Report Aims to Quantify
High Costs of Urban Sprawl

The culprit, the report contends, is urban sprawl.

"Transportation has gotten expensive for many American families. Because of sprawl, driving has changed from a convenient choice into an expensive necessity," said Roy Kienitz, executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, an advocacy group promoting "diversified transportation."

The metro-specific quantification of "Driven to Spend'" may stir up considerable attention. The study, for example, ranked Houston the highest-cost metro, with an average of 22.1 percent of every household dollar spent on transportation. That, according to the study, translated into US$8,840 spent a year for transportation for the average Houston-area household, $2,528 more than the national average. Atlanta, with a transportation outlay of 21.7 percent, was the only other metro with an average above 20 percent. (See accompanying chart of the study's 10 most expensive metros.)

Broad Recommendations Could
Have Major Real Estate Impact

Such bottom-line specificity could conceivably carry considerable weight with advocacy groups and government officials. And that adds heft to the report's broad-ranging series of recommendations. If implemented, some of those proposals could have substantial impact within the real estate industry.

"Driven to Spend's" recommendations include:

• "Smart" development boosted by building and zoning codes: "Developers should build according to the principles of smart growth, and include a variety of affordable housing options so everyone can benefit," the study asserted. "Cities should revise their building and zoning codes to make this easier."
• Greater business/government participation: "Businesses and government should encourage programs that help reduce the high fixed costs of driving, such as pay-as-you-go auto insurance and car-sharing programs," the report recommended.
• Altered home-lending practices: "Banks should offer location-efficient mortgages and other programs that take into account the savings made possible by living in a transportation-efficient location," the study averred.
• Less highway investment: "Governments should invest in public transit, bicycle facilities and walkable neighborhoods as strategies that can help families save money, and should stop investing in sprawl-inducing highway expansions that are shown to cost families more money," the report urged.

New Highways Spurring Higher Costs?

However ambitious, those are only proposals, it bears repeating. Still, the study's thoroughgoing approach could give its findings some long-lasting policymaking clout.

Other findings from "Driven to Spend" include:

• The poorest families "spend the most on transportation - sometimes more than one-third of their income goes to transportation." Said Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, an organization devoted to "inventing new tools for creating livable communities," "We found that counting on cars to get around hurts family finances by using up money that could go toward buying a home."
• "Three-quarters of all automobile expenses stem from the fixed cost of simply owning a car, regardless of how much it is driven. . . . The high cost of gasoline or car insurance . . . had little effect on overall transportation expenses."
• The expensive metros in the study "also provide little transportation choice, as measured by the ratio of transit service to roads."
• Government investments in road building "may be contributing to an increase in transportation expenses. . . . Both expenses and road building grew faster in the top-ranked areas - Houston, Atlanta and Dallas."