There has been some controversy about the federal government’s new “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) rule. Supporters hope, and opponents fear, that the rule will integrate lily-white suburbs and eliminate exclusionary zoning. However, there is reason to believe that the rule’s impacts will be fairly minor.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which enacted the rule, did so in order to implement sec. 808(d) of the Fair Housing Act, which requires federal agencies “to administer their programs…relating to housing and urban development…in a manner affirmatively to further” the policies of the Act—in other words, to affirmatively further fair housing.

In the past, HUD has sought to implement this statute by requiring grant recipients (such as local governments and public housing agencies) to draft an analysis of impediments (AI) to fair housing. An AI typically described impediments to racial integration, such as exclusionary zoning and racial disparities in mortgage lending. HUD decided that the AIs were not tremendously successful, because they did not contain enough data and were not adequately linked to other planning documents. (80 Fed. Reg. 42348).

The new rule requires grantees to create a new document called the “Assessment of Fair Housing” (AFH) every five years. The AFH will address a community’s barriers to integrated housing, such as “integration and segregation; racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; disparities in access to opportunity, and disproportionate housing needs based on race, color [and other factors]” (80 Fed. Reg. 42355). The AFH will summarize any current litigation, analyze relevant data, and identify major factors limiting housing opportunity. The grant recipient must also set goals for overcoming the effects of these factors.To receive funding from HUD, a grantee must certify that it will affirmatively further fair housing, which means that it must promise to take meaningful actions to further these goals.  (80 Fed. Reg. 42316).  In other words, the grant recipient has to create paperwork stating: “This is why our city/county/area is more segregated than we would like, and this is what we would like to do about it.”

According to HUD, the new rule will impose increased costs of data collection and paperwork upon municipalities, because municipalities must solicit more community participation than under the prior rule. HUD also suggests that the municipalities that have already been taking their AI obligations seriously “may experience a net decrease in administrative burden as a result of the revised process” (80 Fed. Reg. 42349).

The rule does not require any specific policies; instead, it just requires municipalities to describe the status quo, promise to adopt some sort of policy related to fair housing, and to justify those policies to HUD. Thus, it seems to me unlikely (though not impossible) that HUD will actually force significant changes in municipal policy.

In theory, HUD could keep saying no to a municipal AFH until the city or county adopts far-reaching policy changes, or could deny funding on the ground that the city has violated the promises in its AFH. But I doubt that this will occur, for two reasons. First, if HUD has not been using the AI process to remake cities and suburbs, I question whether it will have the willpower to use its new and improved procedural tools much more aggressively. Second, if HUD went to the edges of its authority, it would be risking fights in the courts and fights with Congress.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

This graph shows how the midsized cities (excluding Arlington) with Top 10 walkability rankings score in WalletHub’s latest ranking of cities with the healthiest real estate markets. Sad to say: High walkability seems to be correlated with moribund real estate economies. The cities are (from left to right): Jersey City, Newark, Hialeah, Buffalo, Rochester, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Richmond and Madison. (Click for more legible image.)

There is an interesting juxtaposition of news items today. Redfin, the real estate brokerage website, has published a list of the Top 10 most walkable midsized cities in the country. Arlington County (a highly urbanized county) scored third and Richmond scored ninth, based on their Walk Score rankings.

Arlington won kudos for its Ballston-Virginia square neighborhood, where residents can walk to an average of 13 restaurant, bars or coffee shops within five minutes. While the Washington metropolitan area is notorious for its traffic, many Arlington residents live car-free, opting to get around on foot, bike and public transportation.

Richmond earned recognition for the revitalization of neighborhoods surrounding downtown, including Jackson Ward, Shockoe Bottom, Monroe Ward, the riverfront and Manchester. The Fan and Carytown neighborhoods to the west of downtown also stood out for their walkability.

To many urban theorists, walkability is a critical determinant of a community’s livability, ranking close behind the cost of real estate, the quality of schools and the level of taxes in what people take into account when deciding where to live. But it’s no guarantee of prosperity or rising real estate values…. which brings us to the other news item.

The top two midsized cities ranked by walkability are Jersey City (No. 1) and Newark (No. 2). But guess where Jersey City and Newark rank in WalletHub’s ranking of 2015′s Healthiest Housing Markets. Out of 94 midsized cities ranked, Newark scored 94th — dead last — while Jersey City ranked 76th. (Richmond ranked a ho-hum 45th among midsized cities.)

Bacon’s bottom line: I’ll concede that this is a quick-and-dirty analysis based on a comparison of midsized cities only, not a comprehensive comparison of all types and sizes of municipal governments, so it may not reflect the larger reality. But I would advance this as a reasonable hypothesis: Walkability is a wonderful thing, and many people desire it, but it is a relatively minor factor influencing the health of urban real estate markets.

– JAB

(Cross-posted from Bacon’s Rebellion.)

In an excellent blog post, Reuben Duarte explained that many big-city zoning disputes involve a conflict of visions: a “preservation camp” favors preserving neighborhood character at all costs, while an “affordability camp” favors construction of new housing in order to make the city more affordable.

Duarte write that the preservation camp’s interests “hover around preventing evictions of tenants in long-held residences, but also includes the topics of traffic (“this neighborhood can’t support more development, because, traffic!”), parking (replace “traffic” with “parking”), and neighborhood character (“building is too tall or too dense!” “Views!”).”

It seems to me that to the extent government uses preservation as a reason to exclude new housing, arguments based on “neighborhood character” fail on their own terms: either because limiting housing supply itself changes neighborhood character, or because it forces less exclusionary places to change their character.

Zoning restrictions designed to limit traffic create the second problem. For example, suppose a city freezes a neighborhood’s housing supply in order to limit traffic and parking. Other things being equal, fewer households mean fewer cars. So at first glance, this policy has no losers. But if a city or region is adding households, those new households have to go somewhere. And if they don’t go to your neighborhood, they go to another neighborhood, adding cars (and thus traffic/parking problems) to that neighborhood.

To make matters worse, if the frozen neighborhood is more pedestrian-friendly than the “housing-receiving” neighborhood, freezing housing increases traffic everywhere. For example, suppose that the housing moratorium occurs in Pedtown, a neighborhood where 40 percent of households have no car, and 60 percent get to work without driving. The average household excluded by the moratorium moves to Sprawlville, a suburb where only 5 percent of the households have no car, and only 10 percent of them get to work without driving. Obviously, the new Sprawlville households are much more likely to drive cars throughout the region to work, thus increasing regional traffic and parking problems.

But zoning restrictions may also change the character of the neighborhood allegedly benefitting from them. Suppose a city freezes a neighborhood’s housing supply in order to prevent gentrification and the resulting increase in rents. As long as demand is stagnant (for example, in a declining neighborhood) this policy has no real effect: no one will want to build new housing anyhow. But when demand is growing (either because of rising city population or rising city incomes) rents are likely, all else being equal*, to rise in the absence of new construction. If rising rents lead to more evictions, freezing supply is actually likely to lead to more evictions, not fewer evictions. (Of course, I am assuming that the new construction actually increases the neighborhood housing supply, which is not always the case. A new building that merely replaces an old building is obviously more problematic.)**

And if rents rise, that in turn defeats attempts to preserve the intangible “character” of the neighborhood. Even if a neighborhood’s housing stock is frozen in amber, its character will be very different if it becomes more expensive. At a minimum, the inhabitants will be richer. And in turn, this reality will affect the age, race, and even religion of the neighborhood’s inhabitants, to the extent that some races, ages, and religions have more money than others. If the neighborhood has commercial blocks, the shops may look very different if the neighborhood gets wealthier. For example, a street catering to wealthy 50 year olds will have somewhat different shops than one catering to not-so-wealthy 25 year olds.

Moreover, if housing restrictions in one neighborhood cause new housing to be built elsewhere in a region, the “receiving” neighborhood’s character changes. Going back to Pedtown and Sprawlville: if Sprawlville was a rural, sparsely populated suburb in 2000, and zoning restrictions in Pedtown cause dozens of new subdivisions to be built in Sprawlville, obviously Sprawlville will feel very different in 2015. Thus, the restrictions in Pedtown are a classic example of a “beggar thy neighbor” policy—that is, a policy that shifts social harm from one neighborhood to another, rather than actually reducing the harm.

In sum, government sometimes restricts housing to preserve neighborhood character—but if those restrictions keep out new people and raise rents, that neighborhood’s character will still change (albeit in different ways), and shifting populations will change the character of other neighborhoods.

*One huge caveat: this is not the case where supply creates its own demand: that is, where the new housing is so desirable that it not only commands higher rents than the existing housing supply, but also makes the neighborhood as a whole more popular, thus attracting new people even into the existing units. Certainly, a few neighborhoods have become much more desirable in recent decades (for example, New York’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint)—so it could be argued that new housing in Williamsburg and Greenpoint is undesirable because it creates such demand. But this would only be the case if the new housing actually caused the increased demand rather than being a result of the increased demand. Moreover, housing restrictions based on this argument still create the “beggar thy neighbor” problem: if new housing is shifted to another neighborhood or suburb, how do we know that the new housing won’t make that neighborhood more desirable?

**In addition, government can try to avoid this problem by limiting evictions in other ways—but this seems to me to be a separate issue.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Is zoning racist? After a committee designed to study Seattle’s zoning codes suggested some significant reforms to the city’s code, Mayor Ed Murray said: “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.” Even if this remark is factually true, it doesn’t mean that today’s zoning is racist: low-density zoning exists in black neighborhoods as well as white ones, and opposition to changing such zoning crosses color lines.

But it seems to me that even though zoning is not consistently or intentionally racist, zoning is similar to racist housing discrimination (or “RHD” for short) in a few ways. Both involve a politically influential dominant class (in one case, whites generally; in the other case, homeowners of all colors) who have the votes to impose their will on the political process. In both situations, the dominators use their political power to exclude someone else from its neighborhood; racists usually seek to exclude blacks, while pro-zoning homeowners usually seek to exclude new residents regardless of color (to the extent that zoning is designed to exclude housing smaller or more compact than the status quo, such as smaller houses or multifamily dwellings).*

Both RHD and low-density zoning do, on balance, exclude blacks more than whites—though of course RHD does so much more consistently. One purpose of zoning is to raise housing prices (or, as courts and homeowners euphemistically say, “values”). And higher housing prices mean higher rents, which means that everyone has to pay more for less. If you don’t have any money, you are obviously going to suffer more from that policy than someone who has plenty of money, since the difference between having a small apartment and sleeping on the street is a bit more significant than the difference between having a 8000-square-foot mansion and a 12,000-square-foot mansion. And since blacks tend to have less money than whites, on balance blacks are going to suffer a little more than whites from these policies, just as they are going to suffer more from any tax imposed without ability to pay (for example, an increase in bus fares).**

RHD and low-density zoning are motivated by the same concern: fear of change in neighborhood character. Homeowners believe that new housing will change neighborhood character—and even if such housing does not have any tangible negative impact, this of course is the case. A neighborhood with ten houses per acre obviously looks and feels different than a neighborhood with one house per acre.

I suspect that racists similarly believe that an influx of blacks into their neighborhood will lead to crime, poor schools, and of course lower property prices—but even if they didn’t believe this, racists might believe that a neighborhood where they have to look at black faces on a regular basis has a different character from one where they don’t. Certainly, other forms of illegal discrimination affect neighborhood character: for example, a neighborhood full of Orthodox Jews has a very different character than an equally affluent neighborhood that does not, in that stores will be closed on the Jewish Sabbath and restaurants will comply with traditional Jewish dietary laws.

More importantly, both RHD and low-density zoning are rational for an individual neighborhood but perhaps irrational for a city, region or nation as a whole. A racist in the pre-Fair Housing era no doubt wanted to live in an all-white neighborhood, and even non-racist homeowners might have rationally favored RHD because they did not want to take a chance that integration would lead to unwelcome change. But the widespread adoption of fair housing legislation suggests that many whites did not welcome the nationwide results of rigid segregation.

Low-density zoning is more clearly rational for an individual neighborhood. After all, what homeowner would not like his home to be worth a little more, and what homeowner really wants his neighborhood to change (even in intangible ways)? But if no one liberalizes their zoning enough to accommodate new residents, rents explode, and a city’s prospective residents are either priced out of the city or forced to live on the streets.

So what? Why should we care about these similarities? It seems to me that if RHD and zoning have similar results, maybe they should be attacked with similar remedies. RHD was not eliminated by allowing neighborhoods to discriminate a tiny bit less than they had discriminated in the past or by requiring only a few neighborhoods to cease discrimination. Instead, Congress and state legislatures responded with a meat ax: the Fair Housing Act generally prohibits housing discrimination, and has only a few narrow exemptions. Maybe state legislatures in high-cost states should use a similar meat ax in addressing zoning.

*As opposed to commercial and industrial enterprises, or houses larger than the neighborhood norm.

**On the other hand, to the extent that higher home prices increase property tax revenue, and property tax revenue means better government services, poorer people (and thus blacks) may get a countervailing benefit from better government services—if the extra revenue goes to services that disproportionately benefit the poor (a very big IF).

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

A few months ago, I blogged about the impact of Airbnb on rents for traditional month-to-month or year-to-year tenancies. I suggested that this impact was pretty minimal, reasoning as follows: even in a large city such as Los Angeles, Airbnb units are less than 1 percent of all rental units. So even if every single Airbnb unit would (in the absence of Airbnb) otherwise be part of the traditional rental market, Airbnb is unlikely to increase rents in that market.

The comments (and a recent San Francisco Chronicle story) raised an interesting response to my theory: what matters isn’t the percentage of all rental units, but the percentage of all rental vacancies or all new housing units. In the words of the Chronicle story: “where a typical year sees just 2,000 new units added, a few hundred units off the market makes a significant dent.”

But as I thought about the argument, I was less and less persuaded by it. Here’s why: first, the number of vacancies is limited to new housing units. San Francisco has just over 236,000 rental housing units. The units other than the new units are not owned by their current owners or occupants forever: rather, they shift around from occupied to unoccupied as tenants move, and as owner-occupants become landlords or vice versa. So the number of units vacant at any given point in time is a bit higher than the 2000 figure, and the number of units that become vacant at some point over the next year or two will be higher still.

Second, it seems to me that a few hundred units will have little effect upon overall vacancy rates, which in turn means that they will have little effect upon rents. A recent report by the Furman Center [pdf] (affiliated with New York University) lists rental vacancy rates of eleven cities (p.8). San Francisco has the lowest vacancy rate (2.5 percent) and the highest rent ($1491). Boston, New York and Los Angeles are in a virtual three-way tie for second lowest vacancy rate (between 3.4 and 3.5 percent). These three cities are numbers 3-5 in rents (p. 10). (Washington is no. 5 in vacancies but no. 2 in rents, perhaps because Washington is a more affluent city).* At the other end of the spectrum, the two cheapest cities, Houston and Dallas, were no. 10 and no. 9 in rental vacancies. In sum, there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between vacancy rates and rental rates. Since the law of supply and demand suggests that a small supply normally leads to high prices for any commodity, I suspect that this correlation indicates a causal relationship.

The Chronicle story states that “at least 350 entire properties listed on Airbnb …appear to be full-time vacation rentals, bolstering claims by activists that the services remove scarce housing from the city’s limited inventory.” So what would San Francisco’s vacancy rate be if these 350 Airbnb units were used for traditional year-to-year rentals instead of shorter tenancies? According to the Furman Center report, there are just over 236,000 rental units in San Francisco (p.40) which means that (assuming the 2.5 percent vacancy rate mentioned above) there are about 5900 rental vacancies. According to the Chronicle story, Airbnb takes 350 rental units off the traditional rental market by turning them into short-term tenancies. So if government compelled those owners to turn their units into year-to-year tenancies, there would perhaps be 6250 rental vacancies. So the rental vacancy rate would be…2.64 percent, still significantly lower than those paragons of affordability New York and Los Angeles. So if the effect of the 350 units upon vacancy rates is that small, it seems to me that their effect upon rents will be that small.

One broader point is what the entire discussion shows about the growth of government regulation of housing. Government uses zoning to artificially constrict the supply of housing (or, in politicianspeak, “protect neighborhoods from overdevelopment”). This in turn causes a housing shortage which leads to higher rents. The higher rents in turn lead to additional government regulation, such as rent control, inclusionary zoning, or (in the case of Airbnb) efforts to prevent property owners from shifting property from the traditional rental market from other markets. In sum, government regulation of housing feeds upon itself.

*The median household income for Washington’s renters was just over $46,000, about $5-6,000 higher than the comparable figures for Boston and New York.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Much has been written about gentrification and about the specter of poor people being displaced from cities — despite the fact that nearly every central city still has higher poverty rates than most of its suburbs.

But the City Observatory blog has an interesting post about one Atlanta suburb’s attempt to gentrify not through market forces, but by using public money to buy up and destroy an apartment complex dominated by low-income African-Americans.  In other words, the city’s goal isn’t gentrification that might result in displacement — it is displacement as a goal in itself, gentrification or no gentrification.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Every so often I read an argument that says something like this: “There’s no way that rents can ever go down in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco, because rich foreigners are buying up everything, and as a result demand is essentially infinite. So there’s really no reason to allow new apartments because the foreigners will just buy them all.”

This argument could certainly be true in theory: for example, if an entire city were so expensive that only wealthy foreign investors could afford to live there. But it doesn’t seem to fit the social reality of the expensive city I am most familiar with (New York).

If demand was essentially infinite, there would be some evidence of this fact other than high real estate prices. For example, if New York was growing faster than any city in the United States, there might be a credible argument that new demand is truly insatiable. In fact, many low-cost cities are growing far more rapidly than New York and yet have cheaper rents. Between 2000 and 2010, Austin and Raleigh (both of which are far cheaper than New York) grew by 20 and 46 percent, respectively, while New York grew by less than 10 percent.

It could be argued that New York is dissimilar to other high-growth cities, because the number of wealthy foreigners is so huge that it makes New York a high-growth city. For example, if New York had to accommodate not only half a million new residents per decade but also three million wealthy foreigners seeking second homes, its housing-consuming population would have grown by about 45 percent over the past decade, about the same level of population increase as Raleigh. But are there really that many wealthy foreigners in the New York housing market?

I suspect not. According to a New York Times article about the evils of foreign investment in New York housing, “About $8 billion is spent each year for New York City residences that cost more than $5 million each.” Using the magic of long division, I calculate that even if each residence cost only $5 million and not a penny more, there would be 1,600 such residences. In fact, some residences cost far more, so the actual number of super-expensive residences is lower (and of course, the number of such residences purchased by foreigners is lower still). In a city with 8 million people (and thus a few million households), a thousand or so really rich people seems to be like a drop in the bucket, even if their wealth does give them disproportionate influence and notoriety.

Moreover, it seems to me that if New York really were flooded with millions of foreign billionaires, housing prices would be even more expensive than they are. During my last year in New York (2013-14), I lived in a 448-square-foot studio in Midtown and paid $2,330 a month in rent  (The same apartment would cost $2,680 today). This rent is very expensive by the standards of Planet Earth—but by the standards of Planet Foreign Billionaire Oligarch (FBO), it is nothing. What self-respecting FBO lives in a 450-square-foot studio? And what self-respecting FBO pays less than $3,000 in rent? I don’t know how much FBOs make, but I’m guessing that the median FBO income was at least $10 million per year (1 percent interest of $1 billion in wealth)—which means that any self-respecting FBO should be able to afford $60,000 per month (the price of the most expensive New York apartment I found on zillow.com).

And I wasn’t even living in the neighborhood’s cheap housing: had I chosen to live in a walkup, I could have paid around $1,700-1,800 per month—not exactly billionaire rents. And in the supposedly oligarch-ridden Upper East Side, rents are even cheaper.

And these non-FBO-friendly rents are in the nice parts of Manhattan; rents are even cheaper in most of the outer boroughs. Thus, it is pretty clear that to live in New York (even in the nice parts of Manhattan) you don’t have to be a FBO.

In sum, the overwhelming majority of people who are living in, and bidding up the price of, New York real estate are not FBOs. There is no reason, other than government regulation (and the technical difficulties of building housing in a city that is already “built out”) why supply could not rise to meet demand more effectively.

Having said that, there is two grains of truth in the “insatiable demand” argument.  First, even if New York only has a thousand FBOs, it has lots of domestic rich people- not just billionaires, but “ordinary” people earning in the high six figures, people who cannot afford to pay $60,000 per month but can afford to pay $5,000.  The more rich people a city has, the more money that will be used to bid up real estate prices, which in turn means the city has to work harder to keep supply growing.

Second, even if an adequate building supply kept rents down, it might be that no politically feasible policies will increase supply enough to restrain rents. But as readers of this blog are probably aware by now, “policies I favor” and “politically feasible policies” are two concepts that rarely intersect.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

by James A. Bacon

As the global epicenter of technology innovation, Silicon Valley creates a massive amount of wealth — but the housing supply, hemmed in by geography and zoning regulations, is incredibly restricted. The resulting housing crunch is so severe that Millennials are hard pressed to live there. The median income for Millennials in the San Jose metropolitan area is the highest of any of the 50 largest metropolitan regions in the country — $53,000. But the median home value of $925,000 requires an income of $133,000 to pay a mortgage (not to mention a 20% down payment). The earnings gap, according to a new housing index published by Bloomberg, is $80,000!

If Millennials are the life-blood of creativity and innovation for metropolitan economies, the cost of housing could be Silicon Valley’s Achilles heel. The housing supply is so out of whack, as it is in neighboring San Francisco, that, as much as Millennials are drawn to the excitement and glamour of working at companies like Apple and Google, they simply can’t afford it unless they’re willing to live five or six to an apartment.

According to Bloomberg, housing is unaffordable for thirteen of the 50 largest U.S. metros. The biggest affordability gaps are on the West Coast, but Boston, Washington and New York are on the list as well. Young people are willing to tolerate sub-par living conditions for a while, especially while they are single. One of my daughters shared a tiny rental apartment with four roommates while living in Jackson,Wyoming, which, due to its awesomeness, has similar affordability issues. But she rented her own place when she moved back to Richmond. And now that she is getting married, she and her fiance have no trouble affording a comfortable starter home in a nice neighborhood near the University of Richmond. When educated Millennials are ready to get married and start families, the idea of sharing a house with four or five roommates is not a serious option.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are metros like Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland where housing is easily affordable — but job opportunities for Millennials are scarce. If your goal is to recruit and retain educated Millennials with the hope of stimulating the creative economy, it appears that the sweet spot is the middle of the affordability range in which jobs are available and housing is affordable.

Millennials consider many other factors when choosing where to live, to be sure. Larger metros have appeal because the supply of potential mates is larger. They also look for coolness, hipness and authenticity, indefinable characteristics that are difficult to measure but definitely apply to places like San Francisco, New York, Austin and Portland. But once young people have found their mates, the size of the mating pool is no longer a consideration. And once they have children, hipness no longer looms as large.

Metros like Richmond and Virginia Beach will have difficulty competing with San Francisco and New York in luring single Millennials right out of college. But the comparative advantage shifts dramatically in their favor when Millennials are ready to settle down. In the competition for talent, the best bet for downstate Virginia communities is to target educated Millennials at that life-stage. How to target them is quite another question. It’s a question that Virginians need to give more thought to.

 (Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

I just learned that national tables from the 2013 American Household Survey (AHS) are public. These tables contained a variety of information that I thought was at least mildly interesting. To name a few items:

• Cars are really expensive—even when gas is cheap. The average household spent $800 per month on car-related costs. (Table S-04C). Only $200 of this sum was on gasoline—which means that even if gas was free, cars would still cost $600 per month. About half of household spending was for car payments, 15 percent was for insurance, and the rest was split between parking and maintenance.

• Single family housing dominates the landscape. Sixty-four percent of all occupied housing units (and 62 percent of units built over the last several years) are detached single-family houses (Table C-01). This is especially true for owner-occupied units: even in central cities, 79 percent of owner-occupied units are detached houses (Table C-01-00).

• Most single-family housing is not dense enough to support public transit. The average owner-occupied housing unit takes up 0.3 acres, as does the average housing unit built in the last several years. Thus, most blocks probably contain about three or four units per acre; basic bus service requires at least seven units per acre to be economically viable. (Table C-02).
• Despite public controversy over high-rises, they are far more rare than low-rise apartment buildings. Only 3 percent of housing units (including only 6 percent of central-city rental housing units) are within half a block of a multifamily building with over seven stories; by contrast, 18 percent are within half a block of a multifamily building with one to three stories. (Table S-03, Table C-01-RO). Even among multistory structures in central cities, only 22 percent of buildings even have elevators (Table C-01).

• Commuting statistics underestimate public transit use. About 17 percent of occupied housing units used public transit to some extent (Table S-04-A), but only a quarter of that group always used transit to get to work or school. The rest used transit for other uses or less frequently. Transit use is especially high among central city renters—41 percent of their households included a transit user (Table S-04-A-RO), as did 1/3 of all poverty-level renters regardless of their location. New construction continues to be more auto-oriented than other housing; in units built over the last four years only 10 percent used transit. Although transit advocates often focus on the concerns of seniors, seniors were actually less likely than the general public to use transit: only 12 percent of households headed by someone over 65 used transit.

• Americans will put up with more hassle to use faster modes of public transit. Eighty percent of bus riders walked to a bus stop, and 93 percent lived within a mile of transit. By contrast, only 41 percent of subway/light rail riders lived within a mile of their stop, and only 44 percent walked to a rail stop. (26 percent drove, and the rest took a bus to the train or biked. (Table S-04-B)

• Many Americans have inadequate pedestrian access to nearby blocks. Only 55 percent of American housing units have sidewalks, including only 49 percent of over-65 householders. However, new construction is actually more likely to have sidewalks—about 60 percent of units built in the last four years have them (Table S-04-C). Only 43 percent of Southerners have them, as opposed to 69 percent of westerners (the North and Midwest hover around 60 percent). Bike lanes are still pretty rare; only about 14 percent of units have them.

 (Cross-posted from planetizen.com)