AlyssaKatz.com

Making Sense of “Sustainable Communities”

I admit it: I’ve fallen down the Twitter-hole. Why communicate in full sentences out into the ether when I can telepathically connect to devoted courtiers? (Oh yes, we have a lot of fun over there.) We writers like to get paid by the word, y’know.

OK, I’ll begrudge you a few free words today, on the occasion of two articles you ought to read – one mine, one quoting me, and both grappling with the question I raise in the epilogue of Our Lot: how to move real estate markets so they build environmentally sustainable and human-scale places to live, instead of the destructive sprawl that is synonymous with the real estate bubble and the direct product of the government policies that for more than 70 years have favored outward suburban growth.

I tackle this in The American Prospect, in a look at the Obama administration’s new Sustainable Communities Initiative, which brings together the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate…well, their terminology is necessarily much more careful than mine. But ultimately they are looking to create a regulatory and planning environment that cultivates walkable, transit-oriented communities. (You can see their principles here.) As I suggest in the article, these efforts are puny compared with the hundreds of billions shoveled into interstate highways in the Eisenhower era. But they are also meaningful and real, all the more so now that the Senate Banking Committee has passed the Livable Communities Act, which would authorize spending for regional planning projects around the country and especially efforts to coordinate transit, housing and workplace development.

If you’re not reading him already, you should also make sure to tune in to Jonathan Hiskes at Grist, who is doing sharp, important work on this subject (as well as on the fight over PACE financing for home energy-efficiency retrofits). He has just posted a story on location-efficient mortgages, quoting me and grappling with the question of whether giving homebuyers who live near mass transit more purchasing power (that is, debt) is a constructive response to sprawl, given all we know about the consequences of high housing leverage. I’m not so worried that borrowers won’t be able to pay back their mortgages – the assumption here is that their diminished dependency on cars will make their household budgets less burdened. It’s that leverage on a wide scale leads directly to real estate price inflation, and that defeats any benefit of location-efficient mortgages while also making housing less affordable.

By the way, I’m @alykatzz. You know where to find me.

August 5th, 2010 | Posted in A Lot More | No Comments »