The Center for Housing Policy released a study last week which analyzes the combined financial burden of housing and transportation on working families in 28 large metropolitan areas. Working families are defined as households with annual incomes between $20,000 and $50,000. The results, while not surprising, are startling. First, the study points out that, on average, working families spend more of their income on transportation than housing. Secondly, as housing costs decrease for these families, transportation costs increase proportionately. The net effect is that these families do not realize any overall savings as a result of buying cheaper housing farther away from the city. Moreover, the study points out, for working families, the combined cost of housing and transportation increases the farther away a family moves from the city center.

This study is a damaging blow to the hollow version of the American dream being pushed by developers and property rights advocates across the country. These groups have long contended that everyone, regardless of income, has a right to a single family house with a spacious back yard. In their simple minds, the only way to fulfill this dream is to build farther away from downtown and jobs, where land is cheap enough to build affordable homes. As it turns out, life for working families is most expensive in these communities. Given the increase in commuting times and possibly even the hours worked to cover the additional costs, workers in these communities also have less time to spend with their families. Doesn’t sound like the American dream to me.

I believe that every working family should have the opportunity to buy their own house and live their version of the American dream. Some of the most effective public policy in this country over the past 50 years has focused on enabling homeownership for people at all income levels. Unfortunately, I think our national obsession with homeownership has blinded us to the impact of these policies on other facets of our daily lives and created a bias against any form of planning that attempts to marry the goal of homeownership with transportation, economic development or environmental initiatives. As a result, the location and design of these communities is left largely to private developers, who run roughshod over acquiescent planners. If our goal as a nation is to foster homeownership among working families, shouldn’t we be working to make the true cost of owning a home affordable and improvements in quality of life real?

Smart Growth is the nationwide movement to promote such long term planning. Smart Growth advocates have been the voices in the wilderness trying to prevent myopic development and maintain livable communities for all residents. Supporters of smart growth are not anti-growth, as many contend. The point of long term planning which considers all facets of community life is to foster the sustainable growth of metropolitan area and allow for the continued increase in population projected for both large and small communities. Portland has long benefited from a version of Smart Growth in the form of Metro, a regional government body which regulates land use in the three county Portland metro area. Other similar planning bodies exist throughout the country, including Chicago Metropolis 2020, a quasi-public planning group for the Chicago metro area.