All too often, searching for a new home usually comes down to the most basic question: where can we afford to live?
Experts recommend individuals or families shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of their household income on housing. However, a new report from a Chicago-based environmental think tank suggests the hidden cost of transportation can have a huge impact on whether a region is as affordable as the house hunter might think. How much you need to get into your car and drive to essential places can also tell you something about how much you’re contributing to global warming with those actions, the study shows.
The more you have to get into your car from where you live to get somewhere, and the farther you have to drive to get to the places where you routinely go, have a direct impact on the cost of where you live, asserts Maria Choca Urban, program director for transportation and community development at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), the non-profit that published the recent report. And if you’re trying to pursue a greener lifestyle, Choca Urban, the report’s author, notes you should be looking for housing in areas where you can leave your car at home more often or drive shorter distances. It’s even possible to find a place to live that eliminates most, if not all, your needs for owning a car.
“The purpose of the report was to challenge conventional notions about affordability of housing,” explains Choca Urban.
The organization’s research reveals transportation cost is the second largest expense in a family budget, on average between 18-21 percent. She notes it can be as low as 15 percent or as high as 28-30 percent and much of that variation may depend on where you live.
“We believe people are making housing choices with incomplete information,” she adds.
CNT published its report, entitled Penny Wise and Pound Fuelish, to alert consumers about the hidden role transportation plays in calculating the affordability of housing. The report’s author also hopes policy makers will use the data within the report to make smarter urban planning decisions that incorporate transportation issues in a more integral and practical way.
People tend to move farther and farther away from the city center in their search for lower cost housing, explains Choca Urban. Housing may become more affordable the farther away you get, but the flip side is the housing tends to be found in communities that are more spread out. “Housing is often segregated from commercial areas, and from schools and parks,” she observes. “Every time you need to run an errand, or go to school or the doctor -- it’s a car trip.”
The layout of these communities also discourages people from walking or riding a bike because there may not be any sidewalks or the roads might not be on a grid as they are in a city and may be full of cul-de-sacs that don’t connect streets to each other. Even worse, there often isn’t enough population to support public transport.
“All of this makes you default to your car,” she notes. And car ownership is the single biggest expense in a transportation budget, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
What’s great about the new CNT study is anyone can go online and find estimates of transportation costs associated with neighborhoods and suburbs in 337 metropolitan regions across the U.S., including Chicago.
The report enables you to find data groupings of six-block clusters in the city of Chicago. In addition, you can compare communities in the 7-county Chicago region, with spillover data that includes Northwest Indiana and Southeast Wisconsin. The index shows what the average household in each area spends on transportation, says Choca Urban. What’s more, there is even a calculation for the greenhouse gas cost of living in that area.
Once you’re armed with more information, Choca Urban suggests prospective home buyers narrow their search to a few neighborhoods and then hit the pavement for a reality check.
“I’d advise them to walk around the community they’re thinking about living in, see how walkable it feels and see how many types of places they’d like to go to on a regular basis that are within walking distance or a bus or train ride from where they might live,” she says. “Take a look at your community with that in mind as well as housing costs in the community before you sign on the dotted line.”
