The Ground Floor

Moving Beyond 'Drive until you Qualify'

In a joint effort by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and Washington, D.C.-based the Brookings Institute, an interactive mapping web tool -- the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index -- was developed to measure the true affordability of housing by applying transportation costs.

The tool provides housing and transportation costs as a percentage of income on a neighborhood-level basis for 52 metropolitan areas using 2000 U.S. Census data and analysis of household transportation costs.

Urban planners, policy-makers, and transportation and housing advocates measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of household income. However, housing affordability is not always what it seems.

As Scott Bernstein, president for CNT explained during a presentation today at the Brookings Institute, the old adage of "drive until you qualify" is really no longer an appropriate measure of housing affordability. As gas prices increase along with suburban sprawl, much of the population is paying as much for transportation as they are housing.

Rome Wasn't Reborn in a Day

Close your eyes and think back...oh, about 1,687 years ago. Can you picture the great city of Rome at the height of its power? No? Well, the good folks at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia are here to help. Rome Reborn 1.0 (hat tip: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) is a collaborative effort UVA is undertaking with several other research labs to create a digital model of the city in its heyday as the center of the Roman Empire -- June 21, 320 A.D. The model is being created through careful study of archaeological and quantitative data, with detailed representations of about 200 or so buildings (about which archaeological evidence is plentiful), and conjecture about another 7,000-10,000 buildings and features throughout the city from information about their type and frequency in particular regions. Some of the consortium's preliminary products have been posted online, including still images of several buildings, video flythroughs of sites such as the Colosseum and the Forum as well as a video flythrough of the entire city, and an audio discussion of what this project means for future study of ancient civilizations.

For urban planning geeks (such as myself), it is a fascinating look at both the infrastructure of ancient cities -- how it all fits together and functions as a whole -- and the patterns and geometry of urban civilizations. Plus, it's very cool to fly into one of the Colisseum's arched entryways on through to the (blissfully lion-free) field -- but where is the digital Maximus?

A Map With a View

You may have noticed that Google Maps launched its Street View function this week. This feature allows users to get a three dimensional view of streetscapes in a few cities. It is a pretty amazing way to be a virtual flâneur. Hmmm...maybe we should have waited until it was officially the weekend to post this link.

Still, the feature's launch has not been without controversy. Many believe that this feature is an invasion of privacy, including one woman who looked up her address and saw her cat sitting in her living room window. Various sites are collecting interesting images captured by this feature.

What do you think? And how can we -- as real estate and land use professionals -- use Street View?

Elevator IQ

Today, CurbedNY give us a sneak peek at the new New York Times building, designed by Renzo Piano. What intrigued me the most was their description of the building's "smart elevators." Already in use in at least two other buildings in New York, and in four Seattle buildings, smart elevators are a more efficient way of transporting people to their floors in buildings of ten stories or more. A rider keys in his or her destination floor on a keypad at the bank of elevators, and is directed to a specific elevator. Efficiency is acheived by grouping people on adjacent floors into the one elevator, thus saving the interminable stop-and-start of being caught on a "local" elevator. The reported benefits of smart elevators include shorter wait times for elevators and energy savings. My main concern is that this means that some people will have to redraft their elevator pitches.

UrbanMap

Our colleagues over at ULI San Francisco have alerted us to the launch of their Web portal to all of the real estate and land use information for the Bay Area: www.urbanmap.org. It is free and available to all, with no registration required.

UrbanMap is intended "to make the wealth of Bay Area land use and real estate information available on the Web easy to find and access for professionals and members of the public alike," according to Jay Paxton, real estate and land use attorney, and co-chair of ULI San Francisco's Policy & Practice Committee.

"People may know about a few interesting sites they find useful, but almost no one has a comprehensive view of what is really available," says Paxton. "This site provides it, and we believe it will both enhance the trend toward smart growth in the Bay Area and make it easier to research particular neighborhoods or properties for those buying, selling, and developing real estate."