In the previous blog post in this series, I posited that (generally speaking) able-bodied individuals should be expected to pay for their housing, and that for housing to be “affordable” to an individual, it should take up no more than about 30% of their salary, both as a rule of thumb and by the federal government’s own definition. But that’s not the end of the story when it comes to establishing what affordable housing is.

Another major question is this: How far away from one’s employment can housing be to still be functionally affordable for that worker? If I work a minimum wage job on the moon, renting a house on Earth and paying to commute daily to outer space won’t cut it.

For a more grounded example, if a worker’s job is in Overland Park, Kansas, but their housing is 25 minutes away east of downtown Kansas City, would that housing—meeting all criteria before considering location—qualify as “affordable housing”, given the added cost of transportation? If the same job were in Independence—nearly 40 minutes away from Overland Park—would we expect that worker to change jobs to something closer to home, or move to housing closer to their job? How do our expectations change if instead of gas being $2 per gallon, it jumps to $5 per gallon?

This question of affordable housing in the context of geography is a nuanced question that doesn’t necessarily have an intuitive or universal answer. But that doesn’t mean answers aren’t being proposed.

For example, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, or H+T Index, attempts to simulate what residents of a given census tract might expect to pay in housing and transportation combined as a percentage of their income. Keep in mind that “transportation” here includes all transportation, including trips to the grocery store, for entertainment, etc., so the H+T Index isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison to the HUD definition or other housing-only definitions of affordability. But the H+T index is helpful for understanding that affordable housing that isn’t close to gainful employment is, for all intents and purposes, not affordable.

Other factors can also play into the definition of affordable housing, including whether affordable housing includes homes for purchase as well as homes for rent; whether affordability considers the mitigating costs of roommates where appropriate; and the extent to which affordable housing could still be inadequate housing in some other qualitative way.

That said, a reasonable baseline definition of affordable housing includes the following: it should generally be paid for by the individual, should not exceed 30% of their salary, and should be available in rough proximity to their place of employment. Now, we can turn to the question we’re exploring in this series: Does Kansas City have an affordable housing problem? Stay tuned.

The post Part Four: Does Kansas City Have an Affordable Housing Problem? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Cox comes to a number of very interesting conclusions.

For one, Kansas City’s housing is much more affordable relative to incomes than in any of the cities The Economist considers for their list of the 10 Most Livable Cities. The reason for this is that while cities were increasing land regulation through urban containment policies, Kansas City did not. For example, in 1990 Denver, Portland and Kansas City were all similar in the relation of housing prices to median income. Since then, due largely to excessive land use regulation, Denver and Portland housing prices have skyrocketed while incomes have not. Kansas City homes have remained as affordable as they were before.

Another one of Kansas City’s competitive advantages is commute times. Despite its sprawl, Kansas City has one of the shortest commute times in the world. Thanks to an impressive network of highways, traffic congestion is so slight that Kansas City had the least traffic congestion (tied with Richmond) in the 2015 Tom Tom Traffic Index. And lack of congestion isn’t due to public transit. Eighty-two percent of area residents commute to work alone in a car—including 76 percent of low-income workers.  In fact, only 3 percent of low-income workers in Kansas City commute to work by transit. Kansas City (like virtually all US metropolitan areas) is an automobile-oriented city and doing just fine.

Understanding these advantages is imperative if Kansas City is going to build on our strengths. Policy makers are often lured into adopting programs based on the results in Portland, or Denver, or Dallas. But Kansas City is not any of those places, and there is little guarantee that such policies will work here. If we want Kansas City to succeed, we need to understand exactly what we have to offer. This paper seeks to start that discussion.

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We’ve talked before about how Saint Louis City’s attitudes toward non-city alternatives for the NGA expose local leadership’s fair-weather regionalism. After all, no matter what happens, NGA jobs are staying in the region and the area’s economy should remain unaffected. But in a bid to “redevelop” a part of North Saint Louis and keep the earnings tax revenue the NGA currently generates, Saint Louis City is preparing to pull out all the stops.

Saint Clair County is offering a low-cost, green field option on the north end of Scott Air Force base to the NGA, with the state of Illinois preparing to throw in $116 million in infrastructure improvements for the site. Saint Louis City’s original offer was a North City site at a cost $14 million, with $120 million in assistance from the state of Missouri. Now, Saint Louis will waive the $14-million cost, which was supposed to recoup the city’s expenses for preparing the site. Such costs will have to be pushed onto Missouri residents. Additionally, not to be outdone by Illinois’s infrastructure improvements, Saint Louis is throwing a MetroLink expansion into the deal as well. Strangely, Saint Louis has not put forward a solid plan for how it would fund a new billion-dollar-plus light rail line.

While city hall’s financial/infrastructure incentives may seem a little half-baked, they’re nothing compared to its rhetoric. Apparently, according to Saint Louis’s leadership, the city should get the NGA because millennials like to live and work downtown, among other lazy generalizations about an entire generation of Americans. One official stated that, “The days when talented young people wanted to commute 25, 35, 45 miles are over.” An interesting statement, because, since millennials have entered the workforce, the percentage of workers commuting longer than 25 minutes has regularly increased while the share of workers commuting less than 15 minutes has decreased:

This is just another example of how the generation dubbed “millennials” is, largely, much like the generations that preceded them in terms of living, working, and commuting. And city hall’s statements appear to be typical of local government officials using generational stereotypes to justify the types of policies they (not millennials themselves) have pursued for decades.

What’s more, even if millennials are everything that Saint Louis City leaders hope they are (and want to live downtown and take public transportation to work), the existing MetroLink already goes to Scott Airforce Base, where the NGA could be. Millennials could, if the Illinois site were chosen, live on Washington Avenue and ride the train to work. That certainly sounds easier than flattening a large section of North Saint Louis and spending billions to expand the MetroLink. Given the fact the city’s plan would turn dozens of families out of their homes, wouldn’t that be a fairer solution as well?

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For instance, if we go back to 1990, Jackson County, which contains the Kansas City core, contained more than half of all employment in the Kansas City area’s most populous counties (Jackson, Johnson, Clay, and Wyandotte). Johnson County (KS) was a distant second, with about a quarter of the region’s employment. Johnson County could even have been considered a bedroom community, with more people commuting out of than commuting into the county.

Flash forward to 2013 and the situation had changed radically. While Jackson County still housed about the same number of workers as it did in 1990, Johnson County added nearly 120,000 jobs. More workers still commute from Johnson County to Jackson County than vice versa, but the gap narrowed significantly. Johnson County is also now a net importer of workers. Jackson County’s share of employment among Kansas City’s largest counties dropped from 52% to 44% in the period, while Johnson County’s share reached 36%.

Residents in the Kansas City region are more likely than ever to work in, and not just live in, the suburbs. Unfortunately, Kansas City officials still have a tendency to channel investment to the downtown area to a degree that is disproportionate to its actual economic importance and promote transportation plans (public and otherwise) that would be more appropriate to 1920 than to 2020. The region would be better off planning for the city it has rather than an outdated image of the past. 

The post Working in Kansas City: The Rise of Johnson County appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That data indicate that driving is still king, and unlikely to be dethroned any time soon. In 2014, 79% of commuters in Saint Louis City either drove alone or carpooled to get to work. In Saint Louis County, that number was more than 90%. In the Kansas City area, almost 90% of commuters drove alone or carpooled. As for public transportation use, the numbers remain quite modest. Saint Louis City had 10% of its commuters use transit, but in Saint Louis County and Jackson County that number was less than 3%.

If we consider what the numbers in terms of long-term trends, our writing from last year on this subject remain relevant:

Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat.

Nothing has happened to refute those observations. In fact, from 2013 to 2014 transit commuters as a percentage of all commuters decreased in Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, Jackson County, and Clay County, as the chart below demonstrates:

All of the recent changes have been small and may be within the margin of error. This means we cannot say that transit is definitely drawing a lower percentage of riders than they did last year. But we can say that the Census Bureau’s 2014 data, much like data from previous years, show no evidence of either a rapid rise in the preference for transit or a rapid decrease in preference for driving in Missouri’s largest cities. 

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 In 2013, Metro spent about $160 million on its bus system. The performance of that system is questionable, both in terms of total ridership and cost-efficiency. In no Saint Louis County census tract does transit account for 25% of all commuters. No bus route covers its operating costs with fare revenue, and many large buses travel Saint Louis’ streets nearly empty. Why aren’t county residents, even in depressed areas of Saint Louis County, using the bus more often?

Perhaps the better question is why those with any other option would take the bus to begin with. The map above shows the bus routes that currently serve North Saint Louis County.

What is immediately obvious is that, aside from downtown and a couple routes to mid-county areas, buses that serve North County stay in North County. They do not provide direct service to the Central West End, South Saint Louis City, West Saint Louis County, or South Saint Louis County, much less Illinois. Most routes funnel riders to the MetroLink, where they have to transfer to a train, and (if their final destination is not on top of the MetroLink) transfer once more to reach their final destination.

To illustrate how time consuming this process can be, we list rush-hour travel time from a randomly chosen address in Ferguson, MO, to prominent employment areas and compared that to travel time for a car.

Of course a car will be faster than transit, but it is surprising just how much faster it is, even for areas near Ferguson. Take the Galleria, which is about 10 miles (or a 20 minute drive) away. Using transit, the trip would take well over an hour. Why? The fastest transit route includes two transfers, which entails a lot of waiting around.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution for making the Saint Louis bus system better. The region has low population density and spread-out work locations. But it’s never going to look better until Metro can provide service that people will actually find value in without breaking the bank. Metro does plan to change routes after the completion of its transit center, and that may improve the situation somewhat. But maybe, before it plans another $5 million bus stop, Metro should consider how many new buses that money could buy them, and why anyone who could park in their free lot would want to use the bus anyway. 

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The map above shows the second most used transportation mode for commuting to work in the Saint Louis area census tracts, after cars. As the map demonstrates, for much of Saint Louis County and a few parts of the city, working from home (or telecommuting) is the most used mode for commuting after cars. In much of the city and North Saint Louis County, transit is the second most used. However, in the city’s central corridor, where transit is most abundant, the dominant mode of getting to work (after cars) is actually walking, not transit. Read more from the Show-Me Institute on transit and commuting in Saint Louis here.

The post Map Series: VII. Second Most Used Transportation Mode for Commuting in Saint Louis, After Cars appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The map above shows the second most used transportation mode for commuting to work in the Kansas City area census tracts, after cars. As the map demonstrates, for much of the city and surrounding counties, working from home (or telecommuting) is the most used mode for commuting after cars. In much of the center west of the city and southern Clay County, transit is second most used. However, in the city’s downtown area, where transit is most abundant (and the streetcar is opening), the dominant mode of getting to work (after cars) is actually walking, not transit. Read more from the Show-Me Institute on transit and commuting in Kansas City here.

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The map above shows the mean travel time to work in minutes for residents of Saint Louis City and County census tracts. The lighter the color, the lower the average commute time, and vice versa. The map shows how travel times tend to be shortest in the central corridor and in the county along Route 67. The longest travel times are in North Saint Louis City and the fringes of Saint Louis County. While the distance from major work centers makes the later fact unsurprising, North Saint Louis City’s mean travel times may come as a surprise to some readers. The reason is that many North Saint Louisans are transit-dependent, which results in much higher commute times than those who drive personal vehicles to work. Read more from the Show-Me Institute on Saint Louis transportation here.

The post Map Series: V. Saint Louis Area Travel Time to Work appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The map above shows the mean travel time to work per census tract in the Kansas City area. The dark black outline is the city itself. This map shows how mean travel times tend to be lowest on the border within Kansas City as well as within eastern Johnson County. Longer travel times are experienced by those living in northern Clay and southeastern Jackson County. Read more from the Show-Me Institute on Kansas City transportation here.

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The case with Saint Louis and Kansas City, with only around 10 percent of the job market density of NYC, is considerably worse. In both cities, less than 1 percent of job opportunities in the city can be reached within 30 minutes of transit travel. Only around 5 percent of jobs can be reached within one hour. A chart of percentage of jobs available by transit travel time is below:

As a result, moving from suburban residences (where most Saint Louisans live) to suburban workplaces (where most Saint Louisans work) is not well served by transit. Furthermore, large employment centers in exurban areas are difficult to reach via transit at all. Despite significant investment and operating costs—usually more than $300 million per year in Saint Louis—it is clear that very few workplaces can be reached quickly via transit in Missouri.

What accounts for this disconnect? One factor may be that cities like Saint Louis and Kansas City are polycentric urban centers with employment clustering in different nodes across the metropolitan area. Focusing on Saint Louis, while virtually all of Saint Louis City and much of Saint Louis County has reasonable access to transit, much of the system is focused on bringing people in and out of the downtown core. A map of MetroBus accessibility is show below:

A second problem is that transit is time-costly even where it regularly operates, putting work locations outside the 30- or 60-minute transit range. Again taking Saint Louis as an example, it takes 30 minutes to travel from the Chase Park Plaza (in the Central West End) to City Hall via walking and transit. That is about as transit-friendly a route that exists in the city. Traveling from the Central West End to Monsanto headquarters for work (around 8.5 miles apart) would take an hour or more via transit, necessitating a commuter to leave at 7:38 a.m. to get to work by 8:55 a.m. The drive, depending on traffic, is less than 20 minutes.

These realities likely contribute to the very low share of commuters who choose transit in Saint Louis and Kansas City. And unfortunately, it is unlikely that any feasible increase in transit spending or service extension will meaningfully alter these realities. Without significantly rethinking how transit is provided, there is little chance the mode will be able to provide timely transportation for labor pools in Saint Louis and Kansas City.

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Carpooling is the second most popular method of commuting in Missouri. In 2013, around 9 percent of Missourians carpooled to get to work, more than five times the number that used transit. Carpooling and ridesharing are undeniably efficient. More people per car mean lower pollution per person and less congestion on highways, all utilizing the existing resource that more than 90 percent of Missouri households own: a personal vehicle.

Despite advantages, carpooling is an increasingly less popular form of commuting. As recently as 1980, one in five workers carpooled. That percentage fell quickly between 1980 and 1990, and has continued to slowly decline.

The culprits of carpool decline are mostly market-based: more people own cars, population and work centers are more diverse, work schedules are more variable than in the past. Declining carpooling rates in the United States also may be due to structural changes to the U.S. economy (carpooling is far more prevalent for those in the manufacturing sector). However, government policies may be preventing the rebound.

If increasing wealth of Missourians and an increasingly diverse economic environment have led to the decline of ridesharing, new technology that matches potential drivers with riders represents a market-based opportunity for carpooling to rebound. Far from encouraging the rise of a car-sharing economy, Saint Louis and Kansas City have attacked companies that make use of this new technology to protect vested taxicab interests.

If cities in Missouri are serious about reducing congestion and pollution, they should focus more on encouraging carpooling and ridesharing, not just expanding transit. And like many other cases, the best policies are for the city to reduce regulation, stop trying to plan the economy, and let the market operate.

The post The Decline of Carpooling in Missouri: Time for a Rebound? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unfortunately, the most recent commuting data on the national and Missouri levels show no such nascent transformation. In fact, on the national level a higher percentage (73.6 percent) of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than they did in 2010. Transit usage has shown some increase, but only from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent of commuters. Given the increasing resources going to transit agencies nationally, along with high fuel prices and an anemic economic recovery, a 0.2 percent increase in commuting mode share for transit is unimpressive.

In Missouri, the story is much the same. At the state level, a slightly smaller percentage of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than in 2010, but it only fell less than 0.1 percent (to 81.66 percent of commuters). Public transportation did increase its modal share, but only by 0.06 percent (from 1.56 percent to 1.62 percent of commuters). In Missouri as a whole and every major Missouri city other than Saint Louis, more commuters walk to work than use public transportation.

A longer time horizon makes the situation look even worse. Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat. The same is true of Kansas City and Saint Louis.

While total transit usage may be increasing in aggregate, in Missouri and virtually everywhere else in the country, driving alone is still the undisputed king of commuting. As for public transportation, Missouri spends more than $400 million per year on average on transit, but less than 2 percent of the population use it to get to work.

It may be time to reconsider both the idea that transit usage is sweeping America and that increasing resources to transit (without some serious rethinking of how the money is spent) will propel a transportation revolution.

The post Missouri Commuting Habits: Public Transportation on the Ascendency? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Saint Louis and Kansas City, less than 4 percent of the population uses public transportation regularly. While both cities have bus services, Saint Louis has only two light-rail lines and Kansas City has none. Both have streetcar systems in the works, but they have not been completed. This, if we believe those who push for trains and trolleys, is failure. To them, success is a city like Portland, Ore.

Portland, with a comparable metro population to Saint Louis and Kansas City, has a light-rail system, extensive streetcar service, buses, transit-oriented development, and bike share programs. Transit heaven. However, according to the U.S. census, only 10 percent of Portland residents use transit to get to work while 81 percent drive (71 percent drive alone). Despite the city’s much publicized streetcar investments, the major growth category for commuting in Portland is telecommuting, not transit. Providing 10 percent of the population with transit cost Portland almost $4 billion in capital expenses in the last 20 years, none of which has been recovered from commuter fares. That number does not include the cost of maintenance and regular operation. In fact, Portland invested $1.7 billion of capital in transit since 2000 to see total public transit commuters rise from 7 percent to 10 percent.

To sum it up, if Kansas City and Saint Louis invest billions in infrastructure, cordon off growth, and subsidize transit-oriented development (as Portland has), they might get 10 percent of people to commute on public transportation. This is progress if the only measure of success is getting people on transit regardless of cost. However, if the goal is to create economically efficient transportation options for Missouri, this approach is ineffective. Even if your goal is to get as many people on public transit as possible, there has to be a better way.

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Every day, Missouri has approximately 195,000 commuters that come into the state to work. That is the fifth highest total for any state. It is 55,000 more than leave the state to work each day. That ratio (+ 55,000) is the third highest number for any state. In both cases, Missouri trails only states along the eastern seaboard. (Our source for this is the 2000 Census, and we will update these numbers as soon as they are released from the 2010 Census.)

Missouri has low excise taxes. We have the lowest cigarette tax, the sixth lowest gasoline tax, the lowest beer tax, the ninth lowest wine tax, and the third lowest tax on spirits (liquor). What do excise rates and commuter totals have to do with each other?

Low excise taxes serve as an inducement for the 195,000 commuters to Missouri to voluntarily choose to purchase these goods while in Missouri. Missouri gains the tax revenue, and those commuters then bring many of the costs of the externalities of these items back to their home states. Low taxation levels on items that are often bought as part of a special trip serve as an incentive for commuters into Missouri to make those special trips when in Missouri. (This is opposed to, say, lowering the tax on lettuce, which is generally purchased as part of a comprehensive trip to the grocery store.)

These goods (gas, alcohol, tobacco) have other properties that make them a target for purchasing by commuter consumers. They can be purchased very quickly. This is a function of the standard quantity the goods are bought in, and the lack of search costs for most of the products. The reduced search costs are themselves a function of either no brand loyalty (gas) or extreme band loyalty (cigarettes). Among these three goods, only alcohol will generally see comparison shopping, but even there brand loyalty is very strong. These goods also do not spoil. (Cold beer is an exception.) Commuter consumers are not going to buy groceries on their lunch break, or before a long commute home in traffic. Finally, all of these items are more difficult to purchase online than other goods, for fairly obvious reasons and certain legal restrictions.

Missouri’s low excise taxes don’t just benefit Missourians who use these goods. They benefit the entire state by encouraging 195,000 daily commuter consumers to make these purchases while in Missouri. On the other side, they encourage the 140,000 Missourians who leave the state each workday to hold off on these purchases until they return to Missouri. This maximizes the tax revenues received by Missouri, while the costs of the externalities are spread among many states.

NB: As a matter of internal policy, the Show-Me Institute does not hold opinions. All opinions expressed in Show-Me Institute publications and video are those of the respective authors or speakers.

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