Jacksonville, and San Francisco, “the probability of mortgage foreclosure increases as neighborhood vehicle ownership levels rise, after controlling for income.” [PDF]

Housing affordability looks very different when seen holistically as the cost of living in a certain place. “If you measure affordability as just the cost of housing as a ratio to income, 70 percent of people are living in an affordable situation,” Bernstein said. “When you account for transportation costs, that drops to 40 percent.”

CNT has a Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for people to check the true affordability of where they live, but most people don’t access this kind of information when making decisions about where to live.

When agencies start considering housing and transportation costs at the regional level, major changes in infrastructure investment follow. Bernstein says that when Chicago and the Bay Area set out to reduce the joint costs of transportation and housing, their efforts resulted in the reprogramming of state money away from highway construction.

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Urbanists are celebrating the results of the National Association of Realtors’ 2011 Community Preference Survey, which, according to the NAR, shows a clear preference for mixed uses, shorter commutes, and transportation options. The survey shows that people are asking for more walkable amenities and shorter commutes: a good sign.

But the survey is also rife with contradictions. It reveals, for instance, that Americans retain their affinity for certain characteristics found mainly in suburbia: more than anything, they prize privacy, and they overwhelmingly prefer single-family detached housing.

Wading through the survey, it can be difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions. Respondents said community characteristics are more important than the size of the home, with 88 percent saying location mattered more than size. And walkability was one of the traits people seek the most, with 66 percent saying the ability to walk to places in their community is important. High-quality public schools, the Achilles’ heel of many big cities and a primary driver of families to the suburbs, are also highly sought after. Meanwhile, “easy access to the highway” ranks just under good schools on the list of people’s preferences. And 53 percent want to be “away from it all” (as opposed to 34 percent that want to be at the “center of it all”). Slightly more people want a big house than a diverse set of neighbors.

Only 19 percent of respondents said they wanted to live in cities, with another 28 percent wanting “a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses.” That means more than half prefer rural living, traditional suburbs and small towns. Those numbers might show that more people want mixed-use places than the market currently provides, but they also suggest more ambiguity than the claims coming from NAR and some urbanist circles — that the survey is proof that smart growth is the new standard.

Another way to read the survey is to compare this year’s results to past ones and see what’s changing. But the trends don’t all point in the same direction. The 2011 survey shows a modest increase in support for some smart growth principles over 2004 — for example, five percent more people this year said their community needed more public transportation (51 percent in 2011 versus 46 percent in 2004) and four percent more wanted more walkable amenities. On the other hand, two percent fewer said their community needed more low-income housing and one percent fewer wanted more places to bike. The most dramatic change, however, was that in 2004 only 19 percent wanted more big-box stores in their communities, and now, 28 percent do.

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Source: NRDC Switchboard

House Republicans are calling for offshore oil drilling as an answer to foreign oil dependency and high gas prices — and they’re not the only ones. President Obama recently announced his intention to cut oil imports by one-third by 2025, partly by increasing domestic production was the answer to the country’s energy woes. In his speech announcing the plan, Obama barely mentioned transit and land use, even though more and more evidence points to these as real solutions for high gas prices.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has provided this neat graphic illustrating how demand side solutions — like better land use planning, transit access and more fuel efficient vehicles — match up against the tired “drill, baby, drill” mentality that has made the country so fossil-fuel dependent in the first place. The graphic is based on an NRDC analysis examining how much fuel could be saved using a variety of smart conservation policies, given the limits of our existing technology. Then the group compared the savings with the best available information about the country’s remaining domestic oil resources.

The result is a stark demonstration of the inadequacy of oil drilling as a solution. The analysis indicates that the United States could cut oil imports by 44 percent by focusing on clean energy technologies — about eight times what could be produced by domestic drilling. Previous studies have documented that better transit and community planning alone could reduce vehicle miles traveled in the country by 20 percent.

The implications for political leaders should be clear, says Luke Tonachel, writing for NRDC’s Switchboard blog. Unfortunately, the budget proposal introduced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan last week only affirms the oil subsidies and transit cuts that have led to our current predicament.

“As our analysis demonstrates, we have the know-how to break our oil addiction and meet the President’s goal of reducing oil imports by one-third,” he said. “The real question is whether we have the political will.”