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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on May 9th, 2008 at 10:11 am
- Students know what L.A. needs: viable public transit!
- More thoughts on the new Speed Racer Red Line advertisements, people love these things!
- Metro’s plans for 2009: finish the Rapid system, finish the Gold Line Eastside Extension, and start adding fare gates.
- City plans on giving away land near the North Hollywood Red Line station to developers. Joel Kotkin upset.
- Inland Empire residents pay a whole lot for their commutes. I wonder if sitting in traffic is worth it?
- Bicyling Magazine paints a rosy picture of Los Angeles, Westside BikeSIDE sets the story straight.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
People don’t look beyond the mortgage payment when they’re buying a house. In reality, commuting and housing costs are interchangeable: the lower the cost (time + money) of accessing a major activity node, the higher the price of the real estate. This is why rental housing adjacent to college campuses, to use one salient example, costs twice as much as functionally identical housing as little as two miles away.
That $300k McMansion in Palmdale may look tempting, but you’re going to be spending at least $300 more per month on your commute (in gas alone, never mind time costs) and at least $100 more per month on heating and cooling costs than you would if you bought the equivalent house in, say, Glendale.
If the time penalty of commuting were monetized through a comprehensive road pricing system, you would see even more drastic differences in land prices between interior and peripheral areas.
BUT, there are other reasons folks choose to live in the Inland Empire (I’ll grant you Palmdale and Lancaster, the only reason one should live there is if they work there.). There’s space between houses, you are close to skiing, the traffic isn’t as congested as the Valley or the Westside (especially on the weekends), and you are that much closer to Vegas, Palm Springs, and the Indian Casinos. You have your own airport to fly out of, which makes getting in and out incredibly convenient (not to mention that parking 300 feet from the terminal doesn’t cost an arm and a leg). You could take the train into work if you worked downtown or in one of the major OC centers, but the drive isn’t too horrible, especially if you can carpool.
The other thing is that work locations can be fickle. I know someone who was promoted to Quartz Hill from his Industry office. The rule in our agency is you never turn down a promotion, no matter where it is, or you will be put at the end of the line. Luckily the taxpayers are paying for his gas and his vehicle (from his home in Rancho Cucamonga) but spending time with the wife and kids on the cell phone is not the same as doing so in person.
Space between houses in the IE? Surely you jest. Maybe in older areas, but not in your typical KB/Pardee/Hovnanian/Centex tract. Just look at aerial photos of recently developed areas: we’re talking levels of paved/built-area-to-green-space reminiscent of 1920s bungalow neighborhoods in Chicago or San Francisco. Most of the recent tracts I’ve seen in the IE, south OC, and northern LA County are full of “sugar houses”–i.e., houses close enough to one another that you can pass a cup of sugar from one kitchen to another.
The high density of development in its exurbs is a major reason that Los Angeles’ urban area has the highest population density of any in the United States. Lot sizes for greenfield development here are some of the smallest in the country.
Peter, to be fair- a comparable McMansion in Glendale will cost around $850K compared to the $300K in Palmdale, clearly the differences between the 2 is more than a few hundred dollars a month.
I suppose it doesn’t equal out, even if you throw in the value of time wasted commuting from long distances. Even so, a big house on a tiny lot in an isolated area doesn’t strike me as anything resembling paradise.
We are going to find out — the hard way — that these housing valuations are incorrect.
Let’s guess the value of these homes five to ten years after the housing-bubble variations bottom out. This is not five to ten years from this date, since the bottom has yet to occur. This is firing at a target in a pitch-dark room.
What factors outside of prices alone add premiums or discounts? There needs to be a better explanation other than price alone to determine why Glendale has or deserves such a premium.
Shouldn’t we be subsidizing housing purchases 100% and then subsidizing the monthly costs 25-50% as well? Of course, not for all houses. Only those houses that are within defined housing service corridors will qualify while all will be taxed to pay for it. Otherwise we may find people unable to afford houses and other people making housing decisions based on bad land use theories.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
I’m not sure where to post this, so I will post it here.
There is an interesting op-ed by Paul Krugman in the New York Times and the oil futures market and how conservatives are the ones complaining instead of progressives. Their fear. The horror for them is that people might start taking public transit to work.