6 ms·
You can have good mass transit or affordable housing, but not both. This sucks.
by oxryly1 10y ago
You can have good mass transit or affordable housing, but not both. This sucks.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> You can have good mass transit or affordable housing, but not both. Why's that?
- superuser2 10y agoGood mass transit increases demand for housing in its coverage area, increasing prices.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoBut it doesn't have to increase prices to the point of unaffordability, does it?
- superuser2 10y agoEvery piece of real estate that sells/rents is affordable to someone.
- mywittyname 10y agoBut wealthier people are less likely to want mass transit, since they can afford private transportation. That's basically the fundamental issue to providing good mass transit in the US: anybody who can afford to, avoids it.
- ori_b 10y agoThe density needed for effective mass transit means that what many people seem to see as affordable housing ("a house with a white picket fence") isn't going to work especially well.
- davidw 10y agoA house with a fence may or may not be affordable, but it's not dense for sure.
- bronson 10y agoOr, as the Bay Area demonstrates, neither.
- hkmurakami 10y agoWell there's definitely an inverse correlation between housing costs and convenience of travel. Apartments near Caltrain stations or in SF being more expensive than those that are farther away, etc.
- avn2109 10y ago>> "...but not both." What about Chicago. Way cheaper than New York, and has the second best train system in the country.
- rayiner 10y agoYou can have affordable housing, good mass transit, and jobs. Pick two.
- yolesaber 10y agoChicago has all three. It just has a really shitty climate and is surrounded by...corn fields
- jcranmer 10y agoDon't forget the soy!
- falsestprophet 10y agoAnd Lake Michigan.
- yolesaber 10y agoAh Lake Michigan. How I hated you in the winter when your freezing winds suck the life out of me, but how I loved your cold cold waters come summer
- hkmurakami 10y agoFinance seems to be a strong employer there, no?
- pc86 10y agoIt's a scale issue. There are plenty of small metro areas (600K-1.2MM pop) with affordable housing, plenty of jobs, and absolutely zero useful mass transit. Traffic is bad for about one hour in the morning and two hours in the evening, at most, and usually just in one direction with plenty of side streets. You double that and the infrastructure collapses. The tax base doesn't support large investments in transit to get a system built from nothing, and the roads and bridges aren't equipped to handle 2x the volume.
- wrsh07 10y agoWith self-driving cars on the horizon [hopefully!?], this will hopefully become false. [ie everywhere that currently has shitty mass transit will get a system with no single point of failure which is hopefully cheap] Who knows, though?
- shimon 10y agoThis is a very insightful comment. It's also important to understand the reason you can't have both, in the US, is political. Infrastructure spending in the US is currently below depreciation (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/10/spending-on-our-crumbling-infrastructure/ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/10/spending-on-our-cru...) so we aren't building mass transit at a rate that meets growing demand. Rich, mobile people buy up property in cities and along transit lines. If we invested in transit we could make a lot of underused housing useful.
- davidw 10y agoWhere I lived in Italy had pretty good mass transit (although not up to northern European levels, most likely) and reasonable house prices. Because it's dense.
- dpark 10y agoItaly has double the unemployment rate and double the poverty rate of the US. It would be pretty shocking if they didn't have reasonable housing prices relative to the US. For comparison, Seattle is denser than Rome. I'm pretty sure housing is still cheaper in Rome than Seattle.
- davidw 10y agoHousing in Italy is not actually cheap. It's just not batshit crazy expensive like the California bay area. Rome is pretty spread out in terms of a city. Most of Europe has good public transportation and reasonable housing prices, although of course there are tons of local variations (London is super expensive). I just don't see any reason why you can't have both decent transportation and reasonable housing prices.
- dpark 10y agoI walked across most of Rome with my second-trimester wife many times on our vacation there a couple of years ago. It's really not that spread out. What cities in Italy are less spread out? Naples, I guess. Any others? I agree that Rome is not really cheap. But I don't think it's fair to point to Italy as an example of affordable housing driven by higher density when it's not more dense. Especially since density actually seems to correlate well with price. San Francisco is way denser than Rome or Seattle. I don't really agree that most of Europe has reasonable housing prices. For the most part, in urban areas homes seem to be quite expensive and quite small. I wouldn't call that reasonable in comparison to, say, Austin or even Seattle. Just about anywhere is reasonable compare to San Francisco of course. I'm not decided on whether it's possible to have good transportation and reasonable housing prices. You have to have a pretty dense population to make public transit cost effective, and to pay for the up-front costs. And density does tend to imply very expensive housing.
- rwhitman 10y agoPhiladelphia has both