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Home buyers are moving closer to public transit
The HealthLine rapid transit bus in Cleveland. It is a 9.2 mile bus route that connects downtown Cleveland to East Cleveland, where there are several hospitals.
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Kai Ryssdal: While he was standing in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, Ed Glaeser offered a quick tutorial about how important centralized transportation was to the rise of American cities. Railroads and rivers back then.
An analogy for today might be modern transit lines. Moving people, not things. Because even though a nice house out in the suburbs with a white picket fence and all is the prototypical American dream, truth is, a lot of home buyers are voting with their feet and choosing to live within walking distance of public transit.
From public radio's Transportation Nation project at WNYC, Andrea Bernstein reports.
Andrea Bernstein: In 1977, when 11-year-old Terry Alexander moved with his parents and younger sister to Park Slope, Brooklyn, the city's population was rapidly contracting. Whites, in particular, were fleeing the city for the suburbs. But Alexander, who is African American, moved with his family from the Manhattan projects to a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In those days, no one could understand why.
In word, it was:
Terry Alexander: Horrible. There were many stabbings and fights.
Alexander still lives in the house he grew up in. Today, it's one of the toniest neighborhoods in New York City, just a 20-minute subway ride from Manhattan.
Alexander: Mom, I love you, but you were dead wrong. This once.
In 1977, the Alexander home cost $68,000. Today, it's worth more than $2 million. Turns out this pattern is a national phenomenon.
Chris Leinberger, a University of Michigan professor and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, says you can see it in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington D.C.
He gestures to a gorgeous town house in Dupont Circle, with a detailed balcony and an impeccably trimmed Japanese maple out front. But Leinberger says it's not the nice touches pushing up the home's value. It's the proximity to Washington's transit system, the Metro.
Chris Leinberger: Within walking distance of transit, we're seeing anywhere from a 40 to 200 percent price premium. The market is willing to pay 40 percent more to three times more.
After the housing bubble burst in 2007, Leinberger says homes in neighborhoods around the country like Park Slope and Dupont Circle largely held their value. Census figures show that in the last 10 years, these neighborhoods have become increasingly white.
We drive 45 minutes outside D.C., beyond the borders of the Metro to Prince George's County in Maryland, In this area, the population is two-thirds black.
Leinberger: We're now looking for Fairview Vista.
We drive through a suburban subdivision with large new homes. They've got two-car garages, brick details and window shutters. We stop in front of one on a quarter-acre lot. Its value: $365,000, one-fifth as much as the Dupont Circle row-house.
Leinberger: This is a car-dependent house. You cannot live here without taking your car to literally every trip from your home.
As Americans increasingly choose to live near transit, the value of homes like this has plummeted -- 60 percent since the year 2000.
Leinberger: The bulk of the mortgage meltdown took place here. It didn't take place in Dupont.
To be sure, not everyone wants to live in cities. The suburban ideal still has a hold on some. After immigrating from Haiti, Petrice Previlon move to an urban area in New York City. Then, he moved with his four children out to a Long Island suburb with no transit.
Petrice Previlon: I love peace and quiet, that's why I moved to Elmont. Elmont is a very residential area. It's a very good place to raise kids. That's why I live in Elmont.
But still, Leinberger says, even in more established suburbs, homes have lost value in the last several years. And with gas prices rising and families getting smaller, he says it's a trend that's likely to continue.
In New York, I'm Andrea Bernstein for Marketplace.
Ryssdal:
Andrea Bernstein's story on the value of transit was adapted from the American Radioworks and Transportation Nation documentary "Back of the Bus."
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It's worth listening to the argument made by Lane Gradey from "Bingimgham, AL": those of us who support services like transit and health care need to be clear that our case isn't based on simply serving one group of people. This is important regardless of whether Lane Gradey is racist or not. This is about allowing everyone, regardless of race or gender, to have the freedom to choose. If you can't get health insurance, you have no choice. If you don't have transit, you have no choice. If you don't have the money to pay for ever-increasing tuition fees, your children don't have a choice. If some people want to drive, remain sick, or skip education, fine; just don't take that choice away from the rest of us.
By the way, roads are subsidized by everyone: only the highways are funded by the gas tax, and that only partially. Local roads are paid through property and sales taxes.
Ha this article is so laughable, The reason the suburbs are being hit is because that is where the new construction went up and it�s where the bulk of the bubble buying happened, Bending the current situation to fit your agenda is just lame.
As reading the comments on this story suggest there is an obvious disconnect with a lot of Americans on how public transportation can work for them. To understand public transit you have to understand how cities were designed to work, speaking generally, many of the activities one would interact with throughout the day would be generally closer and more easily accessed due to a shorter distance to cover (the point of cities in the first place as explained by Kai Ryssdal). The reality for the vast majority of us is that we do not live in $2M homes nor do we intend purchase one, but we live in apartments and houses that tend to be adjacent to arterial roads and large boulevards, these are the "corridors" (transit-speak for direction of travel) that public transit will utilize for moving the greatest number of potential riders possible. The question that many Americans are asking themselves about where they currently live or will be moving to is how close am I to having access to this in light of an awareness to increasing fuel prices along with other expenses of owning a personal vehicle? When I was growing up this was always taken into consideration for my parents to move into an apartment or house, because who could know if we would always have access to a car, so this choice to live adjacent to the schools and work places in a safe area with access to public transportation paid off many times over and allowed us to save money by driving less or simply take the bus to school and work, or even walk the short distance. It's too often that public transit is casted as for poor people that can't afford cars or that the subway trains are for rich people. Both are half-truths: yes poor people ride buses and trains but so do students, middle class people (like me), tourists, and businesspeople; trains though more expensive than buses travel on "corridors" that have very high ridership, which demands frequent service and high capacity (more than buses can past a given threshold) and these corridors often never turn into ghost towns, the opposite happens, they boom even more with even more activity, Kai hinted at this. I by the way moved into a nice and affordable apartment in Los Angeles that happens to be adjacent to a new Metro station that is due to open in a few months and is walking distance to 12 bus stops and I'm about 6 miles from work. It's time for the American people to reclaim the time and money that constantly is sunk into commuting by exploring other options such as buses, subways, light rail, commuter rail, and even vanpooling.
Boo-Freakin' Hoo. I'm so tired of everything in America being broken down to "poor black people." They need special treatment for everything. Make sure they get a free cell phone, free Internet. Free heatlh care. My husband has been out of work for 14 months. We have two children in college. No one cares. We've paid taxes for 40 years. There is no bus service in my area.There are no scholarships. No one pays for my gas. Does anyone care? Nope.
While it's certainly nice to live in an affluent neighborhood near to rapid transit, the real story is who bears the enormous cost of building and operating rail systems while the much cheaper bus service is being cut back or discontinued. It's an old story... robbing the poor to give to the rich - please to call it enhancing the quality of life.
The proximity to public transit might also affect the hotel industry. When I attend conventions in large cities, I usually can't afford the hotels near the convention center, so I look for hotels near subway stops. I'm unlikely to pick a hotel more than a couple of blocks from a subway stop if I will be walking alone.
As I commuted my 58 miles home from Ann Arbor, I heard of this trend to move closer to public transportation... to 2Million dollar homes. Where is the connectivity? Did people say "I can't afford this car and gas, so I'll buy a 2Million dollar house? Did they ask their boss, "hey, I need to move closer. Can you boost my pay $66K/yr?"
The story made no sense and made me wonder which city realtor subsidized that article. Do the math, please.
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