This post was written by Trisha Riggs, vice president of communications for ULI.
Workers in the San Francisco Bay Area area are caught between a rock and a hard place, when it comes to the trade offs involved in choosing between less expensive housing and longer commutes. A new study from the Urban Land Institute Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing analyzed the combined costs of housing and transportation for nine counties in the region and found that workers pay as much as 65 percent of their incomes for both, placing them in the "severely burdened" category.
It’s a sobering measurement of the costs of living (and working) in the Bay Area, and a stark reminder of the very real impact of land planning conducted out of sync with transportation planning.
The report, Bay Area Burden, was released this week in San Francisco in conjunction with ULI’s Annual Fall Meeting, as part of the Institute’s focus on pressing urban issues affecting long-term community sustainability. The report highlihghts the need for more housing that is affordable to mainstream workers to be built near employment areas in high-cost markets.
"This heavy burden forces residents to make extremely difficult decisions that pit housing and transportation choices against other basic needs such as health care, education and food," said ULI Terwilliger Center Chairman J. Ronald Terwillliger. "These findings reinforce that years of ever-sprawling development have resulted in a growing gap between where people live and where they work." Terwilliger, chairman and chief executive officer of Trammell Crow Residential, founded the center in 2007 to help achieve a measurable increase in the supply of workforce housing in high-cost markets throughout the nation.
"This report underscores the importance of broadening the understanding surrounding some of the challenges associated with housing affordability to also include transportation costs, travel time and the negative environmental impacts of commuting," said former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, a member of the ULI Terwilliger Center Advisory Board.
Along with the report, the ULI Terwilliger Center is providing an online consumer calculator to help workers determine how much they are paying for housing and transportation, depending on where they live and work. The goal of Bay Area Burden: to raise awareness among consumers and policy makers of how much they are really paying for their location decisions.
The ULI Terwilliger Center is expected to release a similar report next year for the Boston metropolitan area, which will be timed to coincide with ULI’s 2010 Spring Council Forum in that city.
