Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Affordability and Harvesting the Green Dividend

I want TOD to be more affordable, I really do. I think that it's important not to push people out and very important to allow people to have an opportunity to use transit and save money by living by it. There's only one problem right now, rail transit is so limited in this country, no one can reasonably expect developers that see a market to not try to build to what they can get. The non-profits and foundations can come in and figure out a way to capture the value created so that some of it goes back into the community. Portland did this by harvesting value from the Pearl District and the Twin Cities is looking to harvest the green dividend as well.

But they can't do it alone. TOD needs transit. It needs a well connected network, one that most cities don't have. I think that TOD in cities with good transit has proven its worth. New York, Washington DC, San Francisco. But we can't expect cities to have inexpensive TOD everywhere when its a niche super hot market that is under built and there is no T. It's starting to look promising since the space race is heating up, but there's a long way to go.

This post was a reaction/commentary on Steve Hymon's TOD posts.

1 comment:

Michael Pereckas said...

Really there has to be more transit for transit-oriented development to be near for TOD to not be an exotic and expensive option found only in the expensive neighborhoods of expensive cities. I visit my German friends and am just stunned by the places they live while having ordinary jobs and ordinary incomes. If there even was a neighborhood like that where I live (which there obviously isn't) just imagine how much it would cost! But they have lots of neighborhoods like that. Sure it's nice, sure it's costly, but it's ordinary nice, and ordinary costly, and ordinary people live there.