Image: Arizona Department of Transportation

Does walkable development really lead to worse traffic congestion? Opponents of urbanism often say so, citing impending traffic disaster to rally people against, say, a new mixed-use project proposed in their backyards. But new research provides some excellent evidence to counter those claims.

A recent study by the Arizona Department of Transportation [PDF] found that neighborhoods where houses are closer together actually have freer-flowing traffic.

Researchers compared some of greater Phoenix’s denser neighborhoods – South Scottsdale, Tempe, and East Phoenix — with a few of its more sprawling ones – Glendale, Gilbert, and North Scottsdale. Some interesting patterns emerged.

In the more compact neighborhoods, the average household owned 1.55 cars, compared to 1.92 in more suburban areas. Residents of higher-density neighborhoods also traveled shorter distances both to get to work and to run errands, the study found.

The average work trip was a little longer than seven miles for higher-density neighborhoods; in the more suburban neighborhoods, it was almost 11 miles. Residents of the three compact neighborhoods traveled just less than three miles to shop, while residents of sprawling locations traveled an average of more than four miles. All of this led the more urban dwellers to travel an average of nearly five fewer miles per day than their suburban counterparts.

The density divide also played an important role in transit use. Rates varied from as high as eight percent transit ridership in high-density neighborhoods to as low as one percent in the more sprawling areas.

All of this translated into a reduced strain on roadways in the places that had more people — running counter to one of the strongest objections to mixed-use development. Comparing one suburban corridor to two of the streets in the more dense neighborhoods, the study found that on the more urban streets, traffic congestion was “much lower,” or about half as high (measured by the ratio of the capacity of the roadway to the actual volume of cars on it).

How did more compact neighborhoods manage to have less congestion? It’s not just because residents there drive less overall. Two design characteristics also ease traffic, according to AZ DOT. Fine-grained street networks distributed traffic evenly across the higher-density neighborhoods, while every driver in the suburban neighborhoods was funneled onto the same big arterials. At the same time, improved pedestrian conditions in commercial centers made it easier for some drivers to park once and walk from destination to destination, taking cars off the road precisely in the areas that attract the most people.

The results of the Arizona study may not apply everywhere, due to the state’s extremely spread out pattern of development. The higher-density neighborhoods still only had between six and seven households per acre, compared with between three and four in the lower-density places. As the report notes, “By Eastern U.S. standards, all of these densities are effectively suburban in character.”

But the report controls for a host of factors, strengthening the conclusion that the different travel behaviors were really the result of design, rather than income, say, or the student population.

The Arizona Department of Transportation deserves credit — first of all, because this is a fantastic, thorough, well-timed study, but also for pointing out the important policy implications. The agency’s recommendations include a public awareness campaign about the benefits of mixed-use, compact development; better planning and public engagement tools; and providing incentives for smart planning.

The authors noted, for example, that outdated policies sabotage planning efforts that are beneficial for livability, public health, and the environment in the name of maintaining traffic flow. The supreme irony — in light of the study results — is that these policies ultimately fail the congestion test too:

Local planners and planning commissions are still using traditional traffic engineering approaches to assess the impact of development projects. By looking only at traffic congestion levels on adjacent links, ignoring through travel, and failing to account for the efficiencies of mixed-use development on lower vehicle trip rates and VMT, progressive projects are likely to be rejected or unreasonably downsized.

The DOT also concludes that congestion isn’t always a bad thing, that density is the key to successful transit, and that short blocks are critical for building vibrant, mixed-use places.

Protesters opposing the Central Corridor's TOD zoning in April 2011. Photo: Metro Lutheran

Such is the quandary facing some communities along the Central Corridor light rail project in Minnesota. The 11-mile line between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul originally called for 16 stations, spaced half a mile apart at either end, but spaced up to a mile apart in some places – including in the high-poverty, predominantly minority neighborhoods of Frogtown and Midway in St. Paul. Initially, planners claimed that adding stops in those areas would jeopardize the project by tipping the Federal Transit Administration’s cost effectiveness rating into unfavorable territory. However, a grassroots campaign called “Stops for Us” took their case directly to FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff, and in January 2010 the agency altered its priorities so that cost effectiveness alone could no longer disqualify an otherwise sound transit project from funding under the New Starts and Small Starts programs.

But now that these neighborhoods, among St. Paul’s poorest, were getting their transit stations, what could be done to prevent them from being gentrified out of existence by jumps in property value? This was the question that the Healthy Corridor for All Health Impact Assessment [PDF], published in December, intended to answer.

The health impact assessment (HIA), which was completed by PolicyLink with the cooperation of local community groups ISAIAH and Take Action MN, “judges the potential, and sometimes unintended, effects of a policy, plan, program or project on the health of a population.” It’s roughly analogous to an Environmental Impact Statement, but with an emphasis on human factors such as “community health, health inequities, and underlying conditions that determine health” rather than an EIS’s impersonal approach to quantifying the effects of a given project.

The report authors lay out a plan to ensure that the new transit line pays dividends for current residents. “Having largely been the victims of disinvestment,” the foreword reads, “they are still hungry to take advantage of this new investment as long as they can be sure that their communities will benefit.”

A map from the HIA showing the level of ethnic diversity along the Central Corridor rail line. Image: PolicyLink/ISAIAH/TakeActionMN

The report confirmed much of what Streetsblog surmised last October: The communities along the Central Corridor are at risk of displacement.

Among the report’s other revelations:

• Fully one quarter of Central Corridor residents are foreign-born.
• The education-employment mismatch in the Central Corridor is such that the jobs expected to accompany TOD demand an educational attainment greater than many residents possess.
• 83 percent of all businesses along the corridor are small businesses, accounting for 38 percent of all employees of businesses on University Avenue (over 4000 employees).
• University Avenue businesses will see an 87 percent reduction in on-street parking due to light rail construction and implementation.

The HIA recommended the following actions to offset the risks to vulnerable communities along the CC LRT line:

1. Institute a community equity program, recapturing a portion of the increased value of development sites close to proposed light rail stations to help cover the cost of reserving some of the housing on these sites for lower-income households. Residential and mixed-use developments would either have to meet a threshold percentage of affordable housing, or else, by paying in-lieu fees to the Housing Trust Fund for example, assist in creating permanent affordable housing elsewhere.
2. Write a commitment to affordable housing into law, by specifying affordable housing objectives as a purpose of the “T”-designated (for Traditional neighborhood) zoning that will apply to the Central Corridor. Once the requirements are written into the zoning code, they can be better enforced by city authorities.
3. As an alternative (or complement) to the community equity program, the report recommends the awarding of density bonuses or modified parking requirements for developers who commit to providing a certain quantity of affordable housing. The greater the share of affordable housing, and the greater degree to which that housing is affordable, the more allowances could be made to developers to exceed the maximum density prescribed by the zoning code.
4. To defray anxiety stemming from the sudden reduction in on-street parking, adopt regulations that would allow use of undeveloped parcels for temporary parking lots. (There is no word on just how temporary these parking lots would be, however.)

The report also recommends a strategy, called “first source hiring,” to require construction contractors to first submit a list of job openings to a city agency, which could then refer applicants from among local residents and track compliance with hiring practices.

The report’s authors are already having an effect. Even before the final version of the report was published, the St. Paul City Council voted in April to study the feasibility of the community equity program and density bonus incentives. In addition, the report’s recommendations could very well find their way into the greater Twin Cities’ regional planning process, which is currently being restructured. From there, the Central Corridor could become a national example of successful integration of transportation and housing policies with an emphasis on equity.

The historic downtown — a poorly-scaled anachronism from when this city of 260,000 housed a mere 3,500 people — was revitalized and reimagined as a “transit village.” Tax increment financing helped support urban-style, walkable development.

All because DART was building a rail line and forward-thinking town leaders wanted to be ready. Now decades of careful planning and preparation are paying off; Plano is poised to secure $60 million in transit oriented development near its two rail stations.

Downtown Plano before. Photo: DART Department of Economic Development

After an earlier deal was thwarted by the economic downturn in 2008, Tennessee-based developer Southern Land Co. announced intentions recently to break ground on a $30 million, 280-unit mixed-use apartment complex in downtown Plano this spring. Meanwhile, the city is negotiating with local developer Prescott Realty Group for a project of a similar scale one stop down the Red Line at the Parker Road station, the Dallas Morning News reports.

Last week the paper lamented that the recession has hampered the (perhaps overly optimistic?) fortunes that were anticipated when DART began building what is today the country’s largest light rail system. But as the real estate shock thaws (at least in Texas), Plano is one of several Dallas area communities that are cashing in on DART’s expansion.

The new rail stations have raised property values along Plano’s rail corridor about 200 percent, said Deputy City Director Frank Turner. That has generated about $40 million from Tax Increment Financing, a method for taxing projected increases in property values. That money will be used to help advance its vision for a vibrant, walkable downtown, a pattern the city hopes to repeat at the further flung Parker Road station as well.

Patrick Kennedy (Streetsblog Network writer from Walkable Dallas Fort Worth) remarked on the suburb’s success in a recent article for D Magazine:

I visited downtown Plano last year. Even in the recession, the thwack-thwack-thwack of hammers filled the air with the optimism of new construction. I counted eight storefront renovations or new construction projects.

Downtown Plano after.

That was the vision for downtown Plano that began taking shape back in 1983 when Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) was formed and Plano was one of the first communities to “opt in,” setting aside a one-cent property tax to support the transit service.

Since that time, the community has invested about $1 billion — or roughly $50 million a year — in the public transportation system, city officials say. That includes comprehensive bus and paratransit service as well as light rail.

In the late 1990s, when Plano learned it would become a stop on DART’s light rail line, City Council decided its historic downtown should become a “transit village.” The neighborhood should be walkable, dense, with a mix of land uses. It should have the kind of amenities that would appeal to tenants that are looking for a more urban lifestyle. The city’s plan called for 1,000 new housing units near the station downtown.

All this was done to set the stage for high-density transit oriented development. After all, you can’t just build hundreds of apartments next to transit and expect it to become an attractive, urban community, says Turner.

“Transit gives you an edge but that’s not sufficient,” he said. “You really have to have the urban amenities, the lifestyle things in order to command the premium in rent.”

The newest development in downtown Plano will include a minimum of 280 residential units on about 3 acres. Parking minimums are about 20 percent lower than elsewhere in the city.

DART's Mockingbird Station in Northeast Dallas looks like it could be Portland. Photo: DART Dept. of Economic Development

Plano is using Tax Increment Financing money to subsidize the downtown development with $1.7 million — with the requirement that it be used only to develop public amenities, including park space, a police substation and parking spaces for the police department.

And although, as the Dallas Morning News noted, some of the Dallas region’s TOD dreams have been delayed by the real estate market, Plano is certainly not the only bright spot in the Dallas TOD market.

Despite its reputation for being a car-centric city, Reconnecting America [PDF] says the Dallas region is the country’s 10th best market for transit oriented development.

DART’s Office of Economic Development says that as early as 1999, the light rail system had increased station adjacent property values by 25 percent. By 2005, the total value of development by stations had added up to $3.3 billion. And by 2007, local communities had collected an additional $78 million in tax revenues due to property value increases.

There are other good examples in the region. DART points to the Mockingbird Station in Northeast Dallas, Cedars Station near the city center, and Irving’s Texas Station redevelopment project, to name a few.

The moral of the story, seems to be that investment in transit and smart growth is paying off — for communities that were forward-looking enough to plan ahead.

Currently, Plano is competing with the suburb of Richardson for a stop on the upcoming Cotton Belt Rail Line. In the D Magazine article quoted above, Kennedy makes his point that Plano is the deserving community.

“Sorry, Richardson,” he wrote. “Your neighbor to the north has a downtown worth supporting.”

For Minneapolis residents along the Hiawatha rail line, that convenience is worth tacking on an additional 10 percent to housing prices. Chicagoans near the Midway transit line are willing to pay about 19 percent extra. And in Portland, folks are willing to fork over an additional 31 percent for an abode within one-quarter mile of a rail transit station along the Westside extension line.

Selling prices for homes within 1/2 mile rose 31 percent after the addition of light rail in Portland, according to one study. Photo: Wired Autopia

The Center for Housing Policy recently completed a comprehensive review of the existing research on housing prices and proximity to rail. According to dozens of studies over decades, a rail station within a short walk can add 6 to 50 percent to home values.

The center’s analysis shows, however, that not all rail lines are created equal, at least when it comes to housing price appreciation.

Some important considerations for potential investors: Is the station walkable or is it located near highway infrastructure? Does the rail service operate frequently and offer service to desirable destinations? What is the strength of the regional housing market?

All of these factors are important. But ultimately they point to a central conclusion: the premium buyers are willing to pay to live near rail transit correlates roughly to how much accessibility the transit service offers relative to other modes. In a congested city with a strong housing market and robust transit system — New York City, for example — rail transit proximity results in the largest premiums. Meanwhile, weak market cities with poor transit and relatively traffic-free highways — like Buffalo, New York — may see little price appreciation around rail transit stops. In these cases, rail transit has little inherent advantage over highway travel.

Other interesting insights from the study:

• Apartments and condos generally enjoy greater price appreciation with proximity to rail transit than single family homes. In a 2008 study of San Diego, the premium was 17 percent for condominiums, but only 6 percent for single-family housing. Researchers theorize this is because multi-family housing dwellers (generally single) have less complicated transportation needs than their single-family counterparts (often families).
• Some evidence shows that appreciation is greater in higher-income neighborhoods. However, other studies have shown that price appreciation also takes place in low-income neighborhoods, indicating that the value of transit is capitalized into housing prices across income levels. For example, after plans were announced for Atlanta’s Beltline rail transit corridor, housing value increases were observed only in the lower-income portions of the route on the south side of the city.
• Price increases are not generally observed for bus transit because they lack the permanence of rail transit. However, fixed bus-rapid-transit routes, like the bus-only corridors in Pittsburgh, did offer a measurable appreciation effect on nearby housing.
• Building transit stations near freeway facilities can counteract the livability benefits of transit and lessen or even eliminate housing price appreciation.
• Housing price appreciation was not found to take place near park-and-ride rail transit facilities, perhaps because of the nuisance caused by increased traffic.
• There is little information about how proximity to rail transit affects rent prices.

In general, study authors found, communities can expect proximity to rail to add up to about 10 percent to nearby home values. Researchers also found that home values generally continue increasing as the value of the new service becomes more widely understood.

The Center for Housing Policy recommended that cities undergoing rail expansion take care to maintain affordable housing by stations. The group also recommended that public agencies attempt to capture some of the value created by transit investments through tax increment financing and use that money to support the rail expansion.

Members of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association on Capitol Hill with Rep. John Mica (center) on Tuesday. Photo courtesy of USHSR.

At a meeting with members of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association Tuesday, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica softened his stance somewhat on his plan to privatize the Northeast Corridor.

He acknowledged that the proposal is “controversial” and said that was why he framed it in a separate bill, apart from the rest of the reauthorization. He said he’s “heard the concerns” about the plan. A member of his staff said that the original plan was being portrayed as transferring Amtrak’s assets away from it, while leaving Amtrak holding the bag on the debt. “Which, when you put it that way, does sound sort of unfair,” the staffer said, indicating that issues like those are being worked out.

Andy Kunz, president and CEO of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association, said he was glad to see Mica striking a more cooperative tone. “His initial bill and his initial hearing was a little bit ‘This is it; take it or leave it’,” Kunz said. “Now he’s recognizing there needs to be a bit more cooperative action.”

The committee isn’t easing up on everything, though. The staffer also stated that the committee was giving inter-city and passenger rail “a temporary rest” while it focuses exclusively on high-speed rail. “It does not serve the two programs well to be ‘smooshed,’ or put together and consolidated the way they have been and then have most of the projects that receive funding not be high-speed rail in any way, shape, or form.”

In response to the Congressional Research Service’s conclusion that the rail privatization scheme could run into constitutional problems, Mica’s staffer was dismissive, saying CRS merely warned that some courts could find it to be a violation, and they should be careful. (Sounds like a finding of unconstitutionality to me.)

As he often does, Mica spoke of his high-speed rail plans as a way to rescue high-speed rail from the Obama administration’s mismanagement and bungling. He often jokes about the “gift that keeps on giving”: the original $8 billion allocated for high-speed rail, some of which has been returned by gun-shy states and re-allocated.

Mica asserted that the involvement of the private sector is “non-negotiable” – which Amtrak itself would agree with, as it’s already seeking private sector partners. Mica gave Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman credit for being on board. “Boardman sees that you cannot [upgrade the NEC to high speeds] – at least in his lifetime – under the current proposal,” Mica said. He also said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is “willing to negotiate.” But he cast blame on Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who he said are willing to give “none of the pie” to private investors.

Everyone is still trying to figure out exactly what the “pie” consists of, in any case, and Mica let the USHSR know that he had sent a letter to Joseph Boardman asking for an itemized inventory of all the assets on the NEC and their fair market value. Mica’s staffer says that “knowing what’s there and how leveraged it is and what are the encumbrances” would be a “building block of private sector financing participation.”

Kunz of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association agreed that Amtrak “needs to show that they’re willing to bend a little bit,” if for no other reason than because “Amtrak needs funding from the federal government every year.”

In an interview with Streetsblog immediately after the Capitol Hill meetings, Kunz said, “Amtrak is just assuming they’re going to control everything and run everything, and that may not be in the interests of the whole country… it’s the country’s rail system. They need to do what’s best for the country, which may not always be what’s best for Amtrak.”

Mica is hoping that transit-oriented development will be a key source of private sector involvement, and, perhaps, revenue. He pointed to successes with TOD in Phoenix and said, “Can you imagine, in the Northeast Corridor, what you could do?”

Mica also said he’s been meeting with Democrats on the larger reauthorization package, and that so far they’ve gotten about 55 or 60 percent of the way through the bill. It’s been lamented that there haven’t been “Big Four” meetings in the House like there have been in the Senate, bringing together top members of both parties from the committee, but those meetings have now started in the various subcommittees. Mica started to say that all that consultation was the explanation for the delay in marking up the bill, but then he said, “We will continue in a slower motion fashion,” he said, “mainly because our leadership controls the floor time.”

He granted that the delay makes sense. “Given the intensity of the current drama on the budget deficit, they probably calculated right,” he said. “To get this to the floor before next Friday seems highly unlikely. But we have a commitment to do it as soon as we get back [from recess]. So you’ll see everything go from slow motion into fast motion as soon as we get back.”

The U.S. High-Speed Rail Association is trying to drum up interest in its new “Republicans 4 Rail” program. They’re trying to get members of Congress, governors, state and local officials, and even some rank-and-file members of the Republican party to sign on.

For now, the pickings are still somewhat slim. Mica counts, although many Democrats see his Northeast Corridor proposal as the “death knell” of passenger rail in the U.S. So does Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), one of few Republican senators representing urban or industrial states. In trying to brainstorm other Senate Republicans who might be interested in joining R4R, Kirk’s staffer and the USHSR came up with a short list indeed: maybe Rob Portman from Ohio; maybe Scott Brown of Massachusetts if he weren’t running for reelection.

The rail lobbyists met with Kirk’s office after the meeting with Mica, but Kirk himself was not able to show up. His staffer talked about the Lincoln Legacy Infrastructure Development Act, also designed to draw private investment to public infrastructure projects.

He also alluded to the House/Senate split around the duration of a reauthorization. He said the constituent calls he gets on the subject are about split, 50-50, on the issue of whether to lock in low spending levels for six years, a la the House bill, or go with a two-year bill at higher spending levels, but offering less ability to plan long-term projects.

David Baker + Partners Architects

The development at 168 Eddy Street would provide 153 new apartments reserved for low-income families and space for a 12,000-foot street-level grocery store. It would help quell some of the high demand for affordable housing in the neighborhood, where valuable lots used to park cars diminish the urban fabric despite very low car ownership. Bringing the first full-sized grocery market to the neighborhood would also provide access to healthy food options within walkable distances.

But as Gen Fujioka wrote this week on Streetsblog Los Angeles, San Francisco hasn’t always had policies in place to preserve space for low-income people as property values near transit skyrocketed.

One test of San Francisco’s affordable housing policies came in the 1990s during the dot-com boom. Amidst a hot real estate market, development pressures grew particularly in transit-rich areas. Evictions reached record levels and entire neighborhoods were transformed in a few years. According to research by UC Berkeley’s Center on Community Innovation, during the period between 1995 and 2000, the out-migration of low-income households exceeded 9,800 each year while the numbers of upper income households grew. Proximity to transit was a significant factor in explaining the pattern of displacement. Neighborhoods within a half-mile of major transit were particularly at risk of gentrification and displacement, suffering marked declines in the number of households of color.

Local social justice groups mobilized and got the city to adopt a moratorium on new development. Stagnant residential construction can also lead to rising rents, so more and more, planners are looking for ways to ensure that transit-oriented development goes hand in hand with housing affordability. Initiatives like the one now underway in the Tenderloin are a welcome sign that localities are waking up to the unintended consequences of TOD — that the rising tides of property values may not lift all boats.

Many cities are still struggling to get it right. In Seattle’s multi-ethnic, low-income International District (also known as the “ID”), now the central nexus of the region’s transit, the city adopted “a transit-oriented upzoning” to allow more than a doubling of housing units in the already high-density district. Fujioka writes:

On paper, the plan’s goals would create 4,500 units of housing affordable for lower income households; however, the new zoning does not ensure the affordable units will ever be built. Over the next six years the city’s estimated $145 million housing fund will support the production of 1,800 affordable units for the entire city. If the ID received a proportionate share of the projected funding, it would only support several hundred new affordable units. “So far, smart growth in Seattle doesn’t add up,” says Ken Katahira, housing development staff for InterIm Community Development Association, a nonprofit that has built affordable housing and a community garden in the neighborhood. “Zoning for higher densities does not necessarily create more affordable housing.”

Los Angeles, still in the early phases of rebuilding its transit system, is finding its way when it comes to ensuring that the benefits of transit-oriented development are distributed equitably. Community groups in the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood, where one of the first rail lines is being built, are now fighting to claim space for people of color in the coming wave of development. “After they started construction we had a wave of evictions near the station,” reports Isela Gracian, director of community organizing for the East Los Angeles Community Corporation (ELACC). “Landlords were looking for any excuse to evict tenants.”

Mariachi Plaza two days before the Gold Line Eastside Extension opened.

ELACC worked to help the transit agency understand the community’s perspective. “It wasn’t just that they didn’t speak the language,” said Gracian. “They didn’t appreciate what we had that would be lost.”

Fujioka writes, “One of the specific enterprises threatened by the line was space along the main business corridor where Mariachi musicians gathered and promoted their services.” ELACC helped bring about the ”community’s own version of mixed-use TOD: affordable housing and community services, including offices for the newly formed Mariachi musician’s association.”

The hazards of inequity in transit aren’t all about gentrification, of course. Fujioka writes about Rondo, an African-American community in St. Paul that was destroyed by the building of I-94 in the sixties, and the Vietnamese neighborhood, Frogtown, in the same city. As light rail was initially being conceived in the Twin Cities, those neighborhoods were passed over.

The original plans provided the fewest number of stations relative to the number of transit riders in those neighborhoods. While offering little service, the project threatened years of construction disruptions and the elimination of most street parking.

Only after each community filed a civil rights complaint with the Federal Transportation Agency did the region’s MPO, known as the Met Council, agree to install additional station stops in the minority communities.

Fujioka calls for greater participation in the planning process to ensure that low-income communities and communities of color enjoy all the benefits transit and transit-oriented development can bring.

You can read Fujioka’s whole story here.

Proximity to downtown and employment centers, and the availability of developable land, are what lead to big real estate impacts from transit expansion. Source: CTOD

“Transit alone is insufficient to make a real estate market,” said Dena Belzer, the president of Strategic Economics, an urban design consulting firm. Her group is a partner in the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), which this week released a new report on the effects of transit expansion on real estate markets.

Transit won’t, on its own, create a booming market for compact, mixed-use development, but if a city has a good, walkable grid and simply needs better access to jobs and centers of activity, it can do wonders. “There are sites where you can see that opening up access just really ‘popped’ things,” Belzer said. For the best chances of success, you need to use transit to connect underutilized land with walkable downtowns and employment opportunities.

The new CTOD report, “Rails to Real Estate: Development Patterns along Three New Transit Lines” [PDF], picked corridors in the Southeast (Charlotte, NC), the West (Denver, CO) and the Midwest (Minneapolis) to see how transit affected development patterns.

Residential units under construction near Charlotte's Blue Line. Photo: Willamor Media/Flickr

The big success story was Charlotte’s Blue Line – where transit “popped things,” as Belzer said. It’s the newest of the three lines, having just opened in 2007, at the height of an ongoing real estate boom. (It went bust along with the rest of the country, and all the big investors pulled out, but until that happened, everything was going great.)

Even in that short timeframe, this corridor saw the biggest spike in development after the opening of the transit line – nearly 10 million square feet of new development, compared with 6.7 million in Minneapolis and 7.8 million in Denver – and that’s along a rail line that’s only half as long as Denver’s (though tightly packed with 15 stations, compared to Denver’s 14).

Charlotte was destined for greatness because the city aligned its transit along all the right places, according to Belzer.

“Charlotte was much more intentional about pairing these infrastructure improvements with the line and placing their stations in locations that would be accessible and enhance development opportunities,” she said. Light rail was built in the midst of a housing boom where demand was focused on high-density housing.

The biggest factor, Belzer said, was that “the line itself went through neighborhoods that were ripe for development.” Even so, that corridor didn’t develop evenly. Most of the development occurred in the downtown district, with some in the South End, an old manufacturing area. “Once it got into places with a more suburban development pattern – less street connectivity, the line is elevated and the stations are no longer at ground level – you see very little impact. The development activity drops off.”

A pedestrian-friendly street grid is a defining quality of places where TOD flourished. In addition to financing light rail, Charlotte voters have approved bonds for station area infrastructure like streetscaping and sidewalks.

That was where Denver came up short. The Southeast Corridor runs along I-25 and I-225, linking suburbs with office jobs. Given that the line follows a highway, and that stations are located in areas without a walkable street grid, perhaps it’s not surprising that development was more dispersed than in Charlotte, with much of it happening on greenfield sites. “The accessibility value there came from the highway,” Belzer said. “Transit was just frosting on the cake.”

The authors do speculate, however, that the transit line’s greatest impact may have been in the design of the new projects and a greater mix of uses.

Of course, transit is often built in places that have already experienced a significant degree of development, where there isn’t always room for much more. Belzer pointed to Denver’s West corridor, under construction now, where several of the station stops are being built in well-established, densely developed neighborhoods. “And there isn’t much opportunity for new development there,” Belzer said. “In that case, the opportunity is to have people who live in that neighborhood be able to use transit, and not have to own a car. So pedestrian connectivity would be a more important thing to focus on – it’s not about reframing a real estate market or enhancing development. It’s just about making a tighter connection between the land use and the transit.”

Square footage of all new development completed or under construction during the specified time period. Source: CTOD

Minneapolis’s Hiawatha Line is the oldest of the three case studies, having opened in 2004. At the time, skeptics noted that the new light rail line would only go from the airport to the Mall of America and downtown – a benefit for tourists and businesspeople but not the majority of city residents. Regardless, ridership has far exceeded expectations. In fact, the 30,500 average weekday trips already exceeds Metro Transit’s goals for the year 2020.

Most of the new development that came in with the Hiawatha rail line was in the form of downtown condos and apartments – very little commercial development occurred. In some places outside of downtown, the relative inaccessibility of the stations from the neighborhoods meant that not all the station areas saw property values go up, as transit was less integrated into the neighborhood.

“There are still opportunities for infill development on sites in Minneapolis,” the report states, “many in neighborhoods with a need for better streetscape, pedestrian connections and other ‘placemaking’ investments.”

To date, most transit-oriented development has occurred in or near downtowns or major employment centers, according to the authors, in part because those places allow for “investments in neighborhood infrastructure and amenities [that] are critical for unlocking the potential for TOD, especially in areas where land use patterns were previously automobile dependent.”

The report is especially useful for localities looking to finance transit using value capture, a strategy by which the private sector, anticipating economic benefits and increased property values, helps pay for a new transit line. Value capture is tricky business, and having some added clarity about when TOD takes off – and when it falls flat – is enormously helpful for developers and planners.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is investing in a new system of transitways and priced traffic lanes instead of traditional highway expansion. Planners there say the region will never be able to build its way out of congestion with highways.

Like many communities throughout the country, Minneapolis-St. Paul is moving beyond the decades-old assumption that the only way to eliminate congestion is with more outward-stretching asphalt. This fall, officials in the Twin Cities voted to roll back highway expansions and increase access to transit options instead.

Local planners say it’s time to acknowledge that the region simply can’t afford to accommodate growth by building new highways.

“We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion,” said Arlene McCarthy, Director of Metropolitan Transportation Services for the Twin Cities Metro Council, which drafted and approved the new plan. “One county alone could easily consume all the money the region has. That’s the reality.”

With vehicle trips expected to increase 35 percent by 2030, regional planners estimate it would cost approximately $40 billion to even attempt to tackle congestion with traditional road projects. But only about $8 billion is expected to be available to the regional planning agency over the next ten years.

The goal of the Twin Cities 2030 Transportation Plan is to maximize the use of existing freeways by adding bus lanes or priced traffic lanes in shoulders wherever possible. The new framework will require increased emphasis on transit and other non-automotive modes.

Rather than measuring transportation capacity in terms of traffic volumes, planners have focused on moving people. The 2030 plan calls for using congestion pricing to help encourage transit, carpooling, walking and biking. The Twin Cities envision a network of “transitways,” which will serve the region through passenger rail, bus rapid transit or express busways. Compact, transit-oriented development will be built in clusters along these corridors. The plan also calls for clustering jobs near transportation centers and encouraging mixed-use development, McCarthy said.

The overall strategy is to pursue high-benefit, low-cost projects. “We’re asking the question, ‘Can we provide the majority of the benefit at a much lower cost?’” McCarthy said. “We’re finding that we can do that.”

As part of the new framework, 14 previously planned highway expansions totaling $2.3 billion have been tabled. However, six “high-impact, low-cost” highway projects are still slated to move forward. Many of the remaining projects focus on the building of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, but traditional highway building is included to a limited extent as well.

Local environmental and business groups have been supportive of the proposal. Jim Erkel, director of the land use and transportation program at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, said it will help ease water and air pollution in the region and prevent sprawl from consuming farmland. The plan, he said, should also help the region stay in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

“We’re going to be looking at less impervious surface,” he said. “Building in already developed areas should mean fewer vehicle miles traveled.”

In addition, Jeremy Estenson of the regional chamber of commerce told the Star Tribune in September that despite some reservations, overall the business group is behind the plan.

This map outlines the downsized number of highway expansions planned for the Twin Cities under the 2030 Plan. Map: Twin Cities Metro Council

Of course, not everyone is thrilled. A group of suburban political leaders raised strong objections, noting that without highway expansion plans in place, the suburban counties would not have been eligible to apply for windfall funds like the federal support that flowed from the 2008 stimulus package.

“Some of us felt that we should have a more aggressive plan,” said Dennis Hegberg, a commissioner with suburban Washington County, which is growing rapidly. “There are a number of state and federal highways that need attention and I feel they’re not being paid attention to.” Still, Hegberg said he and his counterparts have accepted the result of the council’s vote.

One major catalyst for change was the tragedy that took place on August 1, 2007, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis and thirteen people were killed. The event prompted a tax increase to support bridge maintenance, and more generally, forced political leaders to take their responsibility for infrastructure maintenance seriously.

“After August 1, 2007 the ground shifted tremendously,” said Erkel. “It seemed to take that to make the legislature realize that we had a lot of things to take care of.”

The 2030 Plan, and its emphasis on maintenance, should help ensure the community avoids such tragedies in the future.

The plan puts the Twin Cities ahead of the curve in regional transportation policy from a national standpoint. But Minneapolis still lags behind places like Portland, Oregon; Arlington, Virginia; and Montgomery County, Maryland on issues such as land use and transit, said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and author of American Metropolitics.

Though the traditionally progressive Twin Cities benefit from having very strong land use statutes, they haven’t been aggressive enough in enforcing those standards, he said.

Will Schroeer, policy and research director for Smart Growth America, agreed that the Minneapolis plan has room for improvement. Priced lanes offer some advantages, including the ability to recoup expenses, manage congestion, and create priority space for buses, Schroeer said. But the additional lanes still reinforce auto dependence.

Twin Cities officials acknowledge within the plan that the region already has a greater number of highway miles per capita than many comparable areas. The region built hundreds of miles of new highways in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. While the 2030 plan is a step forward, Minneapolis could have gained more ground on the nation’s best-planned regions by just saying no to any new highway lanes. “It’s new capacity in an area which doesn’t really need new capacity,” said Schroeer. “It’s better than regular capacity but it’s still not great.”

Mariia Zimmerman, Deputy Director for HUD's Office on Sustainable Communities.

Streetsblog met with Mariia Zimmerman, Deputy Director for Sustainable Communities at HUD, to talk about these questions. Brian Sullivan from the Office of Public Affairs also joined us for the conversation.

Streetsblog: When you look at the new Congress coming in – how is that going to affect your work, and how does it affect your message?

Zimmerman: We are hopeful that a lot of the success stories in communities across the country – it’s being locally driven and it’s not a partisan issue. We have Republican and Democratic mayors and governors – it’s nonpartisan, or bipartisan. The partisanship does tend to come in from Congress. If you look at the map of where we made grant selections, they’re Democratic and Republican, small towns and big towns. So we’re hopeful that the demand, interest, and excitement around these programs will be conveyed to Congress no matter where they sit – what party, what state, what zip code they’re in.

People just think this is the right thing to do, and it’s long past time for the federal government to be supporting them instead of being in the way.

It’s long past time for the federal government to be supporting [livable communities] instead of being in the way.

In terms of messaging, we have always felt there is a strong economic need for investing more smartly, leveraging our resources. Federal coordination is just cost effectiveness.

That message is one we can be stronger on. We’ve talked about some of the environmental and quality-of-life reasons for sustainability – we can do a better job of explaining what are the costs of not investing this way and what are the savings if we do. It’s really about trying to invest more wisely. As Rob Puentes at Brookings likes to say, ‘We’re out of money, now’s the time to think!’

SB: Tom Latham is likely to be the new head of the House Transportation and HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, and he’s an Iowa boy. He’s from a small town. He doesn’t really get livability. How do you deal with someone like that holding the purse strings?

MZ: We’re happy to talk with them about the number of small communities that came forward for our regional planning grants. Each of them was saying, ‘we have been wanting to do this for so long but there are not resources for small communities to do long range integrated planning, because those resources go to the state. We can’t control, we can’t plan what we want to do.’ They’re saying, ‘we’re losing a lot of jobs; we have aging infrastructure, aging population. How are we going to grow and prosper?’

We also had a lot of fast-growing rural communities and they want to know how they can get control of their growth, how they can build their economies to have a stronger connection to urban areas where the market may be. They’re having hard issues of affordable housing and growth pressures. We hope those communities will make the case.

SB: You gave out planning grants, what if there’s no money for implementation? Especially if a Republican Congress tightens the purse strings?

The moment a community starts to whisper about doing a new transit line, developers are speculating and buying up land – and it’s becoming harder to preserve and create affordable housing.

Sullivan: You can use block grant funding – the normal stable of programs here at HUD – to actually implement these plans. In larger entitlement communities, they get direct block grant funding from us that they can use to implement these. They don’t have to go to the state for that. They can do it themselves.

If you’re a rural community, and you don’t get direct block grant funding from HUD, you do have to go to the state, sell that idea to the state, say ‘we’ve got this regional plan to keep us going for the next 50 years. We need some of that state CDBG money.’

SB: There’s no new money.

MZ: There’s no new money. We already have a lot of money our three agencies are giving each year. How do we make those investments work to implement these grants? There is a lot at our disposal and we want to make sure that if people are coming forward with these great plans and this great vision, that we’re not being the stumbling block. I’m not going to say new money and more money wouldn’t be great, but first and foremost let’s make sure the existing funds we have are supporting this.

SB: Are lenders open to sustainability practices? Are you bringing the whole development community along with you?

MZ: The development community, all on its own, has been going through a pretty major transformation. The moment a community starts to whisper about doing a new transit line, developers are speculating and buying up land – and it’s becoming harder to preserve and create affordable housing. So the demand is there, we don’t have enough supply for it.

It may not be the entire development community, but we’ve had sensational interest by the development community for new housing, or traditional housing, if we think back to how our cities used to be. They have a lot of ideas as well, in terms of barriers in the tax codes or our loan programs that are only to support one element of the market, and they want to level the playing field for a developer who wants to do different kinds of development.

SB: You mentioned affordability. Transit-oriented development, livability does raise property values. That’s a double-edged sword. HUD’s mission is about affordable housing. How do you square that with encouraging livability?

MZ: For many years, transit was seen as the transportation for those who could afford nothing else. One of the reasons there’s a larger transit constituency now than there was 20 years ago is a result of the benefits for those who choose to use transit. And one of them is an increase in property values, which can translate to an increase in equity if you’re a homeowner. That is a benefit that transit and TOD can provide.

We need to be more purposeful in ensuring those benefits accrue to those who lived there before the transit investment and people who need low-cost transportation options. We haven’t seen that the marketplace itself is going to make sure that equitable distribution happens. What strategies can we put in place to ensure the preservation and the creation of long-term affordable housing? In many of our communities, it’s illegal to do multi-family housing, or do mixed use development, or have lower parking standards, so we’re not able to grow the supply, which is creating more and more pressure.

BS: And if CDBG and HOME funds are used in the implementation of these plans, there’s an absolute requirement to maintain affordability.

MZ: Fair housing can be about concentrations of poverty, racial segregation, or other impediments – people who have mobility impairments, are they able to access housing options across the region? In our challenge grants, we have over a dozen of those that want to set up either land banking or land acquisition funds or other strategies to think about long-term, permanent affordable housing strategies within new or existing transit corridors. They can use our funds to help set those up.

BS: Sustainable homeownership is something we’re learning about right now in the biggest way since the Great Depression. This correction that’s taking place is leading to a re-balancing of housing across all kinds of regions. Maybe we were too homeownership-happy.

SB: Is that where HUD is going?

BS: I wouldn’t say that. Who doesn’t support homeownership? But there’s much more emphasis on the sustainable part of homeownership. It doesn’t do anybody any good to get into a home they can’t sustain.

Check back tomorrow for more from Streetsblog’s conversation with Mariia Zimmerman and Brian Sullivan. We ask them about the unexpected challenges of cross-agency collaboration, the selection process for grantees. and a little-known program that could help stretch housing money — or expose affordable housing to foreclosure.

Reconnecting America has mapped and analyzed the winners of competitive grants from HUD and DOT. Click to enlarge (PDF)

It’s worth noting that these are the types of competitive grant programs that John Mica is planning to put under the microscope when he takes the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

“We had unelected officials sitting behind closed doors making decisions without any hearings or without any elected officials being consulted,” Mica said soon after the election. “I’m going to have a full review of that.”

He’s looking for “rational explanations” of why the grants went to the projects they went to. Criteria for the awards were announced well in advance, but it’s true that the departments could have been more transparent in their process. Reconnecting America’s report can help fill in some of the gaps in the agencies’ own explanations of what they were looking for when they made their decisions.

In addition to mapping the top winning regions, Reconnecting America pulled out some common themes, illustrating the awarding agencies’ priorities. They include:

• Equity: ensuring equitable benefits from development with regional affordable housing plans and inclusionary zoning
• Planning for transit corridors and stations: for instance, a project in Seattle will strategize for up to 25 transit corridors and 100 new stations planned for the year 2025
• Comprehensive planning: for regions without an existing plan  or for those filling in gaps on affordable housing, transportation, or sustainability
• Street connectivity and safety: complete streets, off-street trails, and making transit stations more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists
• Economic development, including workforce development
• Zoning and land use reform: fostering compact, mixed-use development
• Healthy eating: improving access to healthy food and integrating local food systems

Generally, the report reflects the growing cohesion between DOT, HUD, and the EPA and the increased desire to achieve goals systematically, instead of operating within separate silos.

The addition of light rail has been linked to higher rates of car ownership, as compared to the Metropolitan Statistical Area as a whole, but that doesn't mean we should stop building light rail. Image: Dukakis Center (PDF)

Even when the new development is built around transit, which can lower transportation costs for low-income residents, unintended consequences can ensue.

Researchers with the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy have recently reached some provocative conclusions from their study of gentrification and transit-oriented development. Without proper planning, they found, new development near transit can lead to stratified neighborhoods and higher rates of car ownership.

They also offered some solutions to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its intended goals. The solutions include preserving affordable housing and restricting parking in new developments.

Historically, the authors notes, transit-rich neighborhoods tend to be diverse. The low-income people and people of color who live there often don’t have cars and they depend on public transportation. They also usually rent their homes — and since rental housing turns over faster than owner-occupied homes, this speeds along the process of gentrification when new transit options come to a neighborhood.

Rents go up as transit arrives (often along with new shops and restaurants) and more affluent people move in. And guess what? Those wealthier people tend to have more cars. That’s the fundamental paradox: the people who are attracted to transit-rich neighborhoods – and have the money to pay more to live there – don’t use transit as much as less affluent people who can get priced out.

The authors stop short of calling this pattern “displacement” – they point to “normal processes of housing turnover and succession.” But what’s clear is that the people moving in are from a different income demographic than those moving out (though the researchers say the racial makeup tends to stay the same).

Income-based housing stratification and more cars are not the outcomes planners want from transit or transit-oriented development. The challenge is to keep development around transit from becoming too exclusive and too car-oriented. How can communities do this?

The report comes with an entire policy toolkit for communities planning new transit (especially light rail, which, according to the research, brings about even more profound change than other forms of transportation.)

In San Leandro, California, they’ve implemented a comprehensive strategy to preserve existing affordable housing and add more. In Minneapolis, the Longfellow neighborhood negotiated benefits that the city then incorporated into the development approvals — making the deal binding. In all cases, ensuring broad public participation in the process was essential.

But having your say is one thing — actually being able to afford your own home next year and the year after — that’s what counts. In Denver, Charlotte, and the Bay Area, communities used transit=oriented development acquisition funds to buy or preserve affordable housing before transit projects came in and drove up land prices and property values.

Some other tools in the equitable TOD toolbox:

• Housing trust funds, which are dedicated sources of public funding for affordable housing
• Low-income tax credits, allocated by state housing agencies to developers to provide money for affordable housing
• Tax increment financing districts, which use the revenue from the higher property taxes in the surrounding area to help finance the building and preservation of affordable housing
• Inclusionary zoning ordinances requiring some proportion of new units to be affordable (usually 10-25 percent, but sometimes more)
• Housing incentive programs that fund transportation-related livability infrastructure in affordable housing projects, which reward local communities for the creation of affordable housing near transit

These are ways to maintain affordability and to keep the existing residents from having to leave. But you also have to incentivize transit use among the new residents, who have the means to drive a lot if they choose. Stephanie Pollack, the lead study author, says it’s just as important to have “transit-oriented neighbors” as to have “transit-oriented development.” One of the most important levers, it turns out, is parking policy.

Here’s what she told an audience at Rail~volution about one transportation package she negotiated in Boston.

This is what the package looked like: it was designed to get at the issue of creating transit-oriented neighbors who would use the transit. One parking space per unit, priced separately from the condo… shared parking spaces in the same garage so people would make their second car a shared car; and a free annual transit pass for your first year after purchase, provided by the developer, who by the way will spend way more on a second sub-surface parking spot for each unit than that annual transit pass will cost them. You have to think about the market housing in transit-oriented neighborhoods. We’re so focused on ‘we need affordable housing’ – because we do – but we still want the people living in the non-affordable housing to be good transit neighbors.

“Unbundling” parking from the price of the unit is key. People don’t notice the cost of car ownership when it’s folded into the cost of their housing, and car-free residents effectively end up sharing the cost of providing parking for car owners — they don’t get the full financial pay-off of eschewing a car. But when faced with the prospect of paying $100 a month for parking in your own building, the benefits of going car-free – especially in a neighborhood newly equipped with good public transportation – suddenly sound like a good deal compared to the costs of owning a car.

Obama is a "breath of fresh air," according to APTA President William Millar, but Congress needs to step up. WMATA via APTA

Around the country, Millar said, voters have chosen again and again to raise their own taxes for increased service. And, he added, “it’s a breath of fresh air” to see a U.S. President get behind infrastructure investment the way Obama has.

After Millar, a panel of officials from HUD, DOT, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Portland Development Commission gave another reason for hope: the very “unnatural” action that federal agencies are beginning to take cooperating with each other.

DOT’s Beth Osborne said it’s easier for each agency to stay in its silo – and the challenges to collaboration are often surprising. “It’s not getting your high leadership agreeing to pool money or to relinquish some control over the decision-making process,” she said. “It becomes, your budget systems are different, or your computer systems don’t coordinate and communicate.” But as the TIGER II and HUD Sustainable Communities grant programs show, agencies are beginning to address those challenges and work together.

Rocco Landesman, chair of the NEA, whose stated goal is to infuse the arts into every federal agency, said that people choose homes based on access to high-quality education and access to culture. And, he said, the cause and effect of developing vibrant communities is understood differently today than it was in the past.

“It used to be thought that people followed businesses,” he said. “We now know that it’s the opposite. Businesses want to move where there’s an educated, committed, enlightened workforce. Businesses follow the people. It’s the Field of Dreams in reverse. If you come, they will build it.”

Erin Flynn, Portland’s Urban Development Director, agreed. She said businesses are moving back from the suburbs in to the urban core because “all of our creative talent lives in these close-in neighborhoods – and they want to bike to work.” It becomes a competitive advantage for employers to allow their workers to maintain the walkable, bikeable, transit-based lifestyle they want.

Evidence of this trend can be found even in small cities like Dubuque, Iowa, which just rebuilt its downtown and attracted 1,300 IBM jobs.

The Obama administration's report emphasizes how much Americans spend on transportation costs and ties the financial burden to car dependence. Graphic: U.S. Treasury/Council of Economic Advisers

When President Obama announced his push for a long-term transportation bill on Monday, he introduced a report by his Council of Economic Advisors and the Treasury Department analyzing the economic impact of infrastructure investment [PDF]. At face value, the numbers in the president’s plan might not look so impressive. It calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, and the restoration of 150 miles of airport runways.

If you’re hoping for an all-out push for sustainable transportation and livable streets, you may be wondering whether this signifies much of a change to the highway-centric status quo. Look at the underlying message, and it does.

The headline numbers sit on top of a broad strategy that groups including Transportation for America, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Transportation Equity Network, and U.S. PIRG have all applauded. There are still few specifics in the administration’s plan, but here’s a quick cheat sheet to the elements of the report that transportation reformers find so encouraging.

It emphasizes the need to provide American families with a range of transportation options, not just driving.

The report calls attention to the heavy burden that high transportation costs place on the middle class. “The average American family spends more than $8,600 a year on transportation, one-third more than they spend on food,” it states, pointing out that the wealthiest 10 percent spend only 9 percent of their income on transportation, while everyone else shells out 16 percent of our income to move from point A to point B.

The report links high transportation costs to car dependence and makes the case for increasing access to transit and other transportation options, asserting that “[t]his burden is due in large part to the lack of alternatives to expensive and often congested automobile travel. Multi-modal transportation investments are critical to get American families moving again without wasting their time and their money sitting in traffic.”

It makes the case for a “fix-it first” approach to highways — which should help put the brakes on sprawl.

The administration notes that the decrepit state of the nation’s roadways is exerting a toll on Americans’ household budgets through “car maintenance due to potholes and poor road conditions.” And it refers to the work of economist Edward Gramlich, who argued that “the greatest return on investment can be garnered from spending on maintenance of existing highways.” The nation’s highway spending should be targeted at keeping our existing roads in a state of good repair, not the over-expansion of the interstate system.

It advances the idea that America needs a new system of transportation investment that fund projects based on merit, not politics or formulas.

The report continues to make the administration’s case for a national infrastructure bank that would provide a mechanism for investing strategically in infrastructure. Instead of allocating transportation funds with a haphazard, often politically-driven system that ends up favoring highways-to-nowhere, the report notes that “a well designed infrastructure” bank would leverage private capital to “fill the gaps in our infrastructure funding system, which currently disadvantage investments in multi-modal” projects and projects that cross state lines.

It advocates for investments in “healthy, safe and walkable neighborhoods, whether rural, urban or suburban.”

The report cites the U.S. DOT’s six principles of livability and mentions the success of transit-oriented development as a path toward improving neighborhood economies.

The time is now.

The economic downturn represents an opportunity for smart spending right now, according to the report. With construction costs down, low bids have allowed stimulus funds to stretch 10 to 20 percent more than predicted. So if anyone was wondering: this is the perfect time to start building.

The administration is framing its infrastructure push as way to keep America globally competitive, echoing a theme which reform-minded lawmakers like Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer have been sounding for years: that the U.S. is lagging behind other nations in infrastructure investment, as the two percent of GDP our country spends annually is dwarfed by Europe’s five percent and China’s nine percent.

The release of the report hasn’t changed the timing of the six-year transportation reauthorization, which is expected to move soon after the next Congress convenes in 2011. But administration officials have made clear that they will push for the “$50 billion down payment” when Congress comes back after the elections for its lame duck session. Lawmakers will need to address the December 31 expiration of the current extension of SAFETEA-LU, but they will likely just extend it again.

The question then will simply be, how long of an extension will they authorize? A short extension will signal a willingness to take up a real reauthorization soon.

The Tucson Modern Streetcar project was awarded $63 million in the first round of TIGER funding. (Image: Tucson Regional Transit Authority)

That’s the word from the DOT, which announced on Friday that it had received about $19 billion in applications for nearly 1,000 projects “from all 50 states, U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.” The volume of applications, which range from “highways and bridges to transit and ports,” far exceeds the $600 million available in TIGER II funds.

States competing for TIGER II money need to show that their transportation projects will have significant economic and environmental benefits at a city-wide, regional, or national level. Since the money is awarded at the discretion of DOT using set criteria, not disbursed through the rote formulas that govern most transportation funding, it’s been a catalyst for innovative transportation projects.

David Burwell, a co-founder of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, isn’t surprised at the overwhelming response to TIGER II. “It shows the enormous interest states have in discretionary money,” he says. “With formula money, states will tell you, ‘That’s our money; we don’t have to do anything for formula money.’ Offer discretionary money and they’ll do backflips.”

According to Burwell, who now heads up the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the volume of TIGER II applications indicates that state DOTs are willing to reform their focus on highways, but they want something in return for the reforms they make. “Otherwise they’ll spend all their money filling potholes and keeping bridges from falling down,” he says. In other words, if you want states to make real advances on transit and smart urban design, you have to give them some incentive.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made a similar point in last week’s announcement. “The wave of applications for both TIGER II and TIGER I dollars shows the back-log of needed infrastructure improvements and the desire for more flexible funds,” he said in a statement. According to the DOT, the appetite for TIGER II funds is not quite as ravenous as it was for TIGER I, when the department got $60 billion in applications for $1.5 billion in available grants.

This time around, TIGER II includes a partnership between the DOT and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to disburse planning grants. $35 million in TIGER II funds will combine with $40 million from HUD to pay for transit-oriented development. In another sign of the closer collaboration among federal agencies, two other departments – Agriculture and the EPA – are getting in on the action too, helping to evaluate the planning grant applications.

Last week, the Livable Communities Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee, a milestone for legislation that would fund local efforts to plan for growth while curbing sprawl. But the 12-10 party line vote raised the prospect that the bill might also encounter unified Republican opposition in the full Senate, where the threat of a filibuster has become the norm.

One GOP senator's "no" vote seemed especially incongruous -- Utah's Bob Bennett. The vast majority of the people whom Bennett represents live in the region centered around Salt Lake City, which has made significant strides in recent years to coordinate housing development and transit investments -- exactly the sort of initiatives that the Livable Communities Act would reward.

“There are many, many things in this legislation that I strongly support," Bennett said during the subcommittee vote, before explaining why he would not support the bill. “There are things in this legislation that... would get in the way of what we are already doing in our state. So I will reluctantly vote against it.”

The remarks provoked some head scratching from advocates familiar with the regional planning efforts underway in Bennett's home state.

“I can’t imagine why he would say that,” said Kate Rube, policy director at Smart Growth America. "You would think a state like Utah would really stand to benefit from that bill."

“I’m not sure what he was referring to,” said Alan Matheson, executive director of Envision Utah, a non-profit that advises municipalities on smart growth strategies. The group’s planning work focuses on coordinating transportation and housing policies while preserving open space. In the past, Matheson said, Bennett “has been a great supporter of the collaborative approaches we have taken in Utah.”

The Livable Communities Act, which would disburse competitive grants to communities of all sizes to both plan and build projects that reduce car-dependence and provide better access to transit, would stand to benefit the planning work that Envision Utah has facilitated. "If there was a way to supplement local funding, it would enable us to go beyond regular planning efforts to go to important implementation work," Matheson said.

Bennett’s office had no further comment as of yesterday afternoon.

Conservatives like Bennett may look at the bill and frown on the $4 billion in federal grants that it would distribute. “One could be in favor of high-density neighborhoods with transit, but it's another thing to say the federal government should be pushing that,” said Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

But the bill creates incentives, not mandates, and it has strong backing from local governments who need the resources to plan for more sustainable growth. Only communities who apply for grants and meet funding requirements will get money, said Daria Daniel, associate legislative director for the National Association of Counties, a strong supporter of the bill.

“Some states have passed their own sustainability efforts,” Daniel said. "This would not usurp what state or local governments have already done."

Envision Utah built support for transit-centered growth in part by communicating the high public costs of development based mainly on building detached housing (scenarios A and B). Graphic: Envision Utah

“It could cost you more in the future not to plan for the future,” Daniel said.

The Senate bill now awaits a vote on the floor; the corresponding House bill has yet to pass a committee vote. In his remarks at the Senate committee hearing, Bennett said he would be open to continuing discussions on the bill.

Shaun Donovan, Ray LaHood, Lisa Jackson: Together forever? The Livable Communities Act would codify the partnership between HUD, US DOT, and the EPA. Photo: EPA

Most of the action would flow through HUD. This year the agency is funding $150 million in grants supporting regional efforts to improve access to transit and promote walkable development. The Livable Communities Act promises to scale up that program significantly, creating a new office within HUD, called the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, that will distribute about $4 billion through competitive grants.

The initial round of grants would fund comprehensive plans -- local initiatives to shape growth by coordinating housing, transportation, and economic development policies. Most of the funding -- $3.75 billion -- would be distributed over three years to implement projects identified in such plans.

While some Senators from rural states had expressed skepticism about the benefits of the bill for their constituents, yesterday's vote split strictly along party lines, with Democrats Jon Tester of Montana and Tim Johnson of South Dakota both voting in favor.

To make the case for the bill to his rural and Republican counterparts, Dodd singled out Envision Utah, a campaign that has built public support for smart growth policies in one of the country's reddest states. Not a single GOP Senator voted for the bill, however, even Utah's Bob Bennett, who told UPI, "I think the overall philosophy is wise, but I will be voting against it."

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP, which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the country's aging population will be poorly served if development patterns don't evolve to make driving less necessary. "Nine out of ten of our members tell us they want to stay in their own homes as they age -- most are living in suburban or rural areas and don't have access to public transportation," said Debra Alvarez, senior legislative representative for AARP. "There's a lot of things that can be done in small towns: co-locating things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting housing there too."

Advocates for transportation reform are now looking at the path forward for the bill. "We applaud the Committee for taking this major step forward on behalf of communities both small and large, and for American families looking for affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods with reliable transportation options," said Transportation for America director James Corless in a statement. "We urge the full Senate to follow their lead and give final passage."

Dodd has vowed to shepherd the Livable Communities Act through to become law before he retires in January. With Congress about to adjourn until September 13, he'll face a tight time frame. In addition to awaiting a vote in the full Senate, the bill has yet to clear a committee vote in the House, where Colorado representative Ed Perlmutter is the sponsor.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The Washington Note)

The Livable Communities Act would provide about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing, transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would strengthen the Obama administration's multi-agency Sustainable Communities Initiative. 

At today's committee hearing representatives of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience -- from trying to revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth of a rural Maryland county -- to explain how federal policy could spur better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the executive director for the region's Council of Governments, but they haven't been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated transportation and land use planning can help address a host of challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency, deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren't urban or rural. "One community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether his rural state would benefit under Dodd's legislation.

After acknowledging that sprawl is a problem, lamenting that in Montana housing has replaced some of the best farmland, Tester pressed the witness panel to explain how the Livable Communities Act would work for a town like his, with only 700 people. The two representatives of rural areas on the panel each suggested some sort of funding set-aside for rural communities, an idea which seemed to intrigue Tester.

Two other senators spoke who are not already sponsors of the bill. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) primarily discussed his own legislation specifically tailored to shrinking industrial cities, of which there are many in Ohio, but seemed supportive of Dodd's legislation. Mark Warner (D-VA) told the committee that he supports the goals of the Livable Communities Act, but would like to make sure that the bill is rigorously defined. "Is it just squishy livability?" he asked. "Is there a way that we can define this with metrics?" Witnesses assured him that results like the volume of reduced greenhouse gases, acres of preserved open space, and rises in property values can be measured.

No Republican Senators attended the meeting.

Comparing the transportation savings in dense versus dispersed neighborhoods for a dozen U.S. metro areas. (Chart: CNT)

The Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, assembled by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), offers details on housing and transport bills for prospective residents of more than 300 metro areas.

(Source: CNT)

"By only focusing on" the 30-percent metric, CNT President Scott Bernstein told reporters, the government "has created an incentive for people to seek out locations where they can meet that goal without taking into account the almost equal cost of transportation."

The index, he added, "show[s] that as people move further out seeking cheaper and cheaper housing, the costs of transportation increase."

The new data is also aimed at encouraging the Obama administration to update its measurement of affordability, a goal embraced by the heads of the three agencies participating in the inter-agency sustainability work.

Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of Housing and Urban Development who leads that sustainability office, has said that $10 million of his initial grant funding would go towards expanding the market for location-efficient mortgages that include transportation costs in their estimates of borrowers' income.

Sims, who joined Bernstein yesterday to discuss the CNT report, observed that the number of mortgage defaults during the current housing crisis was exacerbated because homeowners "did not realize they had a transportation cost burden and a mortgage."

The CNT also pinpointed another legislative goal for its index: enacting legislation requiring real estate agents, landlords, and other housing brokers to publicly disclose neighborhood transportation costs when marketing a property. Bernstein told reporters that Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) would introduce a bill proposing that change in the coming days.

Measuring the combined local burden of transportation and housing costs could influence more than just the mortgage market and government housing policy. Randy Blankenhorn, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, said the CNT index helped planners in his area make difficult decisions on how to use their available funding for new transportation projects -- which totaled just 2.7 percent of this year's revenue. (The remainder of revenue went to maintenance of existing infrastructure, he added.)

Blankenhorn predicted that the CNT index could help urban officials focus on a transportation agenda that's "not just about [fighting] congestion, but about bringing people closer to jobs."

A future commuter rail station along Boston's Fairmount Line, one of five areas selected for EPA sustainable development aid. (Photo: Globe)

The latest moves came as Obama administration officials gathered in Seattle for the annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference, where HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan officially tapped Shelley Poticha and Ron Sims as leaders of his agency's sustainable communities office.

On the HUD website, Donovan's aides are seeking input and suggestions from local planners as they prepare to award an initial $100 million in grants to cities with plans for transportation and land use reform.

Not to be outdone, EPA took the opportunity to launch two pilot grant programs aimed at using clean water funds to boost community development and rebuilding brownfield communities around transit access.

The water-funding pilot will focus on New York, California, and Maryland, while the brownfields -- former industrial sites where hazardous materials may impede environmental cleanup -- selected for transit-oriented development aid are located in Indianapolis, Iowa City, Denver, Boston, and the San Diego area.

The three federal agencies involved in green development work are also beefing up their message, connecting a number of recent policy shifts on their respective fronts into a larger narrative of progress towards a more harmonious approach to transportation and housing. For a recap of the recent steps taken by the EPA, HUD, and U.S. DOT -- many of which were covered by Streetsblog Capitol Hill -- check out the agencies' January bulletin [PDF].

White House budget chief Peter Orszag challenged employees to boost their walking last fall. (Photo: CSM)

The budget also proposes a $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, a rechristened National Infrastructure Bank that would use federal money to leverage private capital for large-scale projects improving the nation's built environment.

The $530 million request for the three-agency sustainable communities partnership, which got $150 million from Congress for the current fiscal year, would go directly to the U.S. DOT for "comprehensive regional and community planning efforts that integrate transportation, housing, and other critical investments," according to the White House budget office.

The administration requested $160 million in total for the two other agencies involved in the partnership, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

As promised to Congress in December, the White House also set aside funding for the implementation of its plans for a new federal role overseeing rail transit safety. The U.S. DOT would receive $30 million in today's budget to train new inspectors and help cities such as Washington D.C. come into compliance with minimum safety standards.

On the controversial question of the cash-strapped highway trust fund -- which is expected to run out of money this spring, not long after the expiration of the latest short-term extension to the 2005 federal transportation law -- the presidential budget maintains its insistence on waiting until 2011 to fix the nation's transport funding crisis.

In the budget's U.S. DOT section, the White House writes:

The current framework for financing and allocating surface transportation investments is not financially sustainable, nor does it effectively allocate resources to meet our critical national needs. The Administration recommends extending the current [federal bill] through March 2011, during which time it will work with the Congress to reform surface transportation programs and put the system on a viable financing path. ...

[T]he Administration seeks to integrate economic analysis and performance measurement in transportation planning to ensure that taxpayer dollars are better targeted and spent.

In a separate section of the budget dedicated to long-term fiscal analysis, the White House describes its $43 billion estimate for highway spending in 2011 as a placeholder, not intended to reflect the funding strategy "that the Administration and Congress necessarily should or will adopt for the long-term reauthorization" legislation.

"Rather," the budget adds, "its purpose is to accurately reflect the condition of the [highway trust fund] and recognize that, under current law, maintaining baseline spending" on highways will require more transfers of cash from the general Treasury.