The Sunday Train is once again rolling out of its station at Voices on the Square ...
Sustainable Real Estate Development is Good for the Economy and Other Growing Things
As a member of the WorldWide Transit Cabal (not to be confused with the Secret Worldwide Transit Cabal, since of course their membership is secret, though at times my blogging is as active as there's), I have long argued that development of sustainable transport will be good for the economy as well as other growing things (to paraphrase the National Lampoon).
Recently, a study by Professor Gary Pivo has been released that demonstrates that this is not just a forward looking statement. Sustainable Transit-Oriented Development is presently good for home values and are associated with lower risk of foreclosure. How good? To quote Ped Shed's summary of the research results:
The second hypothesis was that default risk was reduced by sustainability features (or conversely, risk was increased by unsustainable features). This also turned out to be true. The effect of the variables was substantial:
- Commute time: Every 10-minute increase in average commute time increased the risk of default by 45%.
- Rail commute: Where at least 30% of the residents took a subway or elevated train to work, the risk of default decreased by 64.4%. New York City was omitted from this calculation because it skewed the results.
- Walk commute: Every increase of 5 percentage points in the percent of residents who walk to work decreased the risk of default by 15%.
- Retail presence: Where there were at least 16 retail establishments nearby, the risk of default decreased by 34.4%.
- Affordability: For properties with some units required to be affordable, the risk of default decreased by 61.9%.
- Freeway presence: Where properties were located within 1,000 feet of a freeway, the risk of default increased by 59%.
- Park presence: Where properties were located within 1 mile of a protected area, the risk of default decreased by 32.5%.
And this does not seem to be just "fishing for results": adding these factors to a model used by other researchers, including "characteristics of the loan, property, neighborhood and location, and regional and national economies" improved the accuracy of the model on four measures of goodness of fit.
The full essay may also be found at the
Stars Hollow Gazette and the
HillbillyReport.org.
Feel free to use the comment section to talk about the topic of the essay, or about any other topic in sustainable transport or development.