myurbanist blog

The Seattle blog myurbanist provides insight into the city's next steps to encourage placemaking and pedestrian life, with seven principles derived from the author’s examples from Australia, Italy and Malta.

The blog’s author is Chuck Wolfe, Principal of Charles R. Wolfe, Attorney at Law, who practices in Seattle and also teaches at the University of Washington.

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Farming on the Edge

The American Farmland Trust conducted a ground-breaking national study mapping the relationship between high-quality farmland and land development pressure in America.

An excerpt: "We're needlessly wasting one of the world's most important resources. Less than one-fifth of U.S. land is high quality, and we are losing this finest land to development at an accelerating rate. U.S. agricultural land provides the nation—and the world—with an unparalleled abundance of food. But farmland means much more than food. Well-managed farmland shelters wildlife, supplies scenic open space and helps filter impurities from our air and water. These working lands keep our taxes down and maintain the legacy of our agricultural heritage. It makes no sense to develop our best farmland. Instead, we have a responsibility to protect this most valuable resource for future generations."

The report shows the threat of sprawling development to urban edge farmland state by state.

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Priced Out: Persistence of the Workforce Housing Gap in the San Francisco Bay Area

Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area today remains unaffordable to a large portion of the region’s workforce and the problem is expected to continue to grow with severe housing shortages by 2025, according to new research published by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing. The severity of the problem threatens the region’s future economic viability and, unless serious policy changes are made, new home development will leave significant unmet demand, leaving thousands of working families "priced out" of affordable housing options.

The report examined the availability of for-sale and rental housing to workforce households. Approximately 30 percent of the metro area’s 2.7 million households fall in this income range. The study analyzed the housing market in nine counties – Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Solano, and Sonoma – and found that only 15 percent of the existing for-sale housing stock in the Bay Area is affordable to workforce households earning the median family income. This compares with between 50 and 60 percent in many of the Bay Area’s peer metropolitan regions. In fact, every county in the Bay Area ranked as being one of the least affordable in the country with only New York City being ranked less affordable.

"Families in the Bay Area are finding it harder and harder to escape the high cost of housing," said Henry G. Cisneros, former Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and Advisory Board Member of the Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing. "There are no real 'fringe' locations in the Bay Area where working families can choose to trade off a much longer and expensive commute in exchange for an affordable housing option."

The report also found that uniformly high housing costs are similarly pervasive in the rental housing market, which serves 42 percent of workforce households in the Bay Area. Workforce households have a much higher propensity to rent in the Bay Area, especially among families, than in peer metropolitan regions across the country. Furthermore, Bay Area rents are high and a disproportionately high percentage of workforce households also pay more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent, more than in peer metropolitan regions across the country.

Given the large percentage of the population represented by the workforce, and their importance to major industries supporting the Bay Area economy, the housing shortage needs to be addressed "sooner rather than later," said ULI Terwilliger Center Chairman J. Ronald Terwilliger. "The bottom line is that workforce households are critical to keeping the economy afloat and they offer a deep, relatively untapped market segment. Creating these housing opportunities would improve the competitiveness of the Bay Area as an attractive place to live and work."

Between 2010 and 2030, the Association of Bay Area Governments projects that the Bay Area will add more than 500,000 households. Given this growth, Priced Out estimates that the Bay Area will face a shortage of at least 6,000 for-sale housing units affordable to workforce households by 2025. Moreover, demand for new rental housing is projected to exceed supply by almost 23,000 units, resulting in a total shortage of more than 29,000 workforce housing units in 2025.

Priced Out, prepared for ULI by RCLCO/Robert Charles Lesser & Company, is the second in a series of Bay Area reports released by the ULI Terwilliger Center in recent months. In November, ULI released Bay Area Burden, a report showing that Bay Area households spend on average nearly 60 percent of their income on transportation and housing costs alone. Bay Area Burden also highlights the impact of these costs on the environment and makes available a consumer cost calculator that helps users determine their own true costs of housing and transportation. Their purpose is to bring more awareness and subsequent policy changes to measurably increase the supply of workforce housing in high-cost markets throughout the nation.

To help illustrate how these issues impact working families throughout the Bay Area, Priced Out provides a series of workforce housing profiles which show the personal and economic realities that families are facing every single day. For instance, only 14 percent of the for-sale housing in the Bay Area is affordable to a family in San Jose making a combined annual income of $92,000. Only 9% of the for-sale housing market is affordable to a family in Alameda with a combined income of $78,000. The conditions are just as severe for families seeking rental housing as rents in the Bay Area are among the highest in the nation.

In both for-sale and rental categories, the Bay Area’s workforce housing shortage is most severe among "amily households," which has the most difficulty finding appropriate housing because larger households require homes with more bedrooms, which typically are more expensive. The report notes that nearly every profession includes employees who fall into the workforce housing income range, including those who work in the fields of public service; professional, scientific or technical services; health care and social services; construction; retail; administrative support; finance and insurance services; and education.

"If current trends continue, new construction will fail to meet the significant projected demand for workforce housing in the future," said Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council. "Unless these issues are seriously addressed, not only will Bay Area families continue to be priced out of housing options, but the region’s future economic viability will be threatened."

Priced Out concludes that the San Francisco Bay Area suffers from a workforce housing shortage that is among the most acute and widespread in the nation. Despite the recent housing market downturn, the high cost of housing remains a critical challenge to the long-term economic health of the Bay Area. While most metropolitan areas exhibit a pattern in which workforce households cannot find affordable for-sale housing in neighborhoods convenient to major employment concentrations, what distinguishes the Bay Area is that workforce households are priced out of the for-sale housing market almost entirely. Left unchanged, the pervasive and persistent housing burden of workforce households in the Bay Area will imperil the region’s economic vitality.

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Parking Price Implementation Guidelines

Pricing parking can provide a number of benefits including increased turnover allowing for greater accessibility to parking spaces, cost savings, reduced traffic problems and increased revenue for cities. This report outlines some of the methods jurisdictions can implement, describes the costs and benefits of a parking management program, debunks common objections and arguments against priced parking, and presents case studies of cities that have had success creating a priced parking management system.

Author Todd Litman notes that a typical automobile is used for around one hour a day while being parked for 23 and that the resources needed to store automobiles during this time are high. Typical urban parking has an annualized cost of $500 to $1,500 for land, construction, and operation and at times is worth more than the actual automobiles that occupy them. Instead of directly passing this price on to consumers, parking costs are indirectly absorbed through taxes, rents, higher prices for goods and services, and lower employee wages. In addition to the hidden costs of "free" parking, Litman argues that providing parking increases demand and tends to exacerbate problems such as traffic congestion, housing/job separation, sprawl, and pollution. Directly charging individuals to utilize a service such as parking would help curve some of these negative externalities.

The report goes on to provide statistics, tables, facts and other information on strategies cities have used with success to manage parking and determine an optimal parking price. Overall, the report is an excellent resource for cities interested in parking management and the possibilities of a pricing scheme.

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Updated Model Sustainability Ordinances for Minnesota

Following a directive from the Minnesota Legislature, the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board (then part of Minnesota Planning, and now part of the Minnesota Department of Administration) published a 313-page guide From Policy to Reality: Model Ordinances for Sustainable Development in September 2000. This guide offers legal tools to help local government steer changes in their communities that reflect the aspirations of their comprehensive and other plans. Communities can adapt these model ordinances to their own special circumstances. These model sustainability ordinances were recently updated and the following updated model sustainability ordinances can now be accessed at the web site below, each in PDF format:

• Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance
• Agriculture and Forest Protection District
• Model Community Conservation Subdivision District
• Downtown Mixed-Use District
• Energy Efficiency Ordinance
• Highway Commercial District
• Landscaping and Maintenance of Vegetation
• Local Food Networks
• Natural Resources Performance Standards
• Design Standards for Pedestrian-Oriented Districts and Corridors
• Planned Unit Development Ordinance
• Solar Energy Standards
• Stormwater and Erosion and Sediment Control Ordinance
• Travel Demand Management Performance Standard
• Transit-Oriented Development
• Village Mixed Use District
• Model Wind Energy

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Food Environment Atlas

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in conjunction with Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity campaign has released a web-based map application to help show how factors such as store/restaurant proximity, food prices, food and nutrition assistance programs, and community characteristics influence food choices and diet quality.

The Food Environment Atlas allows users to map out 90 food environment factors including access to local grocery stores, expenditures at restaurants, food taxes, access to local food markets, and socio-economic characteristics. These factors can then be compared across the United States on a county level to help determine what factors create healthy sustainable communities. Individual factors can be combined to allow the user to gain a better understanding of what is happening and the way environmental factors relate to one another. The data can then be downloaded and further analyzed using geographical information system software. The website provides a good source of information for those who want to better understand how one’s physical environment factors into health and well-being.

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The Power of Social Innovation

Civic leaders across the U.S. and throughout the world are discovering creative ways to overcome the obstacles that seal the doors of opportunity for too many. These inspiring individuals believe that within our communities lies the entrepreneurial spirit, compassion and resources to make progress in such critical areas as education, housing and economic self-reliance.

Real progress requires that we take bold action and leverage our strengths for the greater good. The Power of Social Innovation offers public officials, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and individual citizens the insights and skills to create healthier communities and promote innovative solutions to public and social problems. This seminal work is based on Stephen Goldsmith's decades of experience, extensive ongoing research, and interviews with 100+ top leaders from a wide variety of sectors. Goldsmith shows that everyday citizens can themselves produce extraordinary social change.

The book explores the levers and guiding principles used by champions of civic progress who drive new organizations, new interventions or new policies to enhance social conditions. The Power of Social Innovation features illustrative case studies of change-oriented philanthropists, public officials and civic leaders. While all collaborate across sectors, they run both start-ups and established organizations such as the New York City public schools, United Way of America, the United Negro College Fund, and Teach For America. The book shows the catalyzing role each plays in transforming a community’s social service delivery systems.

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