UA News

New measures include not only the cost of housing but transportation as well.

Hefty mortgages and expensive gasoline have thrown a wrench into the traditional notion of affordable housing for most people. A new way of measuring affordable housing that takes these and other factors into account in the Tucson area will be unveiled this week at The University of Arizona.

Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, will present the Tucson/Pima County Housing + Transportation Affordability Index this Thursday at 12:30 p.m. at the University Services Annex Building at 220 W. Sixth Street. The Drachman Institute, part of the UA College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, is hosting the event.

The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology and its collaborative partners, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Transit Oriented Development, is an innovative tool that measures the true affordability of housing.

Housing affordability is typically defined as costing no more than 30 percent of household income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also the intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs.

This work is a project of the Brookings Institution's Urban Markets Initiative and specifically examines the variables that inform Housing + Transportation costs. The key to this work is the finding that the three primary dependent variables in the household transportation model are auto ownership, auto use and transit ridership, and that the two primary independent variables are residential density and household income.

The Brookings project models neighborhood-level data for 52 different metropolitan areas, including the Phoenix area, with results that are available through an interactive mapping Web site. The Index has received attention from policy makers for its benefits to planners and  transit-oriented development advocates and has already served as the basis for other research projects. Interactive mapping for Tucson and Pima County will now be available.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology is an urban sustainability innovations laboratory in Chicago that develops resources and systems to promote healthy, sustainable communities by helping local leaders understand and use their hidden assets.

Bernstein is a founding board member at the Brookings Institution Urban and Metropolitan Center, and co-founded the Center for Transit Oriented Development, a partnership with Reconnecting America and Strategic Economics, whose mission is to promote transit-oriented development as a preferred development form, managing it to maximize new economic value creation and implementing it in ways that help communities and investors capture this value systematically.

The Drachman Institute has been working with Bernstein to develop the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index tool for Pima County. Sponsors supporting this work include the Gadsden Company and Tucson Association of Realtors. Project supporters include Pima Association of Governments, Pima County, City of Tucson, Tucson Industrial Development Authority and Cox Communications.