Mar 18, 2009
Suburbs: Not Always Cheaper
By: Kevin Buchanan
Here’s a link for your Wednesday: The City Fix talking about a new study by the Urban Land Institute that finds that the savings of buying a “cheaper” home in the suburbs rather than the central city is often quickly offset by much higher transportation costs:
Living in the D.C. area is expensive. So, in order to find affordable homes, many median-income families move out to more remote suburbs. But these areas are often under-served by mass transit and far-removed from work centers. Therefore, “efforts to save on housing expenses often lead to higher transportation costs, with the result that an even larger portion of household budgets are consumed by the combined burden of housing and transportation costs.”
A tip of the hat to our friends at The Congress for the New Urbanism for sighting this story.
Not to mention all the time you waste each day driving back and forth and every where else. Spending extra money on transportation is bad enough, but wasting time is worse. You can always get more money. You can’t get more time.
Although I don’t miss the traffic, I do miss the quiet stretch of time I had during my commute to sort of “decompress” from my day.
I get home from work so quickly now that all the problems of the workday are still fresh on my mind.
To remedy this issue, I can take public transit home. Ironically, riding the T (4 miles) takes just as long (45 minutes) as driving my old commute to the country (40 miles).
Working downtown and living there isn’t for me. I need that break from reality if for no other reason to jump start my self for another day at work. I haven’t worked in the downtown area for over 28 years and I don’t miss it. I get to town not as much as I used to, but enough to satisfy my hunger, I don’t like to shop and since the majority of the good retaliators left years ago I will occasionally go to the Bass or maybe to a restaurant.
I used to enjoy going to the movies, but what is produced nowadays has gone to the toilet.
No I would say if you want to live downtown, do it! I will stay in the suburbs.
Might I point out, though, that “urban” does not mean “downtown,” necessarily. Urbanism is more about design and layout, and about walkability and transportation/living choice, than about skyscrapers. Magnolia Avenue and the Fairmount neighborhood, for example, are perfectly urban even though there’s nothing much over four stories tall and there are tons of single-family houses. Another example is most any classic pre-war American small town.
One doesn’t have to live downtown to live in an urban setting.
Exactly. You can live in Fairmount (or Ryan Place, for that matter) and still have your house and yard and relative quiet but still be close to everything. Personally, I hate driving, and I like getting home 5-10 minutes after I clock out from work.
That brings up an interesting idea, had we stayed near the downtown like most american cities had done for a considerable time, we probably would not be talkinhg about this subject now. I really think the word urban is easily contrued to mean almost anything. Urban to my kinfolks in Moundsville WVa is having the downtown area just a few blocks from their home, a neighborhood grocery store in a storefront house,the same with a drug store and etc. I know when I visit my hometown, I really enjoy on getting out and walking,almost all have porch swings and are out when I pass by. People stay friendly that way. My wife said her parents would sit in their driveway and talk to friends. Fort Worth just doesn’t offer a place were people can sit and talk to their neighbors unless they went a distance first. The Southside area you mention are nice,not to sure I would feel safe out at night taking a walk.Someone is going to have to prove to me that these areas are really safe.
Kevin, that last remark about the differnce between “urban” and “downtown” strikes a chord. My son was doing his “Dr Suess My Book About Me” a volume where the child describes his life by answering various questions about himself, and wanted to know if we lived in the city or the suburbs. “I think we’d call this (South Hills, near the 30 and Trail Lake, on the north side) the city,” I said.
“But the house in the picture of “City” doesn’t have a front yard,” he countered. It is true, the house we live in looks (and I think it was considered when it was built in the 50′s) more suburban. But I told him times have changed, and these days, city houses can have front lawns. “And we’re in the city of Fort Worth,” I told him. “If we were in the suburbs, it would be named a different town.”
The Near Southside is perfectly safe, particularly places like Fairmount and Magnolia. I’ve walked around there plenty, day and night, with no nervousness.
I’ve lived in Fairmount for almost 3 years and have never really felt unsafe or had any scary incidents, and I go for walks and bike rides almost every day (gotta get my exercise) all over Fairmount, Magnolia and Ryan Place.
When does the neighborhood become suburban? Is the area of Fort Worth on the southwest side, that is inside Loop 820 city or suburb? What about just south of I-20 or north of 820 on the north side of town.
Kevin, if an area that was originally considered a suburb created an urban environment, would it then be urban? Or is this all covered in your discussion you mentioned earlier?
I live on the west side of town and I love being able to walk to some of the restaurants on Camp Bowie and being just a few minutes from work. There aren’t enough bad drivers in those three miles I travel to raise up any road rage.
“Urban” is less about proximity to the central city core than about design. A place that’s walkable and bikeable, ie on an interconnected grid, with a mix of uses and housing, access to transit, designed for people first, etc. that doesn’t require the use of the car for everything is what we usually mean by “urban.” A place that’s heavily auto-oriented featuring things like big, winding roads and cul-de-sacs, inconsistent sidewalks, single-use pods, big parking lots in front of stores, pods feeding into collector streets, etc. is what we usually mean by “suburban.”
Hence, there are places inside the loop of 820 that are not “urban” by this definition. The area along Hulen running south from I-30, for example, is well within the loop, but little-to-none of it is in any way “urban.”
Late to the discussion-party on this one, though check this site out for an affordability index that maps housing & transportation costs of metropolitan areas.
Every metro area map is a donut – where the inner city is more affordable, and people in the suburbs spend more of their income on housing and transportation than they take home: http://htaindex.cnt.org/map_tool