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Today’s Headlines for Wednesday, Februaury 24
Grid Chicago - Wed, 2016-02-24 09:58
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Cyclist Pulled Off Bike, Beaten and Robbed on the Bloomingdale Trail (DNA)
Man Visiting from the UK Was Electrocuted by Metra Overhead Wires (DNA)
Illinois Is the State With the 11th Lowest Pedestrian Fatality Rate (Tech Insider)
Almost Half of Proposed Eisenhower Noise Walls Likely to Be Approved (Tribune)
1st Tower of Oak Park Development With 271 Units, 428 Spaces almost Completed
(Curbed)
Closed Gas Station at 3901 N. Broadway May Become Tower With 100 Units, 65 Spaces
(DNA)
A List of the 11 CTA Stations That Will Be Getting New Art (DNA)
Western Avenue Closing March 4 for Demolition of the Belmont Overpass (DNA)
Derailment on Yellow Line, Which Re-Opened 4 Months Ago After Embankment
Collapse (DNA)
Curbed Checks Out the Progress of the 35th St. Pedestrian Bridge
Evanston Alderman: Divvy Too Costly, “Let’s Paint Bikes, Put Them Up Around Town”
(Tribune)
4-8 Inches of Snow Will Hit the Region Today — Will “Dibs” Rear Its Ugly Head?
(DNA)
Get national headlines at Streetsblog USA
Categories: New Urbanism
Why are federal programs restricting mixed-use development?
Smart Growth America - Wed, 2016-02-24 09:38
Street-level stores with apartments above them, like these along Main Street in Ossining, NY, are
one example of the type of development current federal regulations restrict.
A growing number of Americans wanting to live in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods—but
arcane federal rules make it unnecessarily difficult to build this type of development. A recent
study by the Regional Plan Association, released in partnership with LOCUS: Responsible Real
Estate Developers and Investors, highlights how—and what lawmakers can do to change it.
The Unintended Consequences of Housing Finance examines several federal regulations around
housing finance that were created in the mid-20th century, and the impact of those regulations on
the type of development that gets built in the United States.
These regulations restrict commercial development in federally backed housing loans, the
report reveals, greatly limiting the availability of financing for three- and four-story buildings
that include both residential and commercial uses. This is despite the fact that more and more
Americans want to live in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.
“For many decades, we’ve been living with a real estate financing system that favors singlefamily home ownership in the suburbs,” said Christopher Jones, senior vice president of
Regional Plan Association and the lead author of the report. “But today, many Americans are
interested in living in places with easy access to stores and services, where cars aren’t needed for
every errand or trip to work. The persistence of out-of-date policies is bad for everyone, but it
takes a particular toll on lower-income Americans by restricting the supply of apartments and
driving up prices for those that are available.”
The rules were developed at a time when loans to commercial properties (such as stores or
supermarkets) were seen as too risky to be tied to smaller-scale residential buildings. But
development trends have changed, and the restriction on mixed-use housing projects is now
constraining the real estate market’s ability to provide what Americans’ increasingly want. Since
private lenders typically adopt federal standards, these restrictions have extended beyond
federally backed projects.
A range of actions could eliminate or reduce these impediments, the report explains, including
raising non-residential caps on loans, allowing alternatives like shorter loan periods or larger
down payments to address risk, or creating a secondary market for mixed-use loans, among
others.
“By taking steps such as raising or eliminating caps on non-residential development within
federal financing, we would be able to better meet demands for walkable communities,” said
Christopher Coes, Director of LOCUS, which partnered with RPA on the release of the report.
“We hope the Obama Administration will move forward and remove these unnecessary barriers
to investing in urban areas, especially in low-income neighborhoods.”
Read more about the findings and the authors’ recommendations in the full report.
Categories: New Urbanism
This Greater Greater Washington post sponsored by... us
Greater Greater Washington - Wed, 2016-02-24 09:20
by Aaron Lemon-Strauss
I don't have a background in transit or planning, and my guess is that you don't either. You're
probably like me: You want to be in a community that values livability for all residents and you
want to keep track of our region's efforts to get there. But we non-experts play a crucial role, and
we need to put our money where our hearts are and donate to Greater Greater Washington today.
Click here to support Greater Greater Washington.
I joined the Greater Greater Washington Board of Directors a couple of years back because I
wanted to do my part to ensure that strong voices supporting a more livable Washington, DC are
heard and supported.
Our community will be more sustainable and equitable with a transit system that opens
opportunities for all citizens and increases mobility for work and play. Also, we all can agree that
housing affordability is a major issue in our region, and it threatens to push longtime residents
out of communities that have grown because of the their hard work.
I don't have the personal expertise and ability to bring about change on these issues, but I know a
collection of people who do: the GGWash contributors, commenters, and readers. I'm a fly on
the wall for a number of internal GGWash conversations, and I'm so impressed at the knowledge
and commitment of the people associated with the site.
How will you support this effort? Will you write a blog post? Will you attend committee
hearings and testify? Will you run for office? I hope you will.
But if now isn't the right time for you to do those things (and believe me, it's not the right time
for me!) I hope you will agree that our obligation to cause change isn't lessened by the
exhaustion of our personal lives. Do what you can: Make a monthly contribution today.
Many of you are able to cause lasting, positive change for livability in this region because of
your job, your volunteering, or your expertise. I hope to have some impact personally through
my work (education at the national level), but it's a couple of steps removed. What I know I can
do to ensure that the right voices are heard on important issues that impact my community is to
support Greater Greater Washington.
I hope you'll join me.
Comment
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so we can keep editing and publishing great articles every day. Please help us be sustainable by
making a monthly, yearly, or one-time contribution today! Click here to support Greater Greater
Washington.
Categories: CNU blogs
Today’s Headlines
Streetsblog Capitol Hill - Wed, 2016-02-24 09:00
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U.S. DOT Announces $500 Million Round of TIGER Funding (Times Picayune)
Arkansas Officials Reject Proposal to Turn I-30 in Little Rock Into a Boulevard
(Arkansas Online)
Indianapolis Working on Its First Pedestrian Plan (Fox59)
SOV Commuting Drops on Colorado Highway, Carpooling and Bus Riding
Rise (BizWest)
Controversy Around London’s “Garden Bridge” Plan (City Metric)
How Much of Toronto’s Awesome New Transit Plan Will Be Built? (Torontoist)
Census Commute Mode Share Undercounts Transit Riders (City Observatory)
Trends Point to Increasing Urbanization in Vancouver (Vancouver Sun)
“The 10 Best States for Pedestrians” (Tech Insider)
Categories: New Urbanism
Breakfast links: Trampled by teenagers
Greater Greater Washington - Wed, 2016-02-24 08:00
by Peter Timko
Photo by Carrie Walters on Flickr.Green line shooting: There was a shooting on a Green Line
train yesterday, near Anacostia station just before 1 pm. Two teens are in custody. Metro's police
chief says it's the first time someone has fired a gun on a train in 20 years. (Post)
Unscheduled stop: A Metrobus driver foiled a group robbery of a 61-year-old visually impaired
woman near L'Enfant Plaza yesterday. The driver recovered the woman's property and police
arrested three girls. (Post)
Up in smoke: For the second time in one week a group of teens has created a smokey
disturbance on Metro. They set off a fire extinguisher on the Brookland platform a week after the
same thing happened on a Red Line train. (City Paper)
All things considered: The Bowser administration released a list of the 28 locations it
considered for future homeless shelter sites. It comes on the heels of FOIA requests and
complaints of a lack of transparency in the selection process. (City Paper)
Alley zoning: January's zoning changes may make it easier to build alley dwellings in certain
parts of the city. Here's a closer look at how. (Urban Turf)
Hello Havana: Mayor Bowser is currently in Cuba, meeting with the mayor of Havana and other
leaders. But the actual goals of the trip aren't very clear, as business opportunities in Cuba are a
ways off. (WAMU)
Architectural fashion: Rainwater harvesting is this year's top outdoor design trend, according to
a survey by the American Society of Landscape Architects. Native plants are also gaining
popularity as homeowners seek more sustainable design. (WTOP)
Dubious honors: DC and Baltimore rank highly on a new list of the most violent places in the
country. According to FBI data, Baltimore has 1,341 violent crimes per 100k residents, and DC
has 1,232. (WTOP)
Pop pop-up: DC is on the list of potential locations for a museum of pop culture. The venture,
backed by Microsoft's Paul Allen, has already passed on a location at 14th and G streets NW.
(WBJ)
Have a tip for the links? Submit it here.
98 comments
Did you enjoy this article? Greater Greater Washington is running a reader drive to raise funds
so we can keep editing and publishing great articles every day. Please help us be sustainable by
making a monthly, yearly, or one-time contribution today! Click here to support Greater Greater
Washington.
Categories: CNU blogs
It's Our Future You Are Planning For: Getting Youth Involved in Planning
Planetizen blogs - Wed, 2016-02-24 08:00
This blog post highlights resources available to help engage children and young adults in
participatory planning processes.
Categories: CNU blogs
How Technology Is Changing Street Surveying
Next City - Wed, 2016-02-24 07:00
A Google car records images for Google’s Street View. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
As more and more cities adopt Vision Zero initiatives, that means more and more researchers
and civil servants must take to the streets, clipboards and clickers in hand, to study street designs,
count pedestrians and otherwise analyze the built environment in which people walk.
Related Stories
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When Navigating a City, Your Brain Could Be the App for That
Mappers of Earth as “One Entire Urbanized Place” Take on Global Energy
New Mapping Tool Helps Planners Judge Pedestrians, Public Space
Say Goodbye to the Clipboard, City Surveyors
Or do they?
A new spate of research and tools are making it possible for researchers to look at a city’s streets
without leaving their chairs.
Case in point: A new study from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
researchers looked at more than 500 streets in all five boroughs of New York using Google
Street View. They found that Street View’s imagery was just as good as being there in real life
— better, because it took a fraction of the time.
“The way the research is normally done … is hard to scale,” says Stephen Mooney, a graduate
student in epidemiology at Columbia. “We were interested in seeing whether we could scale this
research process using information technology.”
And scale they did. A previous survey of 850 intersections in California and Washington State
would have taken one person three years, Mooney said in a statement about the study. Doing the
same thing with Street View would have taken a month.
In addition to using Street View, Mooney and the other researchers used a few other shortcuts.
Instead of counting pedestrians, they used a model that they’d built (and previously tested) to
predict where pedestrians would be. Instead of counting cars, they used maps and city data to
determine where the cars would be. (Mooney says he recently got some more detailed traffic
counts from the city of New York and is working to see if it can be integrated into a more
sophisticated model.)
This is not the first example of using technology to speed up street surveys. The same app used
to gather data for this project, CANVAS (Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment
System), has been used to study streets for graffiti, litter and other “disorder” in Washington,
D.C., Philadelphia, Detroit, San Jose and New York City. (Mooney actually built the app as he
has a background as a computer programmer.)
And it certainly won’t be the last. Mooney mentions a New York-based startup called
Placemeter, which sells small, window-mounted cameras to retailers, business improvement
districts and developers. (The cameras have an artificial intelligence algorithm that can learn
when people are walking by, which could be valuable data on how and when people use a given
block.) Other researchers Mooney knows are training traffic cameras to count the pedestrians in
their “peripheral” vision.
There may even be an easier way. The pedestrian-count model that Mooney and the other
Columbia researchers used has been compared against actual pedestrian counts, but because it
relies on the presence or absence of an MTA subway station as one of the factors in the model, it
probably can’t be reliably used elsewhere in the country. But Mooney found another data source
that correlated pretty well with the model: Walkscore.com. “We got essentially similar results
[comparing the model to Walkscore], within the margin of error,” he says. Since that company
has already established walkability metrics in the U.S., why not use it?
There’s one obvious drawback to this kind of work. “The first 10 to 20 streets you do are kind of
fun,” Mooney says. “You have this sense of travel, of learning about a new space without the
hassle of getting there.” But soon the work gets more and more boring. So even if someone could
survey 850 intersections in a month, would they want to? The answer may be no. Mooney and
other researchers are looking into ways of distributing the work. Community groups interested in
pedestrian safety would likely be willing to chip in and voluntarily inspect sites on Street View;
paid crowdsourcing a la Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is another option.
Whatever the case, CANVAS and other tech like it is making it possible for more and more
research into street design and pedestrian safety.
Whether that research gets done, of course, depends on funding — or whether, as Mooney says,
“if the sort of recent fad of caring about whether people are getting run over turns out to be a
passing fad.”
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Hurdling the Obstacles to Millennial Home Ownership
New Geography - Wed, 2016-02-24 00:28
Justin Chapman contributed research and editorial assistance to this piece. This essay is part of
a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism called "America's Housing Crisis." The
report contains several essays about the future of housing from various perspectives. Follow this
link to download the full report (pdf).
If the United States could remove current obstacles holding back members of the Millennial
Generation from owning homes, the value of the housing market would increase by at least one
trillion dollars over the next five years. Policies that would eliminate or sharply reduce financial
obstacles that are currently hindering thirty somethings who want to start raising a family in the
suburbs from buying a home would enable the construction and sale of as many as five million
more homes between now and 2020. Residential investment represents about five percent of the
country’s GDP, not counting the ancillary spending that results from such purchase. So any
sound housing policy for the United States should begin and end with programs that allow these
“missing Millennials” to join the ranks of America’s home owners.
HOW WE ARE FAILING THE NEXT GENERATION… AND OURSELVES
The Millennial Generation (born 1982–2003), is made up of about 95 million Americans, most
of whom are now in their twenties or thirties. They have been raised to think of life as a series of
hurdles to be jumped with each obstacle becoming increasingly more difficult to overcome. Part
of this mentality stems from the sheer size of the generation, which created enormous peer
competition for success in school. Another source of this pressure to achieve came from their
parents, who constantly
emphasized the importance of going to college, doing extracurricular work in high school to
improve the chances of being selected to attend the college of their choice, and spending time
studying, not working, to make sure their grades were good enough. This kitchen table
conversation was at least partially generated by the pressure that an increasingly global economy
put on family incomes as they were growing up, with particular urgency after the Great
Recession.
Despite the investment in education the generation has made in response to these pressures, the
question remains as to whether or not Millennials will be able to fully participate in the
experience of home ownership. The answer to this question will be determined both by the
efforts of Millennials and also to the degree that efforts to lower the height of the hurdles in front
of them are successful.
There are some people, such as Brookings Institute researcher Matthew Chingos, who don’t
believe the hurdles are unique to this generation. He has suggested, for instance, that student debt
loads weren’t high enough to really impact the housing market.iv, John McManus, an awardwinning editorial and digital content director for Builder magazine, suggested any delays in
home ownership were due primarily to the inherent desire to wait before making decisions in the
hope something better will turn up.vi Despite evidence
of mounting student debt, declines in workforce participation, and stagnant wages, these
economists believe the housing issue can solve itself within the context of existing policies and
current economic growth rates.
Yet from the perspective of most young Millennials these hurdles are both very real and huge
indeed. Not addressing them will impact their lives—and the nation’s economy—for decades to
come.
LOVE AND MARRIAGE: MILLENNIAL STYLE
From 1920 to 1940, when members of the GI Generation were about the age that Millennials are
today, the median age for a first marriage was 24.4 for males and 21.3 for females, numbers that
remained fairly constant until the 1980s. In the 1990s, the median age for first marriages by
Generation X males rose to 26.5 and 24.5 for females.
The early marriage age in the 50s and 60s sparked a rapid growth in suburbs; the percentage of
Americans living there doubled after World War II. By 1970, 38 percent of Americans lived in
the suburbs and, by 1980, 45 percent did, triple the rate of suburban home ownership than before
WWII. As of 2012, nearly 75 percent of metropolitan area residents live in suburban areas.
Overall, 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas;
more than half of them live in areas that are functionally suburban or exurban with low density
and high automobile use. Meanwhile, nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs.
Will Millennials reverse this pattern? Clearly they are marrying even later: the average age of
first marriage in the United States as of 2011 was 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women. This trend
has caused more to linger longer in cities and postpone home ownership until much later in their
lives. Furthermore, in line with their more urban existence,
the fertility rate has fallen from the replacement rate of 2.1 for Generation X to 1.9 for
Millennials.
But this doesn’t mean Millennials aren’t interested in starting a family later in life.
A Pew Research Center report found that among those who have never married and have no
children, 66 percent wanted to marry and 73 percent wanted to have children. Although they may
be late to the family party, the large size of the Millennial Generation, almost double that of
Xers, means there are still plenty of families being formed, just not at the rate that historical
precedents suggested would happen. In fact, the absolute number of household formations rose
to their highest level in a decade in 2014. The trend continued in 2015 as more and more
Millennials entered the prime age for getting married.
These Millennial trends in marriage and parenting can be explained, in part, by the impact of the
Great Recession and more than a decade of stagnant wages. But they are also due to “cultural
changes over time… including more women in the workplace, the increased amount of higher
education among members of the generation, particularly females, and greater social acceptance
of premarital sex, birth control, and cohabitation before marriage,” according to Christine Elliott
and Williams Reynolds III of Deloitte University Press.xv For example, one of the reasons
members of the Silent Generation got married so young in the 1960s was so they could have
socially acceptable sex. No such incentives exist for members of the Millennial Generation.
Liberated from the straight jacket of gender determined roles in society, female Millennials now
outnumber men in every type of higher educational pursuit. Almost 40 percent of female
Millennials aged 25–34 have a bachelor’s degree and about half of them are married, a greater
percentage than among any other educational attainment cohort. Whereas few if any female 25–
34 year olds had attended graduate school in 1964, 13 percent of Millennial females of that age
have reached that milestone today. All of these gains outpace college educational gains among
males in the same time period.
Source:www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/millennials_report.pdf
Millennial women who are not as well educatedxvi and do not have any economic stake in
pursuing a career have their first babies, on average, at age 19 or 20. Well-educated moms have
their first child around 28 or 29, usually after they have saved some money from their
participation in the workforce. The delay in childbearing is greatest among those women with
graduate degrees. Their average age for having their first child is now over 31, a full decade
longer than their counterparts with only a high school degree. This represents a remarkable
reversal of earlier trends over the last 25 years when more educated women were more likely to
have children earlier than their less well-educated peers. In all likelihood, this phenomenon
represents another kitchen table conversation about family finances with more educated females
having more to lose by stepping out of the workforce and their preferred career track by having a
baby than their less educated counterparts.
In a sense, the cultural changes that society has witnessed, driven by a new set of Millennial
beliefs and values about the role of women in society, has run up against the realities of today’s
economy. The best solution to overcoming this obstacle would be a growing economy with
wages increasing comparable to what transpired in the 1990s. Expanded parental leave policies
from companies such as Facebook and Netflix introduced for both their male and female
employees might also impact this trend, or at least the timing of starting a family. Other solutions
designed to artificially increase wages or provide tax incentives are much less likely to overcome
the strong cultural trends impacting family formation that are embedded within the Millennial
psyche.
MILLENNIALS WANT A PIECE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, IF ONLY THEY
COULD AFFORD IT
Not only when they marry but also where these new families choose to reside will have an
enormous impact on American living patterns for decades to come. Despite what some of have
written about Millennials being a “sharing generation” averse to owning things, the generation’s
actual attitudes or aspirations toward home ownership are remarkably similar to those of
previous generations. An Urban Land Institute study, conducted at the end of 2014 of Americans
between 19 and 36 years of age, found that Millennials remained determined to eventually own
their home, with 70 percent of them planning to do so by 2020. “The Great Recession has not
dimmed the generation’s preference for single-family homes, mostly detached,” wrote Leanne
Lachman, the survey’s co-author, a real estate consultant and a Columbia Business School
executive in residence, in a report outlining the survey’s findings.
The same percentage of renters as home owners in the New York Federal Reserve’s Survey of
Consumer Expectations in February 2014 thought home ownership was a good or very good
investment. Almost 65% of millennials aged 21 to 34 looked at real estate websites and apps in
August, and the market share of first time home buyers of existing homes increased to 32 percent
from 28 percent in July of the same year. Realtor.com’s chief economist, Jonathan Smoke, found
that 25–34 year olds were 70 percent more likely than the average adult to be looking for a home
to buy on realtor.com. He estimated half of all home sales activity for the first half of 2015 could
be attributed to first-time buyers and, according to the NAR 2015 Home Buyer and Seller
Generational Trends report, Millennials comprised 68 percent of all such buyers.
“People who believe that Millennials are disinterested in home ownership are grossly mistaken,”
said Smoke. “This generation hit the job market during one of the largest recessions of all time
and
they’ve had to work hard to establish credit and save for a down payment.”
One solution for Millennial couples unable to qualify for a mortgage is, of course, to rent a
course of action many young families just starting out in life have traditionally pursued. The
New York Federal Reserve study found the number one reason renters gave for not buying a
home was they didn’t have enough money saved for a down payment or had too much debt. A
majority also reported that their incomes were too low to support the payments on a mortgage.
These responses nicely summarize the economic barriers to Millennial home ownership. As a
result, the typical first-time home buyer now rents for six years before buying, up from 2.6 years
in the early 1970s, according to a new analysis by Zillow. The median first-time buyer is 33—in
the upper range of the Millennial generation, which roughly spans ages 15 to 34. A generation
ago, the median first-time buyer was about three years younger.
Ironically, many Millennials are being pushed into the home buying market by continuously
rising rents that are making all forms of housing increasingly unaffordable. As Svenja Gudell
pointed out, “We’re also finding that—given how much rental rates are currently rising—a lot of
folks are having a hard time saving for a down payment and qualifying for a mortgage.” The oft
violated rule of thumb says that families should not spend more than 30 percent of their budget
on housing costs. But many young renters are paying more than that. “A striking 46 percent of
renters ages 25 to 34—the core of the home buyer market among Millennials—spend more than
30 percent of their incomes on rent, up from 40 percent a decade earlier,” according to a report
by Harvard University’s Joint Center of Housing Studies.
Along the coast, in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, or Miami, rental costs
exceed 40 percent of Millennials’ median income, with many paying as much as half of their
budget on rent. A minimum wage worker in Orange County, Southern California’s most
desirable suburban environment, would have to work 110 hours per week or over 15 hours a day
to afford a one bedroom apartment where he or she worked. Inland, in cities such as Dallas,
Houston, Chicago, and D.C., Millennials are spending just about 30 percent of their median
income on rent. And the situation continues to worsen.
More striking than these regional differences is the new relationship between the costs of renting
versus owning a place to live. By the fourth quarter of 2014, the average mortgage cost was just
21 percent of average household income in the Dallas area, compared to an average of 28.5
percent of a family’s income being spent on rent. Across the country, it has become less costly
on average for Millennials to own a home (21.4% of income) than to rent (30.1%).
MILLENNIALS TRYING TO BUY HOMES
For those who decide to take the plunge and buy a house, the tighter mortgage-qualification
standards put in place after the Great Recession in reaction to the collapse of the financial
markets when collateralized debt obligations (CDO) supposedly backed by sound mortgages
turned out not to be worth the computer screens they popped up on present the first hurdle to
their goal. To prevent such disasters in the future, Fannie Mae, whose reinsurance programs set
the boundaries of risk that mortgage lenders will tolerate, prohibited certain types of mortgages
altogether and emphasized a return to the traditional 20 percent down, thirty year term, fixed rate
mortgages that had become the standard lending instrument when they were created to revive the
nation’s housing market after the Great Depression.
For a generation that has experienced falling wages and high levels of unemployment, this
requirement can be seen as just too high a hurdle to even attempt to jump. Even if they can
scrape up the money for the down payment, two-thirds of Millennials have a FICO score of
under 680, limiting their ability to secure a government guaranteed mortgage and often saddling
them with additional payments. Andrew Jennings, senior vice president and chief analytics
officer at FICO said that “people in the 600 to 700 [credit score] range average have $25,000 in
non-mortgage debt mostly from credit cards and student loans.” He pointed out that changes to
the FICO score would make it easier for young adults with a thin credit history to qualify for a
home loan. “One way to ease some households into ownership is to ease access to credit.”
Fannie Mae’s Community Home Buyer program takes a step in that direction by lowering the
down payment requirement for qualified buyers to just 5 percent. North Carolina and New
Hampshire have also introduced programs that lower down payment requirements to 3 percent in
an attempt to woo Millennials into buying a home in their state.xxviii More of these programs
should be enacted to knock down this particular hurdle facing Millennials.
(chart: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ docs/millennials_report.pdf)
Much of their lack of credit worthiness stems from the lousy economic environment Millennials
have experienced as they grew up.
Americans between 18 and 34 years of age are earning less today than the same age group did in
the past. The average earning of a Millennial was $33,883 (in 2013 dollars) in the four years
following the recession. This represented a drop in average wages of 9.3 percent in just a decade
(after adjusting for inflation) and is the lowest average wage for this age group since
1980. According to Rob Shapiro, a noted economic policy analyst, annual income gains for thirty
something households (headed by Boomers) averaged 2.6 percent under Reagan and 2.4 percent
under Clinton. Similarly aged households headed by members of Generation X under George W.
Bush experienced income losses averaging 0.3 percent per year, followed by even greater losses
averaging 1.8 percent per year among the first wave of Millennials in Obama’s first term.
The situation is even worse for those with only a high school education. In a report written for
the Brookings Institute in 2015, Shapiro showed that in the last century those with a high school
education could expect their income to grow as they got older, even if it started from a lower
base. This is no longer the case. In this century, those with only a high school education have
actually experienced a drop in their earnings as they got older. Meanwhile, those with a college
education not only start with an initially higher level of income, they can also expect to see their
earnings grow in the course of their lives. College has become the ultimate hurdle in a
Millennial’s life, with failure to get a degree becoming a life sentence of lower economic
opportunity.
The part about going to college that most parents worry about is not so much whether or not their
child will get in and graduate, but how in the world they or their children will be able to afford to
pay for their tuition bills. From 1980 to 2010 the price of tuition skyrocketed by 600 percent. In
the same period, health care inflation rose by just over 200 percent. Meanwhile incomes for all
but the top 5 percent of earners remained basically flat.
In many ways this crisis has been precipitated by the unwillingness or inability of government to
absorb much of the burden for higher education. This follows a notion introduced by the
Carnegie Commission in the 1970s that an educated workforce was not an investment that
government alone should pay for, despite its proven benefits in expanding the middle class and
the country’s economy. Most people agreed with the report’s argument that those who would
benefit most directly from acquiring some sort of a degree—the student and their family—should
pay an increasingly large share of its cost.
Coupled with the inability of states, particularly after the Great Recession, to subsidize the cost
of college at historical levels, this policy led to families in 2014 shouldering the majority of the
cost of sending their child to college for the first time in the nation’s history. Overall, the share of
higher education costs paid for by students and families increased from 33 percent in 1977 to just
under 50 percent in 2015.
Faced with the need to somehow pay for school, students and their families turned to student
loans as the default solution. The result has been a disaster for them and for the American
economy, particularly its housing industry.
Student loan debt doubled from 2007 to 2015. It now exceeds $1.2 trillion in the United States,
more than the country has borrowed to pay for all the cars on the road today. The average debt
for a college graduate in 2015 was $35,000. Eight million former college students are now in
default on their student loan debt with no way to discharge that obligation in bankruptcy. Only
49 percent of Millennials manage to graduate college with less than $10,000 in debt, a major
shift from the 74 percent of the Baby Boomer generation who were able to do so. According to a
recent iQuantifi study, Millennials aged 21-25 shoulder an average of $13,116 in debt.
Millennials in their late 20s carry $46,622 and Millennials in their 30s harbor an average of
$69,552. All of this presents an enormous headwind that the first time home buyer must
overcome.
Under these circumstances, the clearest, most compelling action to grow the housing market
would be to do something about Millennials’ student debt. A staggering 56 percent of
Millennials between the ages of 18 and 29 who have student loan debt told Bankrate. com that
they have delayed major life events because of their debt burden, with home buying the number
one thing they have put off doing. Thirty percent of millennials (versus 22% of adults overall)
say that student loans have forced them to delay buying a home.
To make it easier for Millennials to leap the other hurdles to home ownership without the
deadweight of student debt on their back, some have proposed to go so far as to declare a
“jubilee year” and have the nation simply forgive the $1.2 billion in outstanding student loan
debt. Home developers might well be a major beneficiary of such a windfall, although bailout of
student loan debt at this scale is unlikely to occur any time soon for both financial and political
reasons.
A smaller and more personal solution to the problem is offered by the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness program. It allows students to have their loans forgiven if they work for government
or for certain not-for-profit organizations. Unfortunately, the time period under which a person
must serve—ten years for the federal government, for instance— makes the actual impact of this
law seem
more like indentured servitude to those working under its provisions.
Other solutions also exist or are under discussion. The Obama administration has greatly
expanded eligibility for “income based repayment” (IBR) loans, which limit annual loan
payments to a specified percentage of a person’s income, usually ten percent, and are forgiven
even if the debt is not fully repaid after 20 to 25 years of payments depending on the particular
terms of the original student loan. Some have proposed making IBR loans the standard for all
federally guaranteed student loans, while others believe they represent too much risk for the
federal government to undertake. Even if this type of loan becomes more prevalent among future
home buyers, it still would mean lenders would have to take ten percent of a prospective home
buyer’s income off the table when it comes to determining the buyers’ qualifications for a
mortgage, thereby lowering the value of a home the buyer might consider.
Some presidential candidates have joined the chorus in favor of allowing student loans to be
refinanced, just as many people do with their home loans. About 25 million borrowers are
estimated to be locked into higher rates that student loans require today. For these borrowers,
such a plan, which many states have also started to explore, would reduce their loan payments by
thousands of dollars early in their careers, making it more financially feasible for them to
consider taking out a mortgage to buy a house.
The states of Tennessee and Oregon have gone one step further in terms of reducing the scope of
this problem in the future. The Republican governor in one state and the Democratic legislature
in the other enacted laws that make their community colleges tuition-free. President Obama has
proposed doing the same thing for all the nation’s community colleges in partnership with the
states. Other communities from Kalamazoo, MI, to El Dorado, AR, have used personal or
corporate philanthropy to make all levels of college tuition-free for their high school
graduates. The idea continues to spread since the initial program was established in 2005 in
Kalamazoo with over 30 cities now offering some form of this benefit to their youth in the hope
of increasing the number of families who want to live in their community and stimulating their
local economies.
More directly, new home developers and lenders could begin to accept student loans as a fact of
life for the Millennial market, and generate innovative new offerings to address the issue. One
idea is to rent a home to Millennials under terms that lower the price if they elect to buy it in the
future, just as is done with many car leases today. One such experiment is being offered in
Miami for two unit town houses whose sales price is 21 percent lower than it would be
otherwise. Another would be to find lenders willing to consolidate student debt into a larger
home mortgage, with the lender trading the benefits of a loan not dischargeable in bankruptcy to
a theoretically safer loan that uses the physical collateral of a house. Finally, builders and banks
could take advantage of the Millennial Generation’s love of their parents and build housing
designed not just for multi-generational living, but multi-generational financing, with different
members of the family responsible for the mortgage payments at different times over the period
of the loan.
WHEN MILLENNIALS DO BUY, WHERE WILL THEY LIVE?
Much has been written about where Millennials will buy a home. Some urbanists hope that
Millennials will embrace the denser, less suburban lifestyle these pundits favor. Yet survey
research and moves by older Millennials belie these assertions.
According to the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) most recent data, only 13 percent of Millennials
live in or near downtowns; 63 percent live in other city neighborhoods or suburbs. The number
of downtown dwellers was 12 percent in ULI’s 2010 survey. In fact, the Commerce Department
reported that more Millennials moved to the suburbs from the city than vice versa in 2014. So
even though some young Millennials, especially right after college, do move into urban
neighborhoods, which certainly benefit temporarily from their presence, most think of the
suburbs when their thoughts turn to raising a family.
The National Association of Home Builders survey in January 2014 found that most of their
Millennial respondents intended to purchase a single family home in the suburbs; another survey
put the figure at 66 percent. Both studies confirmed the ULI findings that 75 percent of
Millennials expected to live in a single family, detached house by the end of the decade. The
myth of a new urban dwelling generation largely misreads the difference between “age related”
effects and generational attitudes and beliefs.
This misreading has impacted homebuilders who have built fewer homes that Millennials want
and can afford, reducing the supply and driving up the price. The result is what economist Jed
Kolko calls the “Millennial mismatch—Millennials can afford markets where they don’t live, but
they can’t afford many of the markets where they do live.”
(chart: Urban Land Institute’s Gen Y and Housing report, uli.org/wp-content/uploads/ULIDocuments/ Gen-Y-and-Housing.pdf)
One way this lack of affordable housing manifests itself is the continuing phenomenon of
Millennials living
in their parents’ house. Despite their improving economic circumstances, a Pew Research Study
found that about 42.2 million Millennials, or 67 percent, were living independently in 2014,
compared with 42.7 million Millennials, or 71 percent, who did so before the recession in 2007.
Since 2010, the percentage of Millennials moving back in with their parents actually increased
from 24 percent to 26 percent.xlv While this behavior may temporarily balance the demand for
housing with its supply, it greatly increases the number of Millennials missing from the
country’s housing market.
HOW TO GET MILLENNIALS BACK IN THE MARKET
There are, however, some examples of what would attract these missing Millennials into the
housing market. Almost all of them are successful because they have built upon the most
fundamental of Millennial behaviors—the desire to share their experiences. And almost all of
them make it possible for Millennials to afford a lifestyle they can share with families and
friends.
First on the frugal Millennial’s wish list is the need for the house to be affordable. According to a
Rent.com survey of 1,000 Millennial renters, nearly half said they moved to a different city than
the one they grew up in, mostly because of the job opportunities that city presented. Given the
generation’s strong ties to their family and their friends, this finding puts an exclamation point on
how important a consideration affordability is for Millennial first time home buyers.
As Millennials continued to enter the housing market, their desire for a more affordable home
became evident not just in survey data but actual buying behavior. For instance, 60 percent of
those who took out a mortgage to buy a home in August 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa were 25-34
years old. The top ten markets where Millennials dominated the home buying market that month
were also ones with very affordable housing prices, with the exception of Provo, Utah. The
cheapest big city in America in terms of housing prices, Pittsburgh, was the only one to make the
list.
Beyond a place they can afford, the
next thing Millennials want is to own a home they can share with their family and friends.
Millennials “want to live where it’s easy to have fun with friends and family, whether in the
suburbs or closer in,” says M. Leanne Lachman, one of the authors of the Urban Land Institute’s
study. “This is a generation that places a high value on work-life balance and flexibility. They
will switch housing and jobs as frequently as necessary to improve their quality of life.”
Only about 28 percent of Millennials told the Demand Institute’s Housing and Community
Surveyxlix that they needed grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance of their next
home, which is a common characteristic of urban environments. But more than half wanted such
amenities to be within a short drive. This creates the demand for compact, livable communities
that crop up in less-dense areas, but remain fundamentally suburban albeit with more options for
walking, bike-riding and closer shopping. Unfortunately, these characteristics make many places
in America, particularly its large coastal metropolitan areas, off limits to young Millennial
families. It’s yet another hurdle they must overcome, often sacrificing their desire for shorter
commutes to work and time with family to find a place to live that they can afford and safely
raise their family.
When they find the place they want to live, Millennials look for the type of housing that makes
for a great living experience. It doesn’t have to be large—the most common size of a first time
Millennial buyer’s home is less than 1,200 square feet. Half of all homes purchased by
Millennials average less than 1,650 square feet and cost less than $148,500. But it does have to
be high tech with an open floor plan, making many older homes unsuitable or strictly fixer
uppers for this new generation of buyers. For instance, a generation ago, formal dining rooms
may have been on every buyer’s wish list, but today they hold little appeal because of the way
Millennials entertain. Millennials often convert space originally conceived as a dining room into
a home office and move the food fest outside, weather permitting, or into the kitchen where the
joys of cooking can be shared.
A majority of Millennial home buyers believe the technological capabilities of a house are more
important than “curb appeal.” More than 13 million Americans work from home and all signs
point to that trend continuing, especially among high tech Millennial workers. Many of them see
their home as a place to “do work,” not just a place to return “after work.” They want to hear
about the strength of the mobile carrier’s signal in the house and its Internet speeds, not the
embedded infrastructure of cable wires and land lines. Few if any of these desired attributes are
present in older suburban tract housing, which further constrains the supply of houses for
Millennials, presenting yet another obstacle in their path to home ownership.
Breaking the current chicken and egg standoff between the demand and supply of Millennial
style housing will require developers to stop listening to those who claim that Millennials aren’t
interested in owning homes—or anything else—and focus on the market opportunity staring
them in the face. Realtor.com’s chief economist Jonathan Smoke suggests that the supply of
homes for Millennials is the key to igniting the next housing boom. “Despite the increased role
of Millennials in the housing market, setbacks still exist and are preventing first timers from
making even more of an impact,” says Smoke. “As inventory returns to more normal levels,
expect the blooming of Millennial homebuyers to turn into a boom.”
Recent research from Zillow, for instance, found that adults age 22 to 34 were actually more
eager to own a home than older Americans.lv If all the surveys of Millennial attitudes weren’t
convincing enough, the actual home buying behavior of Millennials who can afford to buy a
house should finally get builders off the investment fence. According to Zillow’s data, young
married couples in which both partners work own homes at a rate close to or above historical
norms for that demographic. Even single employed Millennials are slightly more likely to own a
home than their counterparts in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. All that’s needed, it would seem, to
bring missing Millennials into the housing market is a larger supply of homes they want to buy.
In short, build, builders, build.
Home building, especially construction of single-family stand-alone residences, has not
rebounded as much as it should given the last few years of ultralow mortgage rates. For
example, the number of single family housing starts and completions were both lower in June
than in May of 2015, even as family formations hit highs not seen in a decade. Both of the top
two reasons older Millennials gave to realtor.com for not having bought a house yet had to do
with the limited supply of affordable housing. It’s not up to Millennials to build the houses they
want to buy, it’s up to those with the insights and market leadership skills to step in and create
the supply and
knock down this last hurdle to Millennial home ownership.
MISSING MILLENNIALS ARE A ONE TRILLION DOLLAR OPPORTUNITY
A Demand Institute survey of more than 1,000 Millennial households suggests the generation
will generate
$1.66 trillion in revenue between now and 2020, using an average home sale price of $200,000,
based solely on Millennials’ desire for home ownership and their arrival in the peak new starter
home buying ages of 25–34 years old. If current conditions hold, it predicted the number of
Millennial households would rise by 8.3 percent over the next five years, from 13.3 million to
21.6 million.
But the Institute’s own data comparing existing home ownership rates among Millennials based
on student debt suggests that just removing the burden of student debt would increase these
numbers even more. According to their findings, debt elimination would increase the number of
home owners among 25–34 year old college graduates by 24 percent, 16 percent among 25–29
year olds, and eight percent for 30–34 year olds.lix Based on the cohort’s current population that
would represent over five million more homeowners or $1 trillion in new home purchases. But
some portion of that population would actually be forming joint households. If 60 percent marry
each other, that would still mean an additional three million new home buyers, or a roughly $600
billion dollar increase in market sales over five years from just this one barrier-busting move.
A separate analysis by John Burns Consulting argued that just the hurdle of student debt cost the
U.S. housing market $83 billion dollars in sales last year. They estimate that every $250 in
monthly student loan payments decreases home borrowing and purchasing power by $44,000.
The number of households
headed by those under 40 who owe at least $250 in monthly student loan payments has tripled
since 2005 to 5.9 million. Multiplying those numbers times an average home sale price of
$200,000 leads to their $83 billion conclusion—or $415 billion over five years.
Others put the impact on the housing market of missing Millennials at more than twice that level
by taking a look at the entire panoply of financial hurdles the generation faces, not just student
debt. A Ned Davis Research report suggested these hurdles caused a drop in demand for housing
from Millennials of three million homes, for an annual market impact of $600 billion. Their
estimate suggests “missing Millennials” represent more than a 1.3 trillion dollar market
opportunity over the next five years. Whether the housing market will enjoy that type of revenue
growth depends a great deal on how hard it focuses on the hurdles facing this critical home
buying cohort.
Although no one is going to wave a magic wand and make student debt disappear overnight, it is
possible for government to take
aggressive steps to limit if not eliminate these obligations. Furthermore, easing of credit and
down payment requirements would have an immediate impact on Millennials’ decision to buy a
new home. More generous parental leave policies on the part of the nation’s employers, either by
their own initiative or government mandate, would help accelerate the pace. And policies
designed to actually grow wages and expand the economy, such as easier access to
affordablehigher education, would certainly help a generation struggling to put together the
money they need for a down payment. Longer term policy initiatives designed to increase the
supply of housing are certainly worth exploring, but the likelihood that they will be put in place
in time to help the bulging number of Millennials moving into early adulthood is not high.
Altogether, these initiatives could add at least an extra trillion dollars to the nation’s housing
market and make Millennials so much more a part of that market than they are today.
It’s time to give the country’s next great generation, Millennials, the same chance earlier
generations had to become home owners. We need to help them overcome the hurdles they face
in joining this coveted group of American families. Fortunately, the housing industry has it
within its power to take the first steps to provide Millennials their piece of the American Dream,
helping ignite a housing boom that will spark an economic boom for the entire nation.
This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism called "America's
Housing Crisis." The report contains several essays about the future of housing from various
perspectives. Follow this link to download the full report (pdf).
Morley Winograd is co-author of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New
Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future
of American Politics and fellow of NDN and the New Policy Institute.
Categories: New Urbanism
How Can We Fix the Most Treacherous Part of the Lakefront Trail?
Grid Chicago - Tue, 2016-02-23 19:37
The Oak Street curve was an arctic wasteland last week. Photo: John Greenfield
[The Chicago Reader recently launched a weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog
Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership allows Streetsblog to extend the reach of our
livable streets advocacy. We syndicate a portion of the column after it comes out online; you can
read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]
Maybe they should call it Dead Man’s Curve. Just southeast of Oak Street Beach, there’s a bend
in the Lakefront Trail where it turns south, hugging Lake Shore Drive. As you head downtown,
there’s a wall on your right, and the path’s concrete surface slopes down toward the water’s
edge, where there’s a sheer drop of several feet into Lake Michigan.
During the winter, this hump of land is pounded by waves. After it snows, the waves turn the
path into an arctic wasteland of ice boulders, forcing bike riders to dismount and walk their
steeds or detour to Inner Lake Shore Drive. At other times, the surf transforms the trail into an
angled skating rink that’s also a serious hazard. The curve is especially dangerous for
southbound riders, who often fail to see the slick conditions before they round the blind curve.
By then it’s usually too late to hit the brakes.
When such conditions exist, the Chicago Park District, which is responsible for maintaining the
bikeway, barricades the curve with sawhorses and sends out alerts on Twitter that the section of
lakefront is closed. But bike riders like Joe DeCeault hope a permanent solution can be found to
fix the most perilous spot on the 18.5-mile-long trail.
DeCeault, who works as a Web producer for WBEZ, knows all too well what a death trap the
ice-glazed incline can be. In February 2012, during his first season of winter biking, he was
doing a training ride on a skinny-tired road bike on a particularly windy morning.
Convinced by what he saw farther north that the curve would be ice free, he confidently rounded
the bend at a high speed. Then he looked down and saw he was entering a long, slippery stretch.
He realized he had to pump his brakes. “As I did, I noticed the wheels start to slide,” he wrote in
an e-mail. “My body and bike tilted sideways. Shit!”
DeCeault fell from his bike and landed hard on his side and stomach. “It stung like a b—-,” he
recalled. “I grabbed at the ground to halt my journey towards the lake.” He came to a stop, but
when he lifted his head, he saw his bike continue to slide towards the edge of the path. “My bike
kept going and going and going until—bloop—it dropped off the edge of the concrete and into
the lake.”
Screen shot from 2004 footage that showed 18 cyclists falling at Oak Street in the course of a
few minutes. NBC Chicago
DeCeault is far from the only local cyclist to crash due to perilous conditions at the Oak Street
curve. An NBC Chicago clip from January 2014 showed 18 riders wiping out on black ice at the
spot, sometimes two at a time, over the course of a few minutes.
The mayhem resembles something out of a Keystone Cops flick. “There goes another one, down,
down, down,” chuckles the cameraman.
The persistence of the problems isn’t so funny. I checked out the path in the middle of last week,
a few days after a couple inches of snow had fallen. The Oak Street curve was shellacked with
ice and snow, and the trail was barricaded between the beach and the construction site of the
Navy Pier Flyover. This $60 million elevated path will soar over Grand Avenue and Illinois
Street, eliminating a dangerous trail bottleneck. Much of this stretch was impassable for bike
riders, and treacherous for people walking and jogging.
In addition to the flyover, the city recently completed the $31.5 million Fullerton Revetment
project, which built 5.8 acres of new lakefront parkland at Fullerton Avenue, and relocated a
section of the trail so it’s less exposed to waves.
So are there any plans to fix the Oak Street curve problem in the long term?
Read the rest of the article on the Chicago Reader website.
Categories: New Urbanism
Long-Delayed D.C. Streetcar Ready for Passengers
Next City - Tue, 2016-02-23 17:09
A streetcar is seen traveling along H Street NE in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez
Monsivais)
Our weekly “New Starts” roundup of new and noteworthy transportation projects worldwide.
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D.C. Residents Skeptical of New Streetcar’s Usefulness
This Saturday, those empty streetcars that have been gliding up and down H Street and Benning
Road NE in Washington, D.C. for months will be empty no longer. The long-delayed streetcar
line is finally opening for revenue service.
Actually, make that “non-revenue service.” As a way to get District residents to forgive the long
gestation period for this line, rides will be free for an unspecified introductory period.
WUSA9’s report on the decade-late opening of the $200 million streetcar line featured random
people interviewed near 13th and H streets NE generally expressing skepticism about the
streetcar’s usefulness — “If it’s extended, it might be useful,” one person said — and
commenting on its cost. Some interviewees said they would take the line for the curiosity factor
while it’s free to ride but probably won’t use it once fares take effect. According to the report,
that will happen once the District Department of Transportation figures out how much to charge
for a trip and how the fares will be collected.
Along with its report, WUSA also noted the “cheesy” video DDOT produced to instruct people
how, and how not, to ride the streetcar. “It’s supposed to be a parody of ’80s movie montages,
but it ends up being over-the-top cringeworthy,” the report said. “On the plus side, it’s very
gifable” — capable of being turned into GIFs for social sharing.
Warsaw OKs Two-Phase Metro Extension
The International Railway Journal reports that Warsaw Metro CEO Jerzy Lejk announced at the
2016 International Railway Summit that work will begin soon on the first of two expansions of
the Metro’s east-west Line M2 in the sprawling capital of Poland.
People enter the subway station Rondo Daszynskiego in Warsaw, Poland. (AP Photo/Czarek
Sokolowski)
Each of the two expansions will add stations to both ends of the line. This first one will add six
stations total; three will be located in a 3.44-km eastern extension and the other three in a 3.14km western extension. Lejk said a general contractor will be appointed for this project soon.
Work should commence in June or July and take 38 months to complete.
The second expansion will consist of a 2.14-km, two-station extension on one end and a 3-km,
three-station extension on the other. Warsaw Metro expects to name a design firm for the second
phase soon and let construction contracts in 2017.
Express Train to Airport in the Works for Chicago
The city of Chicago is planning to build a new express rail link between the Loop and O’Hare
Airport. According to Railway Gazette International, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Feb. 14 that
the city expects to select a contractor to develop designs for the proposed line in March.
Travelers walk to a train station at the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam
Y. Huh)
The new line would offer a quicker trip over the 30 km (18.6 miles) between the airport and
downtown than the current CTA Blue Line rapid transit service.
The city’s Department of Aviation has already received three bids from prequalified firms. The
winning bidder will analyze and develop conceptual designs and a project timeline. The city
could award a final design, construction and financing contract as early as next year. Cost
estimates haven’t been finalized, but the city aims to finance the project without taxpayer
contributions.
“O’Hare is an essential economic engine for the city of Chicago,” Emanuel said. “By providing
passengers with a faster, smarter and more efficient way to connect between O’Hare and
downtown, we will take it to the next level.”
Know of a project that should be featured in this column? Send a Tweet with links to
@MarketStEl using the hashtag #newstarts.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Dallas App Will Tweet You to Take Out the Trash
Next City - Tue, 2016-02-23 17:08
(Photo by Dano)
Forget to put out your garbage and recycling? Dallas Sanitation Services now has an app for that.
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The agency announced the launch of a free collection reminder app that features a calendar of
municipal waste pickups and can send weekly automatic reminders via email, tweet, voicemail
or text.
Users will also be alerted to schedule changes due to weather, holidays or events, and can opt in
to notifications about seasonal campaigns such as electronics recycling, Christmas tree pickup,
and batteries, oil, paint, and antifreeze collection. There’s info on which items are recyclable and
compostable too.
“City of Dallas residents recycle over 55,000 tons of material a year. It’s now even easier to
learn about solid waste management in our community with our new online tools and mobile
app,” Murray Myers, manager of Dallas’s Zero Waste initiative, said in a statement. “If you’re
always on the go, this is a great way to stay up to date on your garbage, recycling and bulk
collection schedule.”
The app won’t replace printed collection calendars, but the city hopes it will cut down on call
volumes to the agency and improve response times. With it, Dallas joins the ranks of tech-savvy
sanitation departments like San Antonio, Fort Worth, Boston and Denver, which all offer their
own waste collection reminder apps. These technologies can reduce fees for residents while
increasing the efficacy of municipal trash pickup — particularly if access to sorting information
encourages more people to recycle.
New York City has even tried to make it fun. The city has no collection reminder app, but a
quirky Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling app turns sorting waste into an
animated game.
Dallas passed a Zero Waste plan in 2013, with an early target of 40 percent of waste going to
recycling by 2020.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Brooklyn’s Big Boom, by the Numbers
Next City - Tue, 2016-02-23 16:49
(AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Downtown Brooklyn has experienced some of the fastest growth of any New York City
neighborhood over the last 15 years, thanks, says a new report, to city investment in public parks,
a major land use rezoning, and growth in private sector employment and business incubation.
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The report, commissioned by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and produced by the NYU
Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, defines the Downtown Brooklyn area
broadly beyond the commercial core.
Growth in several neighborhoods has been enormous, with the overall population increasing by
17 percent between 2000 and 2013, the young adult population (ages 18-44) increasing by nearly
29 percent, and the number of residents with a four-year college degree increasing from 35 to 55
percent over the same period. Private sector employment rose by nearly one-third, an increase of
17,078 jobs, with growth concentrated in the media and information, technical, hospitality, and
arts sectors.
New construction has also boomed, with nearly 41 million square feet of residential, commercial
and institutional building completed, under construction or in the pipeline. The city and state
have invested over $1.5 billion in the neighborhood; another $10 billion has poured in through
private investment.
According to the report this transformation comes at the nexus of three major influences: a
citywide economic uptick and crime downturn, the emergence of Brooklyn as a global brand and
innovation hub, and new public policies that have created parks and open spaces and a more
permissive and flexible zoning code.
A 2004 rezone called for retail space on the ground floor of new residential and office buildings,
encouraged higher density, and offered incentives to developers to build community assets —
like affordable housing or healthcare centers — in exchange for more square footage. But the
construction of new office space, the primary goal of the rezone, has progressed more slowly
than the development of new residential units. Companies are relocating to Downtown Brooklyn
in droves, fleeing high rents in Manhattan and moving to where skilled workers live. Among the
report’s recommendations for the continued vitality and growth is ensuring the many new
businesses moving to or incubated in the neighborhood have the space to grow and remain there.
(Even though the rezone didn’t produce exactly the intended results, the report cautions against
returning to a more restrictive code.)
The report also lauds the neighborhood’s cultural and educational institutions for fostering
business growth, and playing a key role in what it calls Brooklyn’s “innovation economy.” At
least seven universities have launched business incubator and accelerator programs in the
neighborhood, focused on everything from tech-oriented law to fashion entrepreneurship.
To ensure opportunity is equitably beneficial to residents, the report recommends creating high
school career and technical education programs that will teach Brooklyn students skills that will
allow them to participate in the “innovation economy.”
The report also cites the redevelopment of the Brooklyn Bridge Park and other open spaces as
central to the neighborhood’s transformation. It recommends continuing and expanding such
development, particularly for Commodore Barry Park, a site near several New York City
Housing Authority projects that has suffered from chronic underinvestment.
If the growth is to continue, the report notes, public transportation to and from the neighborhood
will need to improve. It recommends pursing multiple improvements simultaneously to increase
access between the downtown core and the waterfront and Brooklyn Navy Yard, and new
employment centers across the city, including Sunset Park, Long Island City and Astoria.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Australian Bicycling Advocates Worried About Tough New Laws
Next City - Tue, 2016-02-23 16:07
(Photo by RubyGoes via Flickr)
Australian cycling advocates say new, stiffer laws aimed at increasing cyclist safety will actually
deter more people from biking, reports Bloomberg.
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The laws, which take effect March 1, include an AU$425 fine ($307 U.S.) for cyclists who run a
red light, and a AU$229 penalty ($165 U.S.) for riding without a helmet — a fine higher than
most speeding violations for vehicles. In fact, only one of the new laws targets drivers, with an
AU$319 fine for motorists who fail to leave a gap of at least one meter when passing a cyclist.
Bernard Carlon, executive director of the Australian government’s Centre for Road Safety, told
Bloomberg that the new laws are being enacted in response to the 11 cyclists killed and 1,500
injured every year in New South Wales (where Sydney is the capital).
“If one cyclist chooses to now wear a helmet because of the new penalties, we consider that a
win for cyclist safety,” he said.
But advocates and researchers say these laws are a step backward for the country, and will only
increase traffic congestion in the biggest cities. Australia will already fail to meet its goal of
doubling cycling rates between 2011 and 2016. The percentage of people who told a National
Cycling Participation Survey they had ridden the previous week actually dropped between 2011
and 2015.
Instead of larger fines for such offenses, advocates like Julie Hatfield of the Transport at Road
Safety Research at the University of New South Wales told Bloomberg that what cyclists need is
better infrastructure. A 2014 report she co-authored indicated that cyclists run red lights or ride
on the pavement primarily to avoid dangerous situations on the road.
“We really need to examine if the road system is designed to accommodate all road users,”
Hatfield told Bloomberg.
Australia already had a compulsory helmet law prior to this new legislation, a factor some blame
for the country’s relatively low cycling rates. Australia was the first country to implement such a
law in the 1990s, and remains in the minority, and is doubling down on the requirement with
these new fines — even though none of the famously cycle-safe European countries has a similar
requirement.
Last year, Paris even relaxed its cycling laws, allowing bicyclists to run through red lights after a
pilot indicated the change could actually lead to fewer accidents.
Of Australia’s move in the opposite direction, Chris Rissel, a professor at the University of
Sydney’s school of public health, told Bloomberg, “There are many things that could be done to
make cycling safer and to encourage more people to ride. These things are not it.”
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
San Diego Could Build a Connected Protected Bike Lane Network All at Once
Streetsblog Capitol Hill - Tue, 2016-02-23 15:36
Image: Downtown San Diego Mobility Plan.
Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S.
cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
It looks like one of the most exciting bike infrastructure trends of the last few years — going big
— could be coming to San Diego.
As reported Monday by Next City, the southernmost major metro on the U.S. West Coast is
weighing a proposal to rapidly add an entire connected grid of protected bike lanes to its
downtown.
The plan will go along with a big investment in pedestrian infrastructure, too:
The mobility plan calls for 9.3 miles of protected bike lanes and 5.5 miles of pedestrian
greenways in the roughly two-square-mile downtown core. The plan defines greenways as
expanded sidewalks, “that can serve as linear parks” that include benches, tables, trees and other
landscaping. Additionally, the city plans to install new wayfinding signage and curb bulb-outs to
shorten street crossings. All told, the city estimates the plan will cost just under $64 million.
Perhaps a sign of how urban planning has evolved, the mobility plan specifically calls out the
importance of creating a connected network: “Implementing the network as a whole, rather
than individual segments, will improve the effectiveness of the cycleways and establish a wellconnected grid of north south and east west protected bicycle facilities that can improve the
safety and comfort for cyclists in Downtown.”
The public has until March 11 to weigh in on the project. City Council will vote on whether to
adopt it in May.
The combination of major biking and walking upgrades has been repeatedly shown to give
positive boosts to retail sales in commercial areas, presumably because they make streets more
pleasant to spend time on and easier for more people to reach without a car. This also helps a
district free itself from dependence on auto parking, which can itself be great for local retail.
Despite its heavenly climate for biking, San Diego has never been known as a bike capital,
presumably because of the hills that surround its central city and the relative lack of bike lanes
on its streets. But the city’s flat, gridded downtown is already one of the region’s hubs for biking.
And now that California has embraced protected bike lanes at the state level, San Diego is
preparing to capitalize on its downtown biking potential.
“We actually have a pretty strong bike culture within the beach community,” Sam Ollinger,
executive director of BikeSD, told Next City’s Josh Cohen. “They wouldn’t identify as ‘cyclists.’
It’s just how they get around.”
You can follow The Green Lane Project on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook or sign up for its
weekly news digest about protected bike lanes.
Categories: New Urbanism
Though Congress passed a transportation bill, funding for key programs still up
in the air
T4America - Tue, 2016-02-23 14:59
Though Congress passed a five-year transportation bill back in December, the fate of many
important transportation programs will still be decided in Congress’ appropriations
process this year. Among them is one of the few ways that local communities can directly
receive funding for smart projects.
The TIGER competitive grant program is one of the few ways that local communities of almost
any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects. Unlike the
overwhelming majority of all federal transportation dollars that are awarded via formulas to
ensure that everyone gets a share, regardless of how they plan to spend it, TIGER projects
compete against each other and are selected on their merits to ensure that each dollar is spent in
the most effective way possible.
This competition spurs innovation, leverages federal funding by matching it with greater local
dollars and awards funding to projects that provide a high return on investment. Choosing
projects based on their potential benefits is exactly the direction that transportation spending
needs to move in, and we need to ensure that this vital program continues.
Because TIGER was not even authorized in the five-year FAST Act and therefore wholly lacks
any certainty of funding, congressional appropriators play an incredibly important role in
deciding once again how much funding to provide for TIGER (and other key transportation
programs) in the coming year. We want to ensure that the Senate’s key committee begins the
process by providing at least the full $500 million they’ve provided in the past.
Members of Congress need to hear from you today. Do you represent a city, county, metro
planning organization, or other group? We’re looking for these sorts of groups to sign a letter to
the Senate Appropriations Committee in support of these programs. (We are not targeting
individual letters at this time.)
But TIGER isn’t the only crucial program that appropriators will decide in the coming weeks of
2016. The federal government’s primary resource for supporting new, locally-planned and
supported transit expansion projects is also up in the air. The New and Small Starts programs
have facilitated the creation of dozens of new or extended public transportation systems across
the country, awarded competitively to the best projects.
Sound Transit’s LINK light rail on the Seattle-SeaTac line. LINK is being expanded by a
combination of local funds approved by voters and federal New Starts funds.
Under this program, FTA awards grants on a competitive basis for large projects that cannot
traditionally be funded from a transit agency’s annual formula funds. Congress already
recognized the importance of this program in the FAST Act when they increased its
authorization by $400 million for this fiscal year.
But now we need to ensure that the federal appropriators actually provide that level of
funding here in the critical moment.
You may have seen the news of President Obama’s budget being released a few weeks ago,
which asked for $1.2 billion more for these transit capital grants compared to what was in the
FAST Act. While the President makes a request and Congress actually makes the budget, that list
of transit projects included in the President’s budget does show which projects would be in front
of the queue if Congress comes through with the money this year or next.
That list included Indianapolis’ ambitious plan for a new north-south bus rapid transit line
through the city from the suburbs on one side to the other, an expansion of Seattle’s LINK light
rail system that will be supported by new local revenues approved on the ballot late last year, and
projects to add new capacity to Chicago’s strapped Red Line.
Both of these critical programs — TIGER and transit grants — provide unique, cost-effective,
and innovative solutions that also leverage private, state, and local investment to solve complex
transportation and spur economic development.
Do you represent a city, county, metro planning organization, or other local/state group? We’re
looking for those groups to sign a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee in support of
these programs. Find out more here. (We are not targeting individual letters at this time.)
Categories: New Urbanism
Sober Non-Partisan Analysis: America Wastes a Ton of Money on Highways
Streetsblog Capitol Hill - Tue, 2016-02-23 14:57
Photo: Dhanix/Wikipedia
A good deal of the $46 billion the federal government pours into highway spending each year is
going to waste, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report [PDF].
The conclusion won’t surprise regular Streetsblog readers, but it’s the source that’s interesting.
The CBO is not an advocacy group or an ideologically-minded think tank. It’s a non-partisan
budget watchdog charged with evaluating federal spending decisions, and it says federal
highway funding is not well-spent.
For one, the CBO thinks too much is spent on road expansion and too little on maintenance. The
construction of the Interstate Highway System made freight shipping and traveling between
cities much more efficient, the report says, but since the system was completed in the 1970s
spending on highways has been subject to diminishing returns. Current spending “has not
shifted” to account for “the importance of maintaining existing capacity,” the CBO writes.
Compounding the problem is induced demand. The CBO points to a recent study finding that
“the addition of new lanes is likely to have little effect on congestion within 10 years” as
highway lanes fill with new drivers.
In addition, what the U.S. does spend on maintenance flows disproportionally to lesser-used rural
highways and not the urban interstates that carry the overwhelming majority of traffic, the
CBO says. Urban interstates are in fact the only category of roads receiving federal highway
funds where pavement quality is actually degrading.
Not all of the CBO’s ideas about road spending are good for cities (the report recommends
spending more on expanding urban interstates), but it emphasizes some policy changes that
would result in big savings and smarter decisions, including more widespread use of road
pricing.
Putting a price on roads could be an alternative to expensive highway widening projects, the
CBO writes. For example, congestion pricing could encourage drivers on less time-sensitive trips
to avoid using highways during rush hours, lessening the pressure to expand roads.
Current federal law sharply restricts what transportation agencies can charge on
existing interstate highways, and “only about 7 percent of the Interstate System is composed of
highways with tolls,” the CBO reports. Loosening these restrictions could help America avoid
wasting billions of dollars a year on highway expansions.
Categories: New Urbanism
New Initiative Is Working To Mainstream Green Infrastructure
New Jersey Future - Tue, 2016-02-23 14:44
An example of green infrastructure along a road in Nashville, Tenn.
In September 2015 New Jersey Future launched its newest initiative: the Mainstreaming Green
Infrastructure project. The goal of the project is to make green infrastructure (GI) the first choice
for stormwater management in New Jersey.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines green infrastructure as “an approach to
stormwater management that is cost-effective, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. Green
infrastructure projects capture, filter, absorb, and reuse stormwater to maintain or mimic natural
systems and to treat runoff as a resource.”
Types of green infrastructure include techniques that allow water to infiltrate, such as
biorentention systems, green roofs, porous pavement, rain gardens, and vegetated swales; and
techniques that harvest rainwater for reuse, including rain barrels and cisterns.
According to the EPA, these approaches “can simultaneously help filter air pollutants, reduce
energy demands, mitigate urban heat islands, and sequester carbon while also providing
communities with aesthetic and natural resource benefits.”
Green infrastructure can also provide economic and societal benefits, rounding out its “triple
bottom line” value. As compared to grey infrastructure (conventional piped drainage systems),
GI can make the difference in nuisance flooding, thus avoiding the replacement or expansion of
aged infrastructure—a costly endeavor. Green infrastructure can also increase property values by
creating safer and more beautiful places for people to live and work.
New Jersey Future’s Mainstreaming Green Infrastructure project, largely funded by the William
Penn Foundation, has three major components:
1. Towns: New Jersey Future is selecting pilot towns, with which we will work directly, to
provide education, training and direct technical assistance to improve water quality,
reduce flooding and create vibrant, healthy communities through the use of green
infrastructure.
2. Developers’ Green Infrastructure Task Force: New Jersey Future is working directly
with developers to promote and advance the implementation of green infrastructure and
to encourage the group members to act as ambassadors to the industry.
3. Demonstration Projects: New Jersey Future will facilitate and accelerate demonstration
projects that show innovative and effective use of green infrastructure in public-and
private-sector settings.
Recently, New Jersey Future issued a request for qualifications to allow it to assemble a team of
experts in green stormwater infrastructure design and engineering, planning, and law to support
the project.
More about New Jersey Future’s Mainstreaming Green Infrastructure project can be found on the
project’s webpage and its downloadable factsheet. For more information please contact Green
Infrastructure Manager Louise
Wilson (lwilsonnjfutureorg) emobascript('%6C%77%69%6C%73%6F%6E%40%6E%6A%66
%75%74%75%72%65%2E%6F%72%67','Louise Wilson','emoba-9382','','','0'); or Planning and
Policy Associate Kandyce
Perry (kperrynjfutureorg) emobascript('%6B%70%65%72%72%79%40%6E%6A%66%75%74
%75%72%65%2E%6F%72%67','Kandyce Perry','emoba-2828','','','0'); .
Categories: CNU blogs
Hit-and-Run SUV Driver Killed 34-Year-Old Man in Avondale
Grid Chicago - Tue, 2016-02-23 14:42
The crash site. Image: Google Street View
Police are searching for the hit-and-run motorist who fatally struck Christopher Sanchez, 34, at
the intersection of Belmont and Milwaukee early Sunday morning.
At about 5:20 a.m. on Sunday, Sanchez was crossing Milwaukee on foot when the driver of a
northwest-bound white Ford SUV struck him, police said. The motorist then fled northwest on
Milwaukee, according to police.
Christopher Sanchez
Sanchez was transported to Illinois Masonic Hospital Center in critical condition, police said. He
was pronounced dead that morning, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Police are currently searching for the driver, according to Officer José Estrada from News
Affairs. They hope to recover footage of the crash from security cameras installed on nearby
businesses. People with information about the crash are asked to call Major Accidents at 312745-4521.
About 36 relatives and friends of the victim held a candlelight vigil at the crash site on Monday
evening, the Tribune reported. Sanchez, an auto mechanic, lived with his father about a mile east
of the crash site on the 3100 block of North Sawyer. The two men had been planning to visit the
grave of Sanchez’s mother, who died from cancer last March.
Relatives noted that Sanchez has been suffering from insomnia since his mother’s death, and was
in the habit of going for long walks late at night, which may explain why he was out early in the
morning.
“He was hardworking, smart, respectful and family-oriented,” Sanchez’s brother José Sanchez
said. “He was a great guy. Everyone who knew him would say he was a great guy.”
Fatality Tracker: 2016 Chicago pedestrian and bicyclist deaths
Pedestrian: 6 (two were hit-and-run crashes)
Categories: New Urbanism
Five trains, 20 buses, one awesome transit nerd poster
Greater Greater Washington - Tue, 2016-02-23 13:20
by Peter Dovak
Between rail, bus, and now the streetcar, there are quite a few ways to get around our region by
transit. I made an illustration of the vehicles our extensive network uses. Can you identify all of
them? The answers are after the jump!
Here's a zoomed-in and labeled look at all the vehicles I included.
I have also created similar designs for other cities including Toronto, the Bay Area, and more.
You can order a print or mug with these designs here.
28 comments
Did you enjoy this article? Greater Greater Washington is running a reader drive to raise funds
so we can keep editing and publishing great articles every day. Please help us be sustainable by
making a monthly, yearly, or one-time contribution today! Click here to support Greater Greater
Washington.
Categories: CNU blogs
Cable Car Company Unveils Plans for Toronto
Next City - Tue, 2016-02-23 13:05
Rendering of proposed cable car for Toronto (Credit: Don Valley Cable Car)
A Swiss-Canadian company unveiled a proposal over the weekend to build a privately funded
cable car system across Toronto’s Don Valley, connecting downtown with the urban greenery
surrounding the Evergreen Brick Works, a former quarry and industrial site turned
environmental community center.
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Steven Dale, CEO of Bullwheel International Cable Car, told the Globe and Mail that a gondola
would solve the last mile transportation challenge of getting to the Brick Works, which the
proposal refers to as an “undervalued” city asset. Evergreen Brick Works boasts a popular
farmers market, a children’s garden and several event spaces, and is surrounded by parks and
trails.
But despite being a hub of eco-consciousness, the majority of the center’s 500,000 yearly visitors
arrive by car, even though a shuttle and bus run there from downtown. Because the center is
across one of the city’s many famous ravines, the terrain is too challenging for many to walk or
bike.
Dale says this project isn’t about public transit, though; it’s a recreation amenity and a civic
landmark — and the entire thing would be privately owned, financed and operated. Dale
estimates capital costs of $20 million to $25 million. He envisions a round-trip fare of about $10,
with discounts for locals and annual pass holders.
(Credit: Don Valley Cable Car)
Forty-two cars would run on the line, supported by six towers built on city-owned land in the
Don Valley, with the Brick Works station at one end and a station at Playter Gardens on the
other. Cars would depart approximately every 30 seconds during rush hour, and more slowly the
rest of the time for a more scenic experience.
Each car would be equipped with bike racks and be fully accessible for those with mobility
challenges. Dale estimates it could attract between 500 and 1,000 riders a day, and between
220,000 and 515,000 a year.
Though Dale sees the gondola as recreation, Mayor John Tory told the Toronto Star that the
cable car proposal could square with his ambitious new transit agenda, calling the concept
“exciting” and “novel.”
“I don’t know why we’d reject any means of getting people around,” he said. “We’re trying to
come to grips with what kinds of ways we can provide people greater access to the ravines
without being too obtrusive … . The concept of a cable car that goes through some land that is
beautiful and scenic is very appealing.”
No permit applications have yet been filed with the city. The Don Valley Cable Car project will
host a community information session on March 8, near the proposed station location at
Broadway and Danforth. Public response after the announcement yielded excitement, but also
satire and doubt; similar ideas have been floated before, with nothing to show for it.
A freakin' gondola! Evergreen Brickworks: why just be awesome when you can be Super
Fantastic Awesome! https://t.co/GqGZwVnedc @EGbrickworks
— JJ Hunt (@heyheydoublej) February 19, 2016
@tesskalinowski @moore_oliver …And from 2 years ago, in 2014. https://t.co/r2wRA9C7Ft
— Ivor Tossell (@ivortossell) February 19, 2016
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
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