19 ms·

You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs

230 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
The fact that this article does not break down the various transportation costs sets off massive red flags. The $3k/yr number mentioned for the cost of transportation via car in Houston is on the same order as an MBTA rail pass in the Boston area. Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. Yes of course transit is not free but that's true whether regardless of your mode of transit. The premise is solid. The analysis is lacking.
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  An MBTA local bus and subway pass is $84.50 per month $84.50 * 12 months = $1014 per year As someone living in metro Boston, that is a large difference in cost from my perspective - approximately equivalent to 2 months of rent.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    If you live outside of the subway system and need to get places (particularly in/out of the city) within a reasonable time-frame you're likely going to need a commuter rail pass. That jacks up the price substantially. I did the whole "live in Boston and just use public transit thing" for awhile. Then I moved to one of those cities that MA likes to pretend doesn't exist and my transportation costs stayed about flat. If I had made heavy use of Uber/Lyft they probably would have decreased. My friend commutes in from Worcester and rides the train because of the tolls and the fact that his work subsidizes the rail pass. In a sprawling city with free/cheap parking there would be no economic reason to do anything but drive.
    - Steltek 7y ago
      When people say "public transit", they don't mean the periphery of a commuter rail system. They mean the core bus network and usually the subway. You're comparing the worst case of meaningful public transit to a city only built for cars. My hypothesis, if you lived in Somerville, Dorchester, or at most, Quincy, the numbers would look different.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        Sure, if you specifically craft your living situation to not involve commuter rail (and don't replace it with Uber/Lyft) you can save money. But you'll spend the money on rent.
        hsitz 7y ago
        > But you'll spend the money on rent. Bingo! That's exactly what the linked article is about. How much extra are you paying in rent? How much are you saving on transportation? What are total costs of [rent + transportation] in both cases? How much time is wasted on transportation when you're paying lower rent? These are questions that need to be asked. Why would you not want to "craft" your living situation to give you the optimal setup? No, you can't have everything, but a "crafted" lifestyle that avoids need for transportation may be preferred by many, and may in addition in some cases be cheaper _and_ provide higher quality of life. Maybe not, maybe not for everyone; but those are questions that need to be asked, not simply have, "What are housing rental/purchase costs?" be taken as deciding question of what places have higher cost of "housing".
    - oftenwrong 7y ago
      Yes, that is somewhat the point of this discussion. The money one saves on housing by living further from a dense urban core is often offset to a significant degree by transportation costs, whether those additional costs come from regional rail or driving.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - thomascgalvin 7y ago
    I live in the outermost zone of the commuter rail, and a monthly pass is about $400, or $4,800 per year. Add to that the fact that you are going to be packed in like cattle, won't have a seat to sit on unless you board at the very first station, and can count on a 30-60 minute delay at least once a week ... the MTBA is probably the single biggest stressor in the Boston area.
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - oftenwrong 7y ago
      If you lived in the urban core, you could save $3786 per year by just getting a local pass. You would avoid a lot of that stress and lost time from your commute. You would not need a car. Of course, your housing costs would be higher, or your housing would be worse, or both. Worth it?
      - thomascgalvin 7y ago
        > your housing costs would be higher My housing costs would be roughly twice as high (from $2,500 to more like $5,000 per month). Living closer just isn't an option.
  - electricslpnsld 7y ago
    And most employers will have some sort of transit benefit. $84.50 falls well within a lot of the wage works style benefits people get!
- aqme28 7y ago
  > Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    More control of when you leave/arrive, storage space to transport things, not dealing with other people, ability to go wherever you want, air conditioning. There are downsides like traffic, car maintenance, and parking, but in general, cars are probably more comfortable than public transit in the US. I'm also ignoring externalities like pollution and unsustainable suburban sprawl growth. I'd rather take the subway Mon to Fri in NYC, but if the roads are empty, the streets are faster and more comfortable. Unfortunately, public transit is awesome if everyone has to take it, but if enough people opt out, and we give them an option like a personal car and pave roads over where we could have had public space, then cars become optimal for the individual.
    - derekp7 7y ago
      I personally like a hybrid approach. I absolutely hate driving in a city, and trying to find (and pay for) parking. So I drive to a park-n-ride that is outside the city, park for a couple bucks, then take light-weight rail into the city. This does require the physical ability to walk quite a bit once you are in the city, however, which a number of people can't do much of due to physical issues (starting to include myself in that category).
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        Park-n-ride has great quality of life but costs a ton because you inevitably wind up paying the cost of driving, parking and public transit.
        HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        Like everything else, it depends. It would cost me approximately $23/day to drive to work accounting for gas + parking, even more if I wanted to pay to use the HOV lane. Instead I drive to a park and ride and take an express bus. The total estimated cost is around $6 including my gas costs.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Definitely agree. One way to show that car transport is much more "valuable" than public transport in terms of convenience and comfort is to observe that very rich people almost universally travel by private car.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > very rich people almost universally travel by private car. Do they? I thought this would be hard to know, has there been a survey? And is this true even in cities with decent public transportation?
    - rayiner 7y ago
      There are no American cities with “decent public transportation.” NYC, DC, and Chicago are the only candidates. The first two used to be good, but have fallen off a cliff due to deferred maintenance. The latter is pretty good but inaccessible from vast swaths of the city.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        You forgot to qualify that with "for all residents". If you live in the inner suburbs of Minneapolis and work downtown public transit is pretty good for getting you to work. You will still need/want a car for grocery trips but one car will cover the entire family so you won't need a second. Thus in Minneapolis public transit is subsided transport for the rich - from the perspective of those who do not have a job downtown. (of course the poor also ride public transit, but they don't live in the suburbs)
        komali2 7y ago
        >You will still need/want a car for grocery trips Yea, exactly, there is no good public transit, anywhere, in America. There are cities throughout Europe and Asia where the thought of needing a car to get groceries is comical - the grocery store is right there, or a short hop on a bus/metro away, and it comes every 3 minutes so no big deal. The USA desperately needs infrastructure help.
- aqme28 7y ago
  The $3k/yr number mentioned is not the cost of transportation via car in Houston, but the premium you pay for Houston's sprawl. In other words, commuting in a low-sprawl city is $3k/yr cheaper than it would be in Houston. Car ownership is significantly more expensive than $3k/year.
  - thex10 7y ago
    This. There are many other costs associated with car ownership. As a transit user I don't need to pay towards a vehicle registration/inspection, repairs, insurance...
    - davidw 7y ago
      Not to mention things like the mental stress and sedentary lifestyle.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    My Nissan leaf disagrees with you. 6.5k purchase price. Cost to Charge less than 50$/mo th. Maintenance nill. Insurance cheap ($35/month)
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      It doesn't depreciate?!
      - cobookman 7y ago
        Who cares. 6.5k/4 years is 1.6k/year. the car needs to only last 3-4 years
    - aqme28 7y ago
      Buying a used electric is clearly an exception, not the norm. Also https://www.edmunds.com/nissan/leaf/2018/cost-to-own/ https://www.edmunds.com/nissan/leaf/2018/cost-to-own/
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
- impendia 7y ago
  > Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. Having lived in both places, and currently living in metro Boston without a car, I'm of the opposite opinion. To each their own.
  - davidw 7y ago
    > To each their own. ... as long as they help pay for the externalities all that driving is responsible for.
    - komali2 7y ago
      I don't think anybody in the world is doing this, right? The environmental impact of all these cars? A great bit of activity San Francisco saw recently was someone renting out parking spaces as "office spaces" for like 2.50$ an hour. It pointed out that a similar space in a building would probably go for more like 10$/hour or more, highlighting how little we're valuing our street-side real estate.
      - andys627 7y ago
        In Denmark cars are taxed 100% and they still prob aren't paying their fair share. They do have lots of people walking, biking, and taking tansit.
        davidw 7y ago
        Yes, gas is way more expensive in Europe, in general.
        arminiusreturns 7y ago
        One thing my European friends tend to not understand is just how big the US is. For a huge portion of none-coastline America, driving is the only mode of transport. "Denmark is approximately 43,094 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km. Meanwhile, the population of Denmark is ~5.6 million people (321.0 million more people live in United States)" From a quick search.
- hsnewman 7y ago
  Why would you say using public transportation results in a poor quality of life? Not driving would increase my quality of life a great deal!
  - TACIXAT 7y ago
    I just lived the last 10 months without a car. There needs to be a big asterisk of not driving would increase your quality of life if there is alternative transit in place. It's pretty miserable when the nearest activities are a 45 minute light rail ride away. Biking is great mid day, but doing anything at night when you're adding 30 minutes to an hour on each side makes most plans fall through. I would love to not have to own a car in my city, but we'd need to increase density and transit significantly.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    As someone who has years' of experience each doing non-trivial commutes by driving and by subway, I'd have to say, the subway wins hands-down. It's not even a close contest. I was doing the most reading of my life when I was taking the subway to work every day, and it was great. I also occasionally played handheld video games or read magazines. My commute time wasn't wasted; I spent it doing things I wanted to do. Contrast with driving, where my commute time was wasted. And driving is much more stressful and unsafe, as well. You can't be off when you're driving, but you can definitely be off when you're taking the subway. On days when I was especially tired, I would just zone out with my eyes closed. Now I just have a 10 minute bike commute, and it's my favorite commute I've ever had, but I do miss reading as regularly as I did back then on the subway.
  - reddog 7y ago
    When I've driven I have never had to stand for 40 minutes in rush hour in a jammed Milan subway car with my nose in a strangers armpit while another stranger breaths down my neck. I've never been ask for spare change while in my car. I've never been challenged to a fight for asking someone to take their feet off the opposite seat so my wife could sit down. I've never been pickpocketed. I've never had a bad dixieland band set up, play a few measures of bad out-of-tune jazz and then aggressively solicit donations. I've never had a creepy passenger stare at me for the entire ride as if they are trying to memorize my face. My car seat is never covered with vomit when I get in. I've never had a car commute cancelled because of a a labor action, or a signal malfunction, of work being done on the lines or bureaucratic incompetence. I've never had my car stop running because it was too late in the day or a holiday. All these things and much more have happened to me on public transport. Yes, it is irritating to be stuck in traffic in a car -- you have to move your right foot back and forth between the accelerator and brake while you sit in your adjustable leather seat, traveling on your own schedule to your custom destination in climate controlled comfort while rocking out to music, an audible book or a podcast.
- andys627 7y ago
  > Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. It's a trade off. One of these tanks the planet and the other doesn't, however.
  - njarboe 7y ago
    Public transit doesn't come for free. Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars. I would suggest fixing the individual vehicle transportation system (congestion tolls + high gas tax would be a start) than forcing everyone to stand on trains for their commute and stay at home on the weekends.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      > Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars. Source?
      - njarboe 7y ago
        In the US, bus routes often run with zero passengers on the bus. Here is a Quora question and answer that states buses consumed 20% more energy than cars per passenger mile in 2009[1]. It references a US Department of transportation document that can now be found here(pdf)[2]. Tables in chapter two. Not sure about more recent figures. I made this comment as I remembered an AC Transit (Alameda County Transit which includes Oakland) study that said their average mpg per passenger was around 8 mpg some time ago and I found that surprisingly low. [1] https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-energy-efficiency https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-en... [2] https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_Full_Doc.pdf https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_F...
- komali2 7y ago
  Lived in Houston most of my life, and in places with public transit (good and bad) other parts. My perspective: sprawl fucking sucks. That's what this is about - not just driving, but what a city built on driving leads to: sprawl. 45 minute commutes to college from Clear Lake while I'm doing nothing but kinda listening to an audiobook or something. So demotivating. Not really being able to hang with my classmates after school cause I can leave at 4 and get home in 45 minutes or 6/7 and get home in 1.5-2 hours.... or just wait until 9, 10, which fucks me cause the next morning I need to be on the road at 6:30 sharp if I want a "reasonable" 45 minute commute. Oh, and when I turn up to school, better leave 20 minutes to an hour to find parking. That's not hyperbole, parking was that bad at University of Houston. Compared to the train I used to take to Mountain View - my "worst" commute from my time in the bay area. Still a "long" trip, but I'm sitting on a train reading, playing a video game, or sleeping. Traffic is not a consideration. I can go in rush hour or whenever, I'll still get there at the same time. I get off the train and bicycle to the office, leave my bike downstairs and that's it. No idling in the parking lot shitting out CO, waiting for someone to walk into the parking lot so I can offer them an AC ride to their spot in return for the ability to park in it when they leave. Growing up in that sprawl was painful. Our suburbs were spread out not too bad, but enough to suck hard. One of my best friends was a good 3 miles away in a different suburb (so I had to go the long way round to actually get to an entrance. Sometime's I'd toss my bike over the 10 foot sound barrier thing and try to scale it but stopped after spraining an ankle). Bicycling there would take 20 minutes if there were bike lanes, but there weren't, there were "sidewalks" with giant roots pushing the concrete up that were too big to hop on the bike, or there'd be massive puddles in the dips or dirt and sand ready to slip me up, so I was on/off/on/off the bike, waiting 5 minutes at an intersection for a walk signal and still keeping my head on a swivel because nobody expects someone to actually walk in the burbs. So, it'd take me like 50 minutes to get to my friend's house. If it wasn't so hard, I think I would have hung outside more with my friends, and played less videogames. I distinctly remember chatting in WoW about how we'd consider hanging out, and then say "nah don't wanna bike an hour" and just play more WoW. Then when you finally do get a car, it's not that much better. First spend 45 minutes driving a pentagram across the suburbs picking everyone up, then drive another 45 to get to the city or wherever. It just sucked! So, I don't know about cost, I don't have the math for it, but it was terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and I hated it growing up. The convenience of living in a mildly walkable city like SF with even the mediocre (from int'l standards) public transit they have here is to me leagues better than the bullshit I put up with in Houston. And then you go to a city like Taipei and see what this world is capable of creating... it's a dream.
- danans 7y ago
  > Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. I'd bet that few people exclusively take public transit in Boston. People still take taxis and car-shares, hitch rides with friends. The key is that for many important high traffic routes, the highest quality of life option in Boston is transit, far better than sitting in traffic. Even in parts of the world that have amazing public transit systems, there are use cases where a car (whether owned, rented, or hired), fills in the quality of life gap very nicely.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  We live and work in Cambridge, and live close enough to work that walking and cycling are our normal commutes, so our commute costs effectively nothing. I could get a subsidized T pass through work, but I don't need it. When we were looking for a house, we could have gotten something bigger further out, for less money even, but then everything else would cost more and take longer. We'd have to drive more. Hell, taxes would be higher. Our city tax bill is a lot less than most of the people we know in nearby towns pay.
  - Noos 7y ago
    From zillow, the median home price there is 900k. The median rent is 3,000 a month. It is literally unaffordable to most people to do what you do; the yearly amount you pay in rent alone is the yearly salary of many other people. You'd need to make a wage of $24 an hour just to pay that rent. If you looked at the median wage in the USA, its 56k, and this rent would end up being 64% of that income. What you do is a luxury of the rich. Most people simply can't afford the luxury of carlessness in an urban center.
    - Finnucane 7y ago
      Gosh, I was unaware of what it cost to live here, or what the flood of tech/biotech money has done to the neighborhood. We got lucky and were in a position to buy during the crash. We couldn't afford it now.
rconti 7y ago
Yeah, it makes me very uncomfortable when people say "housing is unaffordable in ${region} for anyone making less than ${salary}. On the one hand, I appreciate that they're trying to put numbers on a problem we all feel in our gut. You can't hand-wave it away by saying "well, things change". But, at the same time, things DO change. At a time when many goods and services are at an all-time low in terms of costs, why WOULDN'T housing costs go up? On the one hand, costs will be affected by constrained or increased supply. On the other hand, there's the demand side. If I can afford to cheaply feed and transport and clothe myself, why would I not choose to allocate a greater share of my income towards housing closer to work, or with more space, or in a more desirable neighborhood? The choices we all freely make with how to allocate our income necessarily drives affordability for others.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  This seems like a reasonable hypothesis. And easily tested. Is it true that the other costs of living have gone down in real terms. If it is, then we also need to know if people are buying those cheaper products and services. We also need to know which groups of people are affected by which price-changes-over-time, in real terms. This seems like information the statistics bureaus are likely to collect, definitely recall seeing this sort of data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and I vaguely recall the costs of living have gone up but I’ve never attempted to dissect the data. I think the most important idea from the parent comment here is whether it’s possible to live on rice, lentils, onions, and potatoes, plus heating and cooking energy, at a lower rate now than the recent past, and if so why are we choosing not to.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    Cars are more expensive compared to many people's salaries, as evidenced by car loans getting extended to 7 years. However they are more fuel efficient, last longer, and have lower maintenance costs (oil change at 10,000 instead of 3000 miles, for example). For food it really depends on what you get. Meat seems to be higher, but I'm always amazed at how cheap bananas and potatoes are (and rice). Paying per minute for phone calls is a thing of the past too. However a modern lifestyle also comes with more "almost necessary" expenses, such as home internet, cable ($150 - $200 a month), plus cell phone ($160 per month for two lines, to get unlimited calls and data). But electric usage is lower due to higher efficiency appliances and lighting.
COREi7 7y ago
"They spend 30 percent of their income on housing and 20 percent of their income on transportation. The second household lives in a city and owns one car. Their house is more expensive than the suburban one, so they spend 40 percent of their income on housing, and just 10 percent on transportation. Is it really accurate to describe the second (city) household as any more “cost-burdened” than its suburban peer?" The answer is yes. Comparaing housing costs to transportation costs is not accurate. Housing costs are fixed based on neighborhood so most residents are forced to either pay the price or move. While transportation costs can always be budgeted lowered by many methods. EX: using fuel efficient vehicles, car pooling, sharing vehicles, etc.
- ouid 7y ago
  You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation.
  - COREi7 7y ago
    > You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation. Housing prices both renting/buying are usually fixed based on similar houses in the area. You arent going to see a $2500 a month house next to a $600 a month house. So the idea that you can just buy drastically cheaper houses in the same neighborhood is not true. Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families
    - amalcon 7y ago
      Price per unit area is the thing that's more or less fixed based on similar homes. You can definitely see a 3000sqft home next to an 800sqft home, if the neighborhood grew organically. The price difference in that case could well be that stark. In the US, many neighborhoods (esp. newer) were constructed all at once by a single developer. This is how you get the "sameness", and finding a significantly cheaper home is not possible in these places. In other places, it can be.
atemerev 7y ago
Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving? Being free from public transport timetables and the ability to go anywhere on a whim are so precious. As an introvert, I see my car as my private space.
- acomjean 7y ago
  Everyone loves their cars. Climate control, freedom.. But in many places cars being loved so much no one can get around to the detriment of everyone and the places we love. Thus looking to hack a better way of getting everyone moving is natural. Sometimes when I drive to work, the ride home can take 45 minutes to an hour for 3.5 miles. I can ride my bike faster.
- gorbachev 7y ago
  I do, too. Just not in rush hour traffic.
- jdavis703 7y ago
  I don’t own a car, and I might be what some call a mobility advocate. But I’ll admit it, driving is fun. There’s few things as fun as going on a 50 mile trip to explore a new park. But personal automobiles start creating issues when we are required to drive to pick up groceries or drop kids off at school. When everyone does this we get terrible traffic, suffocating pollution and an environment that winds up being built to focus on machines over people. This is killing our health, our relationships and our environment. We don’t want to ban cars, we want a culture that gives transportation choice: driving, biking or walking. So many parts of our cities and suburbs right now only give one choice: “driving.” Last thing, I’m also an introvert, but running errands and commuting on a bike is great. Aside from dangerous or aggressive drivers, most of my interactions with other people is limited and when it does happen is positive. No one really bothers you like they do on transit or while walking.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving? Probably not. You might be the only one willing to take the inevitable scorning you'll get for admitting it though.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
There's a huge connection between housing and transportation, one affects the other in profound ways. NIMBY Environmentalist, please take note: For example, in the bay area, high housing prices push people to the outer boundaries of the bay for housing, like Tracy, Stockton and beyond. Imagine the impact on the environment as most people are commuting 100+ miles per day more than if they were simply allowed to live where they work.
- davidw 7y ago
  > NIMBY Environmentalist This is a real thing. Exhibit A is the San Francisco Sierra Club. https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fights-to-save-a-parking-garage/article_93ff9084-3be7-11e7-a3a8-17f11f24db6e.html https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    As abhorrent as the "San Francisco" multiplier probably makes them you could drop it and the sentence would have the same meaning. The Sierra club won't be happy until humans are not impacting nature because we've left the planet.
    - davidw 7y ago
      Eh, they're an organization I'll never give money to because of their anti mountain bike stance, but the national level one is pretty good on most 'urbanism' type issues. They understand that denser living leads to less sprawl, that cars are horrible for the environment, long commutes are bad, and so on. The SF group seems to just stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I'VE GOT MINE GO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE STOCKTON OR MAYBE IOWA".
    - vkou 7y ago
      That's about as fair as saying that the fossil fuel lobby won't be happy until every last living thing on Earth cooks in a Venusian Armageddon. Actually, it's a bit less fair then that.
  - 7y ago
rayiner 7y ago
A lot of this is hand waving. As the article admits, it doesn’t adjust for lost time, or household size and composition. Regardless, it assumes a causal relationship between housing costs and transportation costs (I.e. that people with lower housing costs spend more on transportation because their houses are further away). That’s not a sound assumption. The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. In the latter case, transportation costs go up because the amount of transportation that needs to be done goes way up. My wife and I went from not having a car in Chicago to having two cars in the Annapolis suburbs. One car is necessary because we now have to drive to the train station to get to DC. That fits in with the article’s premise that increased transportation costs offset lower housing costs somewhat. The other, however, is necessary because we have two kids who need to go to a ton of different places. Even in Chicago, it’s unlikely that your work, your wife’s work, your kids’ school, and your kids’ extracurricular activities are all going to be near transit. Also, the article assumes that transportation erases the housing cost difference without accounting for the fact that people might purchase more transportation because housing costs are so much cheaper, not just because they have to to cope with sprawl. We moved from a 1,400 square foot 3BR downtown to a 2,800 square foot 4BR in the burbs. Our mortgage is half of what our rent used to be. Had we continued to pay city rents, we may have continued to drive my 10 year old fully paid off car. Instead we bought two newer cars, not because they were necessary for the commute, but because we had the extra cash. The article also leaves out the third rail of urbanism: schools. The folks who live in our neighborhood in Annapolis could not afford to buy a house, even a much smaller one, in DC with a public school as good as the one we have here. The folks I know trying to square that circle (living downtown in one of the handful of good school districts in the city) are paying three times as much as we did for housing. (And, as a result, live in gentrified neighborhoods with little economic or even racial diversity.)
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  >The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. How long has this been the typical pattern? Auto-oriented suburbs are an experiment two generations in the making. Before that development, there was a sharper urban-rural divide. I would not be surprised to see the US largely swing back to that arrangement within the next 60 years.
EZ-E 7y ago
Housing affordability & transportation costs relationship is the cornerstone that triggered the yellow jacket movement in France. Take most vulnerable families that live away from employment centers (cities) because they can't afford a house there, you have dependability to driving cars (no public transport). The government steps in and tries to tax fuel more for ecology - which pleases richer urban voters but squeezes people who bought a house 20 years ago back when fuel, insurance, parking wasn't as expensive. Their house are the only one that - by the way - are the only ones that didn't gain value. The ever increasing "metropolisation" as we call it, is scary. More and more, you better be able to afford living in a big city or suffer the negative consequences
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- albertgoeswoof 7y ago
  > squeezes people who bought a house 20 years ago back when fuel, insurance, parking wasn't as expensive. Their house are the only one that - by the way - are the only ones that didn't gain value. Are those the same people that tell me to move out of the city into a bigger place and commute in? They seem pretty smug about their choice, “you paid how much for your tiny little house? You could buy a mansion for that here” Well this is why those people are wrong.
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    This sums up my feelings on the topic better than I'll ever be able to. "Do you like to see a mountain stream a-flowin' Do you like to see a youngun with his dog Did you ever stop to think about, well, the air your breathin' Well you better listen to my song And Lord I can't make any changes All I can do is write 'em in a song I can see the concrete slowly creepin' Lord take me and mine before that comes" -Lynyrd Skynyrd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH-gnMSzmtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH-gnMSzmtI
  - EZ-E 7y ago
    Some people do not realize they could get bit pretty hard by buying a house far away, that is indeed cheap and larger - but what happens when fuel gets even more expensive and governments issue many taxes and restrictions to discourage car usage ? (without offering realistic public transport options). Not to mention the usually poorer infrastructure/hospitals/schools Note that it depends on the locality though, some places manage to find the sweet spot - not too far and still not that expensive. In some cities this doesn't exist.
ineedasername 7y ago
The math in the article is a bit off when it claims the "sprawl tax" makes up the difference in higher travel costs when located in sprawling lower cost housing markets. They estimate increased travel cost at $3k/year, $250/month They take Houston as an example, which is on the opposite end of the housing cost/sprawl spectrum from, say, San Francisco, but the "sprawl tax" math doesn't work here. Given average apartment costs and 30yr mortgages at about 4%: Houston Avg House Cost:about $300k or $1400/month SF Avg House Cost: about $1.3 million or $6100/month Difference: about $54,000/year Apartments aren't much better: Houston Avg Apt: about $1100/month or $13k/year SF Avg Apt: about $3500/month or $42,000/year Difference: $2400/month or $29,000/year The sprawl tax doesn't begin to cover these differences. The numbers above are similar for NYC. For Seattle it's less drastic, but still well in excess of $3k/year. Boston is on par with Seattle. On the other hand, Chicago is semi-sprawlish with it's suburbs, and prices are significantly cheaper. About the only place I could find where this "sprawl tax" concept applies successfully after looking at a few randomly picked cities is Hoboken, NJ. A small city twice as densely populated as SF, very popular through proximity NYC and a mini tech hub in its own right. There, buying a house is still not going to even out the sprawl tax, but an apartment will just about do it. (The average cost of apartments vs. houses there is oddly divergent from other cities I looked at.)
- komali2 7y ago
  Maybe try a city like Taipei or Tokyo? I think unfortunately there's too much noise from factors like weird regulations and anti-housing hyper activists in cities like San Francisco to get a good comparison.
  - moate 7y ago
    But isn't that part of the problem? You can't make these sort of blanket "one size fits all" statements because every local is a new mix of problems. The types of solutions and regulatory changes that solve the bay area would be useless in Tokyo and laughable in New Jersey.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  I think the point is more that you should be comparing far-out exurbs to closer-in suburbs of major cities. Of course property in San Francisco or NYC is going to be significantly more expensive than far-off sprawl around Houston. As they say in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. Living in the city is highly desirable for many reasons beyond just having lower transportation costs.
kadendogthing 7y ago
Not to mention all the tax dollars suburban/rural homes take from city centers to subsidize their "cheap" housing.
dazmax 7y ago
One of the easiest ways in which you can live longer, is by simply managing your current time better. For example, try living near everything that you might need, in an area with no pollution. Hard to find for a good price!
robertnealan 7y ago
Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700/month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45/mile). It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter. Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Why $.45/mile? Is that real? I keep track of all my expenses, so a few years ago I was able to calculate my real lifetime costs at $.15/mile, asymptotically approaching $.10. Of course when I travel for work the IRS says I charge $.50/mile, which is pure profit. The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.
  - testis321 7y ago
    In my country (EU, so gas is a bit more expensive) the government calculates* transport costs at 0.37eur/km. So $0.45/mi would be in the right ballpark. You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc. *that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
microcolonel 7y ago
When you ask for public transit, you don't necessarily get it either. It seems that when demand for public transit is high, politicians often put forward light, elevated, and subsurface rail boondoggle projects instead of just buying some buses and organizing routes, the incremental, somewhat temporary improvements necessary to move toward better transit connectivity.
bayareanative 7y ago
Also property taxes and costs of living: food, transportation and other necessities.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
" If you have to drive everywhere, and drive further for every trip, what you save in rent or mortgage payments, can be more than eaten up in car payments, gasoline purchases, and time wasted traveling." Well, that's assuming you own / lease a vehicle. Instead, if you're using public transportation then sprawl translates into time. Longer distances translate into more stops, and perhaps even a transfer, or two. That time adds up. If you're lucky you drive to the train station. But best I can tell, if you're using buses to get around locally, you're paying dearly in time. In fact, a couple days ago I saw a report on the local news that SEPTA (PHL, PA) is seeing bus rides / riders declined. They attributes this it Uber and Lyft. Apparently, the market is figuring out - faster than SEPTA - that time really is money.
deleted 7y ago
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ghettoimp 7y ago
Why single out transportation? One could imagine a cheap house in a small town with no jobs, high taxes, expensive utilities, pricey shopping centers, in a flood plain, in a country with an exceptionally broken healthcare system. Transportation could be the least of your problems.
SilasX 7y ago
Yes! This is why I have suggested using my metric DIPHLoW: Discretionary Income Per Hour Lost to work: Discretionary income: Income minus taxes and minimal housing costs. Hour lost to work: Time at work plus time commuting That more completely captures the tradeoffs that policymakers face. They can't just sigh and expect people to move further out, be cause, yes, it increases discretionary income, but also increases time lost to work, so isn't necessarily an improvement. Higher taxes might be a good idea if they can be used to scale up transportation capacity in proportion to the hit to DI. And policies that reduce pre-tax income might be a good idea if the housing savings cancel it out.
rdiddly 7y ago
4:30 PM PST - hug of death?
esotericn 7y ago
It's strange to me that this wouldn't be considered intuitively obvious. Is it specifically car costs that people find hard to grok? In London you could live in Zone 1, walking distance from your work, and pay 0 GBP for essential transport, or you could live in Zone 6 and pay ~250GBP a month, or you could live in a small town or village somewhere with a rail station and pay 250-500 depending on distance. You can't really avoid knowing it unless you just don't care what anything costs. A few years back I moved from a flat around the corner from work to one quite far out. The cost savings were minimal with transport accounted for; negative if I valued my time. The main thing was being in a more suburban location, less concrete etc.
AtomicOrbital 7y ago
keep in mind the retail cost of fuel is massively subsidized ... after you factor in global military budget spent subjugating oil rich countries, say nothing about the hit western global big oil would take if those same countries nationalized their own oil ... everytime people step on that pedal they must be reminded of the implications

230 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

The fact that this article does not break down the various transportation costs sets off massive red flags. The $3k/yr number mentioned for the cost of transportation via car in Houston is on the same order as an MBTA rail pass in the Boston area. Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. Yes of course transit is not free but that's true whether regardless of your mode of transit. The premise is solid. The analysis is lacking.

oftenwrong 7y ago
An MBTA local bus and subway pass is $84.50 per month $84.50 * 12 months = $1014 per year As someone living in metro Boston, that is a large difference in cost from my perspective - approximately equivalent to 2 months of rent.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  If you live outside of the subway system and need to get places (particularly in/out of the city) within a reasonable time-frame you're likely going to need a commuter rail pass. That jacks up the price substantially. I did the whole "live in Boston and just use public transit thing" for awhile. Then I moved to one of those cities that MA likes to pretend doesn't exist and my transportation costs stayed about flat. If I had made heavy use of Uber/Lyft they probably would have decreased. My friend commutes in from Worcester and rides the train because of the tolls and the fact that his work subsidizes the rail pass. In a sprawling city with free/cheap parking there would be no economic reason to do anything but drive.
  - Steltek 7y ago
    When people say "public transit", they don't mean the periphery of a commuter rail system. They mean the core bus network and usually the subway. You're comparing the worst case of meaningful public transit to a city only built for cars. My hypothesis, if you lived in Somerville, Dorchester, or at most, Quincy, the numbers would look different.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Sure, if you specifically craft your living situation to not involve commuter rail (and don't replace it with Uber/Lyft) you can save money. But you'll spend the money on rent.
      - hsitz 7y ago
        > But you'll spend the money on rent. Bingo! That's exactly what the linked article is about. How much extra are you paying in rent? How much are you saving on transportation? What are total costs of [rent + transportation] in both cases? How much time is wasted on transportation when you're paying lower rent? These are questions that need to be asked. Why would you not want to "craft" your living situation to give you the optimal setup? No, you can't have everything, but a "crafted" lifestyle that avoids need for transportation may be preferred by many, and may in addition in some cases be cheaper _and_ provide higher quality of life. Maybe not, maybe not for everyone; but those are questions that need to be asked, not simply have, "What are housing rental/purchase costs?" be taken as deciding question of what places have higher cost of "housing".
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    Yes, that is somewhat the point of this discussion. The money one saves on housing by living further from a dense urban core is often offset to a significant degree by transportation costs, whether those additional costs come from regional rail or driving.
- deleted 7y ago
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- thomascgalvin 7y ago
  I live in the outermost zone of the commuter rail, and a monthly pass is about $400, or $4,800 per year. Add to that the fact that you are going to be packed in like cattle, won't have a seat to sit on unless you board at the very first station, and can count on a 30-60 minute delay at least once a week ... the MTBA is probably the single biggest stressor in the Boston area.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    If you lived in the urban core, you could save $3786 per year by just getting a local pass. You would avoid a lot of that stress and lost time from your commute. You would not need a car. Of course, your housing costs would be higher, or your housing would be worse, or both. Worth it?
    - thomascgalvin 7y ago
      > your housing costs would be higher My housing costs would be roughly twice as high (from $2,500 to more like $5,000 per month). Living closer just isn't an option.
- electricslpnsld 7y ago
  And most employers will have some sort of transit benefit. $84.50 falls well within a lot of the wage works style benefits people get!
aqme28 7y ago
> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  More control of when you leave/arrive, storage space to transport things, not dealing with other people, ability to go wherever you want, air conditioning. There are downsides like traffic, car maintenance, and parking, but in general, cars are probably more comfortable than public transit in the US. I'm also ignoring externalities like pollution and unsustainable suburban sprawl growth. I'd rather take the subway Mon to Fri in NYC, but if the roads are empty, the streets are faster and more comfortable. Unfortunately, public transit is awesome if everyone has to take it, but if enough people opt out, and we give them an option like a personal car and pave roads over where we could have had public space, then cars become optimal for the individual.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    I personally like a hybrid approach. I absolutely hate driving in a city, and trying to find (and pay for) parking. So I drive to a park-n-ride that is outside the city, park for a couple bucks, then take light-weight rail into the city. This does require the physical ability to walk quite a bit once you are in the city, however, which a number of people can't do much of due to physical issues (starting to include myself in that category).
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Park-n-ride has great quality of life but costs a ton because you inevitably wind up paying the cost of driving, parking and public transit.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        Like everything else, it depends. It would cost me approximately $23/day to drive to work accounting for gas + parking, even more if I wanted to pay to use the HOV lane. Instead I drive to a park and ride and take an express bus. The total estimated cost is around $6 including my gas costs.
dcolkitt 7y ago
Definitely agree. One way to show that car transport is much more "valuable" than public transport in terms of convenience and comfort is to observe that very rich people almost universally travel by private car.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > very rich people almost universally travel by private car. Do they? I thought this would be hard to know, has there been a survey? And is this true even in cities with decent public transportation?
  - rayiner 7y ago
    There are no American cities with “decent public transportation.” NYC, DC, and Chicago are the only candidates. The first two used to be good, but have fallen off a cliff due to deferred maintenance. The latter is pretty good but inaccessible from vast swaths of the city.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      You forgot to qualify that with "for all residents". If you live in the inner suburbs of Minneapolis and work downtown public transit is pretty good for getting you to work. You will still need/want a car for grocery trips but one car will cover the entire family so you won't need a second. Thus in Minneapolis public transit is subsided transport for the rich - from the perspective of those who do not have a job downtown. (of course the poor also ride public transit, but they don't live in the suburbs)
      - komali2 7y ago
        >You will still need/want a car for grocery trips Yea, exactly, there is no good public transit, anywhere, in America. There are cities throughout Europe and Asia where the thought of needing a car to get groceries is comical - the grocery store is right there, or a short hop on a bus/metro away, and it comes every 3 minutes so no big deal. The USA desperately needs infrastructure help.
aqme28 7y ago
The $3k/yr number mentioned is not the cost of transportation via car in Houston, but the premium you pay for Houston's sprawl. In other words, commuting in a low-sprawl city is $3k/yr cheaper than it would be in Houston. Car ownership is significantly more expensive than $3k/year.
- thex10 7y ago
  This. There are many other costs associated with car ownership. As a transit user I don't need to pay towards a vehicle registration/inspection, repairs, insurance...
  - davidw 7y ago
    Not to mention things like the mental stress and sedentary lifestyle.
- cobookman 7y ago
  My Nissan leaf disagrees with you. 6.5k purchase price. Cost to Charge less than 50$/mo th. Maintenance nill. Insurance cheap ($35/month)
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    It doesn't depreciate?!
    - cobookman 7y ago
      Who cares. 6.5k/4 years is 1.6k/year. the car needs to only last 3-4 years
  - aqme28 7y ago
    Buying a used electric is clearly an exception, not the norm. Also https://www.edmunds.com/nissan/leaf/2018/cost-to-own/ https://www.edmunds.com/nissan/leaf/2018/cost-to-own/
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
impendia 7y ago
> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. Having lived in both places, and currently living in metro Boston without a car, I'm of the opposite opinion. To each their own.
- davidw 7y ago
  > To each their own. ... as long as they help pay for the externalities all that driving is responsible for.
  - komali2 7y ago
    I don't think anybody in the world is doing this, right? The environmental impact of all these cars? A great bit of activity San Francisco saw recently was someone renting out parking spaces as "office spaces" for like 2.50$ an hour. It pointed out that a similar space in a building would probably go for more like 10$/hour or more, highlighting how little we're valuing our street-side real estate.
    - andys627 7y ago
      In Denmark cars are taxed 100% and they still prob aren't paying their fair share. They do have lots of people walking, biking, and taking tansit.
      - davidw 7y ago
        Yes, gas is way more expensive in Europe, in general.
      - arminiusreturns 7y ago
        One thing my European friends tend to not understand is just how big the US is. For a huge portion of none-coastline America, driving is the only mode of transport. "Denmark is approximately 43,094 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km. Meanwhile, the population of Denmark is ~5.6 million people (321.0 million more people live in United States)" From a quick search.
hsnewman 7y ago
Why would you say using public transportation results in a poor quality of life? Not driving would increase my quality of life a great deal!
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  I just lived the last 10 months without a car. There needs to be a big asterisk of not driving would increase your quality of life if there is alternative transit in place. It's pretty miserable when the nearest activities are a 45 minute light rail ride away. Biking is great mid day, but doing anything at night when you're adding 30 minutes to an hour on each side makes most plans fall through. I would love to not have to own a car in my city, but we'd need to increase density and transit significantly.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  As someone who has years' of experience each doing non-trivial commutes by driving and by subway, I'd have to say, the subway wins hands-down. It's not even a close contest. I was doing the most reading of my life when I was taking the subway to work every day, and it was great. I also occasionally played handheld video games or read magazines. My commute time wasn't wasted; I spent it doing things I wanted to do. Contrast with driving, where my commute time was wasted. And driving is much more stressful and unsafe, as well. You can't be off when you're driving, but you can definitely be off when you're taking the subway. On days when I was especially tired, I would just zone out with my eyes closed. Now I just have a 10 minute bike commute, and it's my favorite commute I've ever had, but I do miss reading as regularly as I did back then on the subway.
- reddog 7y ago
  When I've driven I have never had to stand for 40 minutes in rush hour in a jammed Milan subway car with my nose in a strangers armpit while another stranger breaths down my neck. I've never been ask for spare change while in my car. I've never been challenged to a fight for asking someone to take their feet off the opposite seat so my wife could sit down. I've never been pickpocketed. I've never had a bad dixieland band set up, play a few measures of bad out-of-tune jazz and then aggressively solicit donations. I've never had a creepy passenger stare at me for the entire ride as if they are trying to memorize my face. My car seat is never covered with vomit when I get in. I've never had a car commute cancelled because of a a labor action, or a signal malfunction, of work being done on the lines or bureaucratic incompetence. I've never had my car stop running because it was too late in the day or a holiday. All these things and much more have happened to me on public transport. Yes, it is irritating to be stuck in traffic in a car -- you have to move your right foot back and forth between the accelerator and brake while you sit in your adjustable leather seat, traveling on your own schedule to your custom destination in climate controlled comfort while rocking out to music, an audible book or a podcast.
andys627 7y ago
> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. It's a trade off. One of these tanks the planet and the other doesn't, however.
- njarboe 7y ago
  Public transit doesn't come for free. Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars. I would suggest fixing the individual vehicle transportation system (congestion tolls + high gas tax would be a start) than forcing everyone to stand on trains for their commute and stay at home on the weekends.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    > Bus systems are sometimes worse than people in cars. Source?
    - njarboe 7y ago
      In the US, bus routes often run with zero passengers on the bus. Here is a Quora question and answer that states buses consumed 20% more energy than cars per passenger mile in 2009[1]. It references a US Department of transportation document that can now be found here(pdf)[2]. Tables in chapter two. Not sure about more recent figures. I made this comment as I remembered an AC Transit (Alameda County Transit which includes Oakland) study that said their average mpg per passenger was around 8 mpg some time ago and I found that surprisingly low. [1] https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-energy-efficiency https://www.quora.com/Do-buses-really-result-in-increased-en... [2] https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_Full_Doc.pdf https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Edition30_F...
komali2 7y ago
Lived in Houston most of my life, and in places with public transit (good and bad) other parts. My perspective: sprawl fucking sucks. That's what this is about - not just driving, but what a city built on driving leads to: sprawl. 45 minute commutes to college from Clear Lake while I'm doing nothing but kinda listening to an audiobook or something. So demotivating. Not really being able to hang with my classmates after school cause I can leave at 4 and get home in 45 minutes or 6/7 and get home in 1.5-2 hours.... or just wait until 9, 10, which fucks me cause the next morning I need to be on the road at 6:30 sharp if I want a "reasonable" 45 minute commute. Oh, and when I turn up to school, better leave 20 minutes to an hour to find parking. That's not hyperbole, parking was that bad at University of Houston. Compared to the train I used to take to Mountain View - my "worst" commute from my time in the bay area. Still a "long" trip, but I'm sitting on a train reading, playing a video game, or sleeping. Traffic is not a consideration. I can go in rush hour or whenever, I'll still get there at the same time. I get off the train and bicycle to the office, leave my bike downstairs and that's it. No idling in the parking lot shitting out CO, waiting for someone to walk into the parking lot so I can offer them an AC ride to their spot in return for the ability to park in it when they leave. Growing up in that sprawl was painful. Our suburbs were spread out not too bad, but enough to suck hard. One of my best friends was a good 3 miles away in a different suburb (so I had to go the long way round to actually get to an entrance. Sometime's I'd toss my bike over the 10 foot sound barrier thing and try to scale it but stopped after spraining an ankle). Bicycling there would take 20 minutes if there were bike lanes, but there weren't, there were "sidewalks" with giant roots pushing the concrete up that were too big to hop on the bike, or there'd be massive puddles in the dips or dirt and sand ready to slip me up, so I was on/off/on/off the bike, waiting 5 minutes at an intersection for a walk signal and still keeping my head on a swivel because nobody expects someone to actually walk in the burbs. So, it'd take me like 50 minutes to get to my friend's house. If it wasn't so hard, I think I would have hung outside more with my friends, and played less videogames. I distinctly remember chatting in WoW about how we'd consider hanging out, and then say "nah don't wanna bike an hour" and just play more WoW. Then when you finally do get a car, it's not that much better. First spend 45 minutes driving a pentagram across the suburbs picking everyone up, then drive another 45 to get to the city or wherever. It just sucked! So, I don't know about cost, I don't have the math for it, but it was terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and I hated it growing up. The convenience of living in a mildly walkable city like SF with even the mediocre (from int'l standards) public transit they have here is to me leagues better than the bullshit I put up with in Houston. And then you go to a city like Taipei and see what this world is capable of creating... it's a dream.
danans 7y ago
> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston. I'd bet that few people exclusively take public transit in Boston. People still take taxis and car-shares, hitch rides with friends. The key is that for many important high traffic routes, the highest quality of life option in Boston is transit, far better than sitting in traffic. Even in parts of the world that have amazing public transit systems, there are use cases where a car (whether owned, rented, or hired), fills in the quality of life gap very nicely.
Finnucane 7y ago
We live and work in Cambridge, and live close enough to work that walking and cycling are our normal commutes, so our commute costs effectively nothing. I could get a subsidized T pass through work, but I don't need it. When we were looking for a house, we could have gotten something bigger further out, for less money even, but then everything else would cost more and take longer. We'd have to drive more. Hell, taxes would be higher. Our city tax bill is a lot less than most of the people we know in nearby towns pay.
- Noos 7y ago
  From zillow, the median home price there is 900k. The median rent is 3,000 a month. It is literally unaffordable to most people to do what you do; the yearly amount you pay in rent alone is the yearly salary of many other people. You'd need to make a wage of $24 an hour just to pay that rent. If you looked at the median wage in the USA, its 56k, and this rent would end up being 64% of that income. What you do is a luxury of the rich. Most people simply can't afford the luxury of carlessness in an urban center.
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    Gosh, I was unaware of what it cost to live here, or what the flood of tech/biotech money has done to the neighborhood. We got lucky and were in a position to buy during the crash. We couldn't afford it now.

rconti 7y ago

Yeah, it makes me very uncomfortable when people say "housing is unaffordable in ${region} for anyone making less than ${salary}. On the one hand, I appreciate that they're trying to put numbers on a problem we all feel in our gut. You can't hand-wave it away by saying "well, things change". But, at the same time, things DO change. At a time when many goods and services are at an all-time low in terms of costs, why WOULDN'T housing costs go up? On the one hand, costs will be affected by constrained or increased supply. On the other hand, there's the demand side. If I can afford to cheaply feed and transport and clothe myself, why would I not choose to allocate a greater share of my income towards housing closer to work, or with more space, or in a more desirable neighborhood? The choices we all freely make with how to allocate our income necessarily drives affordability for others.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
This seems like a reasonable hypothesis. And easily tested. Is it true that the other costs of living have gone down in real terms. If it is, then we also need to know if people are buying those cheaper products and services. We also need to know which groups of people are affected by which price-changes-over-time, in real terms. This seems like information the statistics bureaus are likely to collect, definitely recall seeing this sort of data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and I vaguely recall the costs of living have gone up but I’ve never attempted to dissect the data. I think the most important idea from the parent comment here is whether it’s possible to live on rice, lentils, onions, and potatoes, plus heating and cooking energy, at a lower rate now than the recent past, and if so why are we choosing not to.
- derekp7 7y ago
  Cars are more expensive compared to many people's salaries, as evidenced by car loans getting extended to 7 years. However they are more fuel efficient, last longer, and have lower maintenance costs (oil change at 10,000 instead of 3000 miles, for example). For food it really depends on what you get. Meat seems to be higher, but I'm always amazed at how cheap bananas and potatoes are (and rice). Paying per minute for phone calls is a thing of the past too. However a modern lifestyle also comes with more "almost necessary" expenses, such as home internet, cable ($150 - $200 a month), plus cell phone ($160 per month for two lines, to get unlimited calls and data). But electric usage is lower due to higher efficiency appliances and lighting.

COREi7 7y ago

"They spend 30 percent of their income on housing and 20 percent of their income on transportation. The second household lives in a city and owns one car. Their house is more expensive than the suburban one, so they spend 40 percent of their income on housing, and just 10 percent on transportation. Is it really accurate to describe the second (city) household as any more “cost-burdened” than its suburban peer?" The answer is yes. Comparaing housing costs to transportation costs is not accurate. Housing costs are fixed based on neighborhood so most residents are forced to either pay the price or move. While transportation costs can always be budgeted lowered by many methods. EX: using fuel efficient vehicles, car pooling, sharing vehicles, etc.

ouid 7y ago
You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation.
- COREi7 7y ago
  > You can buy cheaper houses in neighborhods, or rent, or have roommates. Many things can be done to mitigate the cost of housing, just like with transportation. Housing prices both renting/buying are usually fixed based on similar houses in the area. You arent going to see a $2500 a month house next to a $600 a month house. So the idea that you can just buy drastically cheaper houses in the same neighborhood is not true. Roommates are an option for singles. But not feasible for families
  - amalcon 7y ago
    Price per unit area is the thing that's more or less fixed based on similar homes. You can definitely see a 3000sqft home next to an 800sqft home, if the neighborhood grew organically. The price difference in that case could well be that stark. In the US, many neighborhoods (esp. newer) were constructed all at once by a single developer. This is how you get the "sameness", and finding a significantly cheaper home is not possible in these places. In other places, it can be.

atemerev 7y ago

Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving? Being free from public transport timetables and the ability to go anywhere on a whim are so precious. As an introvert, I see my car as my private space.

acomjean 7y ago
Everyone loves their cars. Climate control, freedom.. But in many places cars being loved so much no one can get around to the detriment of everyone and the places we love. Thus looking to hack a better way of getting everyone moving is natural. Sometimes when I drive to work, the ride home can take 45 minutes to an hour for 3.5 miles. I can ride my bike faster.
gorbachev 7y ago
I do, too. Just not in rush hour traffic.
jdavis703 7y ago
I don’t own a car, and I might be what some call a mobility advocate. But I’ll admit it, driving is fun. There’s few things as fun as going on a 50 mile trip to explore a new park. But personal automobiles start creating issues when we are required to drive to pick up groceries or drop kids off at school. When everyone does this we get terrible traffic, suffocating pollution and an environment that winds up being built to focus on machines over people. This is killing our health, our relationships and our environment. We don’t want to ban cars, we want a culture that gives transportation choice: driving, biking or walking. So many parts of our cities and suburbs right now only give one choice: “driving.” Last thing, I’m also an introvert, but running errands and commuting on a bike is great. Aside from dangerous or aggressive drivers, most of my interactions with other people is limited and when it does happen is positive. No one really bothers you like they do on transit or while walking.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>Am I the only person here to actually like cars and enjoy driving? Probably not. You might be the only one willing to take the inevitable scorning you'll get for admitting it though.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

There's a huge connection between housing and transportation, one affects the other in profound ways. NIMBY Environmentalist, please take note: For example, in the bay area, high housing prices push people to the outer boundaries of the bay for housing, like Tracy, Stockton and beyond. Imagine the impact on the environment as most people are commuting 100+ miles per day more than if they were simply allowed to live where they work.

davidw 7y ago
> NIMBY Environmentalist This is a real thing. Exhibit A is the San Francisco Sierra Club. https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fights-to-save-a-parking-garage/article_93ff9084-3be7-11e7-a3a8-17f11f24db6e.html https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  As abhorrent as the "San Francisco" multiplier probably makes them you could drop it and the sentence would have the same meaning. The Sierra club won't be happy until humans are not impacting nature because we've left the planet.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Eh, they're an organization I'll never give money to because of their anti mountain bike stance, but the national level one is pretty good on most 'urbanism' type issues. They understand that denser living leads to less sprawl, that cars are horrible for the environment, long commutes are bad, and so on. The SF group seems to just stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I'VE GOT MINE GO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE STOCKTON OR MAYBE IOWA".
  - vkou 7y ago
    That's about as fair as saying that the fossil fuel lobby won't be happy until every last living thing on Earth cooks in a Venusian Armageddon. Actually, it's a bit less fair then that.
- 7y ago

rayiner 7y ago

A lot of this is hand waving. As the article admits, it doesn’t adjust for lost time, or household size and composition. Regardless, it assumes a causal relationship between housing costs and transportation costs (I.e. that people with lower housing costs spend more on transportation because their houses are further away). That’s not a sound assumption. The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. In the latter case, transportation costs go up because the amount of transportation that needs to be done goes way up. My wife and I went from not having a car in Chicago to having two cars in the Annapolis suburbs. One car is necessary because we now have to drive to the train station to get to DC. That fits in with the article’s premise that increased transportation costs offset lower housing costs somewhat. The other, however, is necessary because we have two kids who need to go to a ton of different places. Even in Chicago, it’s unlikely that your work, your wife’s work, your kids’ school, and your kids’ extracurricular activities are all going to be near transit. Also, the article assumes that transportation erases the housing cost difference without accounting for the fact that people might purchase more transportation because housing costs are so much cheaper, not just because they have to to cope with sprawl. We moved from a 1,400 square foot 3BR downtown to a 2,800 square foot 4BR in the burbs. Our mortgage is half of what our rent used to be. Had we continued to pay city rents, we may have continued to drive my 10 year old fully paid off car. Instead we bought two newer cars, not because they were necessary for the commute, but because we had the extra cash. The article also leaves out the third rail of urbanism: schools. The folks who live in our neighborhood in Annapolis could not afford to buy a house, even a much smaller one, in DC with a public school as good as the one we have here. The folks I know trying to square that circle (living downtown in one of the handful of good school districts in the city) are paying three times as much as we did for housing. (And, as a result, live in gentrified neighborhoods with little economic or even racial diversity.)

oftenwrong 7y ago
>The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids. How long has this been the typical pattern? Auto-oriented suburbs are an experiment two generations in the making. Before that development, there was a sharper urban-rural divide. I would not be surprised to see the US largely swing back to that arrangement within the next 60 years.

EZ-E 7y ago

Housing affordability & transportation costs relationship is the cornerstone that triggered the yellow jacket movement in France. Take most vulnerable families that live away from employment centers (cities) because they can't afford a house there, you have dependability to driving cars (no public transport). The government steps in and tries to tax fuel more for ecology - which pleases richer urban voters but squeezes people who bought a house 20 years ago back when fuel, insurance, parking wasn't as expensive. Their house are the only one that - by the way - are the only ones that didn't gain value. The ever increasing "metropolisation" as we call it, is scary. More and more, you better be able to afford living in a big city or suffer the negative consequences

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albertgoeswoof 7y ago
> squeezes people who bought a house 20 years ago back when fuel, insurance, parking wasn't as expensive. Their house are the only one that - by the way - are the only ones that didn't gain value. Are those the same people that tell me to move out of the city into a bigger place and commute in? They seem pretty smug about their choice, “you paid how much for your tiny little house? You could buy a mansion for that here” Well this is why those people are wrong.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  This sums up my feelings on the topic better than I'll ever be able to. "Do you like to see a mountain stream a-flowin' Do you like to see a youngun with his dog Did you ever stop to think about, well, the air your breathin' Well you better listen to my song And Lord I can't make any changes All I can do is write 'em in a song I can see the concrete slowly creepin' Lord take me and mine before that comes" -Lynyrd Skynyrd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH-gnMSzmtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH-gnMSzmtI
- EZ-E 7y ago
  Some people do not realize they could get bit pretty hard by buying a house far away, that is indeed cheap and larger - but what happens when fuel gets even more expensive and governments issue many taxes and restrictions to discourage car usage ? (without offering realistic public transport options). Not to mention the usually poorer infrastructure/hospitals/schools Note that it depends on the locality though, some places manage to find the sweet spot - not too far and still not that expensive. In some cities this doesn't exist.

ineedasername 7y ago

The math in the article is a bit off when it claims the "sprawl tax" makes up the difference in higher travel costs when located in sprawling lower cost housing markets. They estimate increased travel cost at $3k/year, $250/month They take Houston as an example, which is on the opposite end of the housing cost/sprawl spectrum from, say, San Francisco, but the "sprawl tax" math doesn't work here. Given average apartment costs and 30yr mortgages at about 4%: Houston Avg House Cost:about $300k or $1400/month SF Avg House Cost: about $1.3 million or $6100/month Difference: about $54,000/year Apartments aren't much better: Houston Avg Apt: about $1100/month or $13k/year SF Avg Apt: about $3500/month or $42,000/year Difference: $2400/month or $29,000/year The sprawl tax doesn't begin to cover these differences. The numbers above are similar for NYC. For Seattle it's less drastic, but still well in excess of $3k/year. Boston is on par with Seattle. On the other hand, Chicago is semi-sprawlish with it's suburbs, and prices are significantly cheaper. About the only place I could find where this "sprawl tax" concept applies successfully after looking at a few randomly picked cities is Hoboken, NJ. A small city twice as densely populated as SF, very popular through proximity NYC and a mini tech hub in its own right. There, buying a house is still not going to even out the sprawl tax, but an apartment will just about do it. (The average cost of apartments vs. houses there is oddly divergent from other cities I looked at.)

komali2 7y ago
Maybe try a city like Taipei or Tokyo? I think unfortunately there's too much noise from factors like weird regulations and anti-housing hyper activists in cities like San Francisco to get a good comparison.
- moate 7y ago
  But isn't that part of the problem? You can't make these sort of blanket "one size fits all" statements because every local is a new mix of problems. The types of solutions and regulatory changes that solve the bay area would be useless in Tokyo and laughable in New Jersey.
CydeWeys 7y ago
I think the point is more that you should be comparing far-out exurbs to closer-in suburbs of major cities. Of course property in San Francisco or NYC is going to be significantly more expensive than far-off sprawl around Houston. As they say in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. Living in the city is highly desirable for many reasons beyond just having lower transportation costs.

kadendogthing 7y ago

Not to mention all the tax dollars suburban/rural homes take from city centers to subsidize their "cheap" housing.

dazmax 7y ago

One of the easiest ways in which you can live longer, is by simply managing your current time better. For example, try living near everything that you might need, in an area with no pollution. Hard to find for a good price!

robertnealan 7y ago

Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700/month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45/mile). It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter. Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.

bluGill 7y ago
Why $.45/mile? Is that real? I keep track of all my expenses, so a few years ago I was able to calculate my real lifetime costs at $.15/mile, asymptotically approaching $.10. Of course when I travel for work the IRS says I charge $.50/mile, which is pure profit. The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.
- testis321 7y ago
  In my country (EU, so gas is a bit more expensive) the government calculates* transport costs at 0.37eur/km. So $0.45/mi would be in the right ballpark. You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc. *that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago

microcolonel 7y ago

When you ask for public transit, you don't necessarily get it either. It seems that when demand for public transit is high, politicians often put forward light, elevated, and subsurface rail boondoggle projects instead of just buying some buses and organizing routes, the incremental, somewhat temporary improvements necessary to move toward better transit connectivity.

bayareanative 7y ago

Also property taxes and costs of living: food, transportation and other necessities.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

" If you have to drive everywhere, and drive further for every trip, what you save in rent or mortgage payments, can be more than eaten up in car payments, gasoline purchases, and time wasted traveling." Well, that's assuming you own / lease a vehicle. Instead, if you're using public transportation then sprawl translates into time. Longer distances translate into more stops, and perhaps even a transfer, or two. That time adds up. If you're lucky you drive to the train station. But best I can tell, if you're using buses to get around locally, you're paying dearly in time. In fact, a couple days ago I saw a report on the local news that SEPTA (PHL, PA) is seeing bus rides / riders declined. They attributes this it Uber and Lyft. Apparently, the market is figuring out - faster than SEPTA - that time really is money.

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ghettoimp 7y ago

Why single out transportation? One could imagine a cheap house in a small town with no jobs, high taxes, expensive utilities, pricey shopping centers, in a flood plain, in a country with an exceptionally broken healthcare system. Transportation could be the least of your problems.

SilasX 7y ago

Yes! This is why I have suggested using my metric DIPHLoW: Discretionary Income Per Hour Lost to work: Discretionary income: Income minus taxes and minimal housing costs. Hour lost to work: Time at work plus time commuting That more completely captures the tradeoffs that policymakers face. They can't just sigh and expect people to move further out, be cause, yes, it increases discretionary income, but also increases time lost to work, so isn't necessarily an improvement. Higher taxes might be a good idea if they can be used to scale up transportation capacity in proportion to the hit to DI. And policies that reduce pre-tax income might be a good idea if the housing savings cancel it out.

rdiddly 7y ago

4:30 PM PST - hug of death?

esotericn 7y ago

It's strange to me that this wouldn't be considered intuitively obvious. Is it specifically car costs that people find hard to grok? In London you could live in Zone 1, walking distance from your work, and pay 0 GBP for essential transport, or you could live in Zone 6 and pay ~250GBP a month, or you could live in a small town or village somewhere with a rail station and pay 250-500 depending on distance. You can't really avoid knowing it unless you just don't care what anything costs. A few years back I moved from a flat around the corner from work to one quite far out. The cost savings were minimal with transport accounted for; negative if I valued my time. The main thing was being in a more suburban location, less concrete etc.

AtomicOrbital 7y ago

keep in mind the retail cost of fuel is massively subsidized ... after you factor in global military budget spent subjugating oil rich countries, say nothing about the hit western global big oil would take if those same countries nationalized their own oil ... everytime people step on that pedal they must be reminded of the implications