Sneak Peek: Wed, April 3, 2024
Added 2024-04-03 12:57:12 +0000 UTCIn regional planning, you strive to diversify employment and housing locations. The downtown of a region's central city is almost always going to be a big employment draw, but planners look for ways to encourage development and growth of employment centers outside the central city too. A big reason is transportation. Having all the jobs in the central core and all the residential in outlying areas leads to massive inefficiencies in how limited roadway space and transit capacity get used -- unbalanced traffic flows, deadheading transit vehicles, etc. -- and it makes it much more difficult for people to live close to their jobs.
I talk about all of this in today's video, which is about "reverse commuting," i.e., living in a central city but commuting outbound to a job in the suburbs. This is ALMOST entirely theoretical to me. I've always lived in a central city (except for my year in Henderson, NV in 2022) and always worked in that same central city. EXCEPT! When I was living in Portland, I worked a short stint for Multnomah County, which is located in Gresham, just next door to Portland to the east. And honestly, the reverse commute and the length of it are a big reason I left that job after only six months and started working for a consulting firm downtown.
I can believe that's not necessarily a typical experience though, so I'd love to hear stories. Have you done a reverse commute before? Do you still? What are your personal pluses and minuses, if you don't mind sharing?
Happy Wednesday!
Comments
Somehow this topic has set me into "simmer" mode... Is this a "three body problem" in mathematical terms? Here's what I'm thinking this morning: (1) "Walkable" definitely implies basic life activities located in fairly close proximity. Food, shelter, and clothing... work, schools, weekend stuff... (Maybe we need to discuss whether you can raise kids, at all, without a car.) (2) Shelter: Looking at the most constrained items in the list above gives us work+shelter... right? If you own the business, you still have to locate "near" employees... Now: Assuming housing budgets are ~20% to 35% of income? Then the gap between business owner income and employee wages would drive living spaces... Amenity inflation, size bloat, or ... what do we get when we double the house payment but keep the apartment square footage from doubling? The customer is always right, so you'd get some NIMBY pressure, right? (I'm thinking out loud here...) Is there a dynamic at which NIMBY becomes an "amenity" and the business owners buy out the adjacent space simply to take it off the market? Do we have any research on this question, in the wild? (3) Office: So what do you get when you buy up space adjacent to your NIMBY housing? Would that leave business owners with a convenient place to put offices? Might "workplaces" and low value services become a nice buffer zone filler? I guess if you own vacant ground, you could write a ground lease and collect rents from (a) the business you own, plus (b) service providers located adjacent to those offices, plus... (c) concessions to enable schools, hospitals and fire departments... What else is missing? I guess #3 depends on employee bargaining power? Would that bargaining power be greater, or lesser with car-enabled commuting capability? I mean to ask which types of mobility shift the balance to a greater extent? Is mobility enough to offset the economic decision-power of business owners who can double-dip as rent collectors? I don't remember reading papers about this in business school, though we did skim over "company towns" as an oddity of early industrialization... 🤔 If such effects of innovation are really the way I've imagined them, then there's no organic counterbalance... that I can see. I guess I have some reading to do. But what search terms?
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2024-04-09 15:13:59 +0000 UTCI lived in the Kansas City "ring commute" for a decade... 1990s. Not a reverse commute, but 65mph to and from work, about a half hour drive. Almost no traffic. Literally never had to see the crusty downtown. Cheap par-3 golf courses everywhere! Cheap housing. Indeed, I had a difficult adjustment when I got a short commute, later, and could no longer "unwind" in the car. Looking back, that was really weird... Chicago, LA and SF were same, when I traveled for work. Remember Herz Gold Club? ;-) Here's a data point for you: I could judge my degree of urbanism by how long my car smelled new! ;-) As my career advanced, I no longer parked in the sun! Of course, the ultimate urbanism is work from home. But you can tell that's not really the ultimate, because it includes the word "work." I guess "ultimate" would be passive income. 🤔 Maybe urbanism is not the opposite of car-centricity... Thanks bro! Keep going! Your posts always, always get me thinking! I'm adding this about an hour later, as I'm thinking about this... I wonder if cost per square foot for housing is bi-modal in functional urban centers? ...or what would come up if you filtered that way? I'm thinking about the need for cheap housing "across the alley" from expensive housing, as a necessity for a walking commute for nannies and housekeepers, all the way through, uh, ad copy writers and uh... do they still have bank tellers? Or I guess taxi drivers and family-run grocery stores? Actually, what are the available jobs in a functional urban "ism" example? My own sense of how to live changed from childhood, to post-college, to raising my own family, to post-divorce bucket-lister..? And what about the upside-down generational demographics in our weird post-family era? Wow! Great, great topic here!!!
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2024-04-09 11:10:02 +0000 UTC
