Dallas Morning News
A rowboat isn't much use without an oar.
You can stand on one leg, but walking requires two.
Similarly, North Texas won't remain a great place to live without a regional housing strategy to complement its regional transportation strategy.
Think about it: Our transportation infrastructure – roads and mass transit lines and the like – exists primarily to get each of us from where we live to where we work. To that end, we have regional planning agencies that project future travel patterns and see that roads and transit lines are built where they're needed.
The other way – actually, the better way – to make commuting more efficient and our lives more bearable is to reduce the distance between where we live and where we work. That approach has all sorts of additional benefits: lower gasoline outlays, less aggravation, cleaner air.
You might assume that the free market will sort things out – that people will naturally choose to live close to where they work, even without a regional strategy. But here's the crucial point: Many people in our region live far from their jobs because they can't afford to live any closer.
Many residents, particularly in newer, more desirable areas, struggle to find affordable housing simply because their incomes have not kept up with increases in housing costs. As a benchmark, the federal government defines any household that spends more than 30 percent of its income on housing as "housing burdened." In the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area, that includes more than one-third of homeowners who are still paying on a mortgage, according to the Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey. The percentage of renters who are "housing burdened" is even higher.
To complicate matters, the housing market isn't a free market. The zoning policies of many cities actually exclude people toward the lower end of the economic scale. In some communities, even critical workers such as teachers, police officers and nurses are hard-pressed to find housing they can afford – much less child care workers, construction workers and retail clerks.
There's an issue of fairness here. If we expect people to do a good job of building the house we live in or caring for our 3-year-old child, shouldn't we be willing to welcome them as a resident of our community? Fairness aside, though, for every mile each of those workers must travel to work, our highways get more clogged, and our air gets dirtier.
What does this jobs-housing disconnect cost us in real terms? Consider that:
•To build a single highway lane just one mile long costs roughly $5 million, according to a recent Texas Department of Transportation estimate. That's $1,000 per foot – not including the cost of the underlying land.
•Just to keep congestion from getting worse as the population grows, the Dallas-Fort Worth region would need to add 300 highway miles every year. Cost: more than $1.5 billion.
•At current congestion levels, each commuter who works a regular day shift wastes an average of more than $1,000 a year through excess fuel consumption, lost productive hours, etc.
Other regions have developed a variety of solutions that could work in North Texas. They include:
•Inclusionary housing policies, which require builders to include a certain percentage of units affordable to moderate- and low-income households in any new development. In return, builders typically receive density bonuses, fee waivers or expedited approvals to offset any loss of revenue.
•Housing trust funds, typically funded through various real estate fees and surcharges.
•Use of federal tax credits to subsidize construction of housing for those who can't afford market-rate units.
•Curbs on exclusionary zoning regulations that require excessively large lots, forbid accessory units such as garage apartments or impose other rules that exclude moderate- and low-income households.
•Creating housing enterprise zones or tax increment financing districts that offer incentives to builders of working-class housing.
At our annual North Texas housing summit Jan. 24, we'll explore these and other alternatives in depth. We invite you to come be a part of the regional solution to this looming crisis. You can register online at www.nthcinc.org. Regardless of where you live, this is about the quality of your life.
Albert Martin is executive director of the North Texas Housing Coalition. His e-mail address is amartin@nthcinc.org. Dr. Timothy Bray is director of the J. McDonald Williams Institute. His e-mail address is tbray@thewilliamsinstitute.org.