A cheap home isn’t affordable if it comes with high transportation costs.
I’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced appropriately, and whether households are being asked to spend too much. I’ve explored some of these issues before, but today I want to focus on one key issue: the tradeoff between cheap rents and costly transportation.
In virtually every major urban real estate market, a major determinant of rent and housing prices is accessibility. If you live in a dense, walkable urban neighborhood, you might manage to live quite comfortably not owning a car, or having just one car for a two-worker family. If you live on the exurban edge, in a low density subdivision, you might need to own multiple cars just to manage the daily chores of school, shopping and play, as well as commuting to work. It turns out that the value of accessibility gets priced in to the walkable, well-located housing; and conversely, rental and for sale housing that’s located at a distance from everything is priced at a discount to the market................Read More
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