for billions of years since the outset of time/ every single one of your ancestors survived...

[myurbandream]

"For every doctor working at [the medical center] there are three people making less than $50,000 a year who come from 140 countries and speak 100 languages. Where are they going to live? How are they going to get to work?"
-Rollin Stanley, AICP, in the article "The Upsizing of White Flint" by Andrew Ratner in this month's Planning magazine.

Discuss.

Comments

[zaphod-groupie.livejournal.com]

Some additional context would be helpful to fuel a discussion, but going on the assumption that the quote refers to the Texas Medical Center and Houston's piss-poor excuse for mass transit, all I can do is throw my hands up and say "THIS!!!".

You and I live in the same neighborhood, so you know where I'm coming from. The housing here (i.e., in the small area in which its feasible to live and utilize mass transit to travel to and from Reliant and The Med Center, two HUGE employers) isn't exactly cheap, and it's not getting any cheaper. We'd have to seriously (and I do mean seriously) tighten our belts to live here on B's (professional, two-job master's-degree) salary alone, and that's *with* a roommate.

I get that there will always be expensive parts of town, and that's okay. I cannot afford River Oaks....yet. However, for B&I to get a place in which we could reasonably live without a roommate without sacrificing comfort or safety (i.e., not in the ghetto or an efficiency), we'd have to move way the eff out into BFE, and spend a LOT more on gas, parking and car maintenance to lead anything like our normal lifestyle. And by "live our normal lifestyle", I don't necessarily mean frequenting the same bars or bookstoreS< I just mean basic things, like not having to try to change jobs (that's a hilarious idea right now!) or schools.

I guess my point is, he and I (and you and Jim) are educated middle-class people, with cars and comfort and options. We want to live somewhere with easy access to Cool Fun Stuff, which, with the lack of mass transit here, means living geographically near the Cool Fun Stuff. We have the luxury of choosing to pay higher rent to be near those things, but what about the people without the same financial flexibility who depend on Cool Fun Stuff for jobs? They're basically fucked, because the demand for access to Cool Fun Stuff will never go away, and there will always be people like us who are able and willing to pay premium rents for it. What, then, is the incentive for the development of mass transit?

In case it wasn't obvious, that last bit wasn't rhetorical, I'm legit curious what the experts say on that.

[jen-chan13.livejournal.com]

Yes, I should have given some context: the quote came from an article about affordable housing programs, which brings up the broader issues of balanced economies, cost of living, urban vs. suburban living, etc.

Your point about Cool Fun Stuff is excellent, btw - it's a catchy way of encapsulating the draw of a more expensive lifestyle. :D

So the drift of the article was that higher density - especially newly developed higher density - is prohibitively expensive to the people who would benefit the most from it. You and I both have cars and can afford to fuel and maintain them, which means we can pursue jobs and Cool Fun Stuff outside the range of how far we can walk. But that's not true of everyone, and the people that don't have cars are the people that work the lowest-paying jobs and really need the convenience of being able to get around without a car, a lifestyle that is too expensive for them. Catch 22.

In answer to your question, mass transit is usually more expensive to install than roads/ freeways/ parking lots - but that's because we've been doing car transit systems for years. We have it down to an art, there's a lot of competitive business driving down the cost, every person who can afford to drive owns a car, and automobile transit is heavily and routinely subsidized. In other words, the constituency is huge, the risk is low, and the cost is artificially cheap.

Not so for mass transit - the constituency is usually the poorest class, plus some young professionals, and the systems are expensive to install in part because so few people really know how and competitive options are limited. In addition, subsidies for mass transit are few, low, and widely competed for. And on top of that, cities aren't willing to risk the millions of dollars of infrastructure installation cost unless there's a guarantee that the ridership will pay it back. We pay taxes towards the costs of our roads, but the only revenue source of mass transit is ridership fares.

Development of mass transit only becomes incentivized (from the City's perspective) when its provision will attract higher-income residents, businesses, etc that will (re)develop an area and bring in a high tax base, re the TMC and the CBD in Houston. Midtown is the kind of environment the City wants - lots of well-to-do tax-payers with lots of buying power, lots of high-cost businesses in which those residents can spend their money - the Cool Fun Stuff. Thus, installing the light rail through the TMC, Midtown, and the CBD was a plus on the cost-benefit analysis, and getting it down to Reliant was a logistical bonus. The ridership success of the Red Line is giving further expansion the political impetus it needs to get the go-ahead - the Red Line brought a higher tax base, so further light rail should do the same and its cost is therefore justified.

THE PROBLEM is that now the people who would really benefit from the light rail - people without cars - can't afford to live within walking distance of it. There's your catch-22 again, and the argument in favor of subsidized housing.

(In case you don't know the specifics of affordable/ public/ subsidized housing - developers are given cost breaks or relief from certain requirements associated with construction, on the proviso that they reserve a certain percentage of the new building to be "affordable" - fixed-rate rents available only to a certain income bracket, or similar.)

[jen-chan13.livejournal.com]

Sorry, above when I said mass transit I was generally referring to light rail and related systems. Bussing is also a form of mass transit, which happens to function on the roads that are already installed. But those buses ain't cheap to buy or feul, and again, the only source of revenue to make up the loss is ridership fares. And even worse, bus routes are hugely inefficient and inconvenient for the riders - a twenty minute drive from home to work might take as long as an hour and a half by bus and foot, and that's assuming you don't miss the most timely bus and end up on the wrong side of the schedule.

But bus transit is logistically cheaper than rail transit, because it doesn't require any new infrastructure installation, except for the benches and signs on the sidewalks.