John Hennessy III,
P.E.
As city leaders struggle to help their communities become “smart cities,” elected officials also grapple with more basic issues. Affordable housing is a priority in every city in the country. America is literally teetering on the brink of declaring an affordable housing crisis.
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Silicon Valley is booming. The economy has come roaring back since the 2008 downturn. In 2013, the total surged past even the 1999 high-water mark of the dot-com boom, and there are more total jobs in the county than ever before. That roaring economy has an impact everyone feels: more traffic.
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The idea that people can find a comfortable place to put down community roots for the long term is increasingly precarious. The pressure on poorer residents to leave for more distant areas and make way for people who can afford more has seemingly moved from neighborhood to neighborhood with little slowdown, overcoming recessions, natural disasters, and concerted efforts from government and community organizations alike. There is a common thread in the areas experiencing these pressures: They are walkable areas with good access to jobs and public transit. And they also are the areas where the people most vulnerable to displacement are likely to live.
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CENTER FOR NEIGHBORHOOD TECHNOLOGY
Late at night, when Chicago sleeps, apartment parking lots are at their peak usage. When CNT visited those lots and garages at 4:00 a.m., though, we found one third of the parking spaces sitting empty…This may not seem like a huge problem, but each indoor, underground parking space – one individual space – costs $37,300 to build. Multiply that by all of the spaces in the lot, and the price tag is huge. We think that wasted money and space should be allocated to housing instead.
Texas A&M University recently announced plans to expand its student housing capacity by more than 3,400 beds with a unique agreement between public and private partners worth over $360 million. The announcement is similar to dozens just like it throughout the country. Student housing on university campuses is an extremely large, growing marketplace and most of the new projects are collaborative efforts called public-private partnerships (P3s).
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Jersey City is in the middle of a $100 million-plus project to revitalize its affordable housing. As part of this initiative, the city teamed up with EarthCam and Prestige Building Companies to document the implosion of Montgomery Gardens on Saturday, August 29, 2015. Don’t miss a second of the demolition – EarthCam’s HD footage, captured by its StreamCam 4K, first shows the demolition in real time and then an instant replay in slow motion.
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LAKEVIEW CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Lakeview is historically a dense community that developed around its CTA stations, and demographic trends since 2000 continue to reinforce the central role of transit in the neighborhood. CTA stations serve as hubs for the community, providing significant foot traffic from visitors and local commuters to fuel the neighborhood’s business corridors. Lakeview has the highest rate of transit commuting of any neighborhood in the city. Transit is critical to the neighborhood’s economic success and quality of life.
URBAN LAND INSTITUTE
A common perception exists that unit sizes in new apartments have been shrinking as developers seek higher density and higher revenue per square foot to offset rising land value and construction costs and to hold monthly rent at an affordable level relative to income. The ultimate incarnation of this trend has been the introduction—or the reintroduction—of very small units, often referred to as micro units.
While cities like Chicago, Austin, and Seattle can typically stave off drastic price increases by just building enough housing to meet demand, that’s not always possible for world cities because demand isn’t just local, or even national — it’s global, and in an era of growing inequality the demand for luxury investment properties and pieds-à-terre is vast. That demand is an obstacle to providing an adequate supply of affordable, middle-class housing, but it needn’t be. If harnessed appropriately, it could even be a strength.
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TRANSFORM
CALIFORNIA HOUSING PARTNERSHIP CORPORATION
A new analysis of data from Caltrans’ California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) completed in February 2013 shows that a well-designed program to put more affordable homes near transit would not just meet the requirements set by the California Air Resources Board (ARB), but would be a powerful and durable GHG reduction strategy – directly reducing driving while creating a host of economic and social benefits.
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