SPUR, the nonprofit that has helped shape growth in the Bay Area over the past century, has released an agenda for change stressing the importance of density and affordability. We include it here in part because it does a really good job of making the case that affordability is important to everyone — not just lower income residents: "The high cost of housing in the Bay Area is a direct threat to everything that makes this place great," notes the report. "If current trends continue, and more and more parts of the region become unaffordable to people with modest resources, we will lose our diversity, our artists, our activists, our innovators — in short, our culture. Parents will have to work so much they won’t be able to spend time with their kids. Young people will have to move somewhere else after college. We cannot keep the wonderful, uniquely open culture of the Bay
Area intact for new generations unless we find a way to bring down the cost of housing."

We should take note of SPUR's agenda for change here in Greater LA. The report is HERE.

Just saw this amazing map of the U.S. showing that in no state can a minimum wage worker afford a 2-bedroom unit at fair market rent (the amount a property would command if it were available) working a standard 40-hour work week — without paying more than 30% of income. I found it on Shane Phillips "Better Institutions" blog (www.betterinstitutions.com — see previous blog post as well). This map is from the National Low Income Housing Coalition's "Out of Reach 2013" report. Phillips notes that many minimum wage workers don't need a 2-bedroom unit, or are sharing it with a partner or roommate. Still, the point is that if you are poor in America and have a family, housing costs probably leave you with little money for food, transportation and health care. See a bigger version of the map on the NLIHC website here.

Shane Phillips has been making some interesting maps while studying for his masters at USC. His most recent shows which neighborhoods are the least (and most) car dependent. (You have to log onto his website to see them; link is below.) The most car-free is — you guessed it — Westlake/MacArthur Park, where nearly 80% of residents use public transit for their commute, and Long Beach, North Hollywood and Van Nuys also have a higher commute mode share for walking, biking and transit, as do most of the neighborhoods around downtown LA.

He's also done a map of mode share for pedestrians, and a map of the absolute number of people who commute other than by car (as opposed to a population-weighted percentage).

See maps HERE.

According to the LA Times the 2 counties contain more than half the nation's most heavily crowded neighborhoods, with rising rents far out outpacing incomes. From the outside looking in it's hard to tell, because places such as Maywood and Huntington Park don't look the highrise neighborhoods you see in Chicago or Boston. But behind the closed doors of bungalows or squat apartment buildings in overcrowded LA and Orange County neighborhoods are thousands more people per square mile.

"This is an example of poverty that can go unseen in our communities," says Jason Mandell, spokesman for United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

The overcrowding is caused in part because of rising rents, which have easily outpaced incomes across the region. A federal study 3 years ago found that between 1990 and 2009 rents in the LA metro area rose more than 20% while incomes of renters sagged 6% after adjusting for inflation. Experts say building is unusually difficult in LA, one of the factors that contributes to the affordable housing shortage.

Researchers at UCLA and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that children in overcrowded homes have poorer health, worse scores on math and reading tests and more behavioral and emotional problems such as depression and tantrums — even when poverty as a factor is taken into account. Read MORE in the LA Times.

On LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's blog: As 2 light rail lines race toward completion, there’s trouble ahead on the tracks. Unless train car production can be significantly accelerated, there won’t be enough vehicles to serve both new lines—Phase 2 of the Expo Line to Santa Monica and the Gold Line Foothill Extension to Azusa—if they open as scheduled in late 2015 and early 2016 respectively.

Metro is so concerned about the problem that it’s dispatching a delegation to the manufacturer’s headquarters in Japan later this month in hopes of finding a way to speed up production—a tall order for a company that the agency acknowledges is on track with the aggressive schedule mutually agreed to under its contract.

So, with a likely initial shortfall of about 50 train cars, the issue presents some tough decisions for Metro, all of which are likely to be unpopular with the traveling public. It could delay the new lines’ openings, operate them with shorter, more crowded trains, offer less frequent service, or redeploy cars from elsewhere in the system, thus spreading the pain more broadly.

The shortage is expected to be most severe in the first months of operation for the two new extensions, with steady improvements coming as new rail cars arrive throughout 2016. But even the prospect of a relatively short-lived disruption has been enough to strain the relationship between Metro, which will operate the lines, and the two construction authorities charged with successfully completing the projects.  Read more.

Says the Downtown News: "The surge of investment in Downtown in the last couple years has reminded many people of the pre-recession era. Then, as now, big-budget housing and other projects are announced seemingly weekly. Once again, construction cranes speckle the sky.

"There is a big difference, however, between the current boom and the one that peaked around 2006. Whereas the first wave of housing was powered by local developers often on a piecemeal basis, today the residential and mixed-use projects (and sometimes mega-projects) increasingly come from deep-pocketed institutional investors. What’s more, many of those pouring money into Downtown hail from Asia."

Read MORE.

The American Public Transportation Association says the demand for public transportation rose again last year for the 8th year in a row. Metro Rail saw an overall ridership increase of 5.4%, mostly due to the popularity of the Expo Line. Read more.

Interesting story on Transport Politic that compares ridership growth between 2001 and 2012 on the 10 urban transit networks that are not expanding their rail systems (Los Angeles and Portland are not included). The results support the idea that typical bus operations (as opposed, for example, for BRT projects like LA's Orange Line) are not offering the sort of service that attracts new riders, often because buses are simply too slow and too unreliable. (Networks that are rapidly building rail were excluded on the presumption that installing a new rail line would likely cause a considerable shift from bus to rail.) Read more.

New Starts is the biggest federal funding program for new transit projects. President Obama's proposed transportation budget, for example, includes $100 million for the Regional Connector (which will eventually receive $670 million) and $100 million for the Purple Line Extension (which should eventually get $1.25 million). Both projects are also funded by Measure R. If the budget is approved by Congress this will be the most New Starts funding that Metro has ever received! Moreover, both the Connector and Purple Line will use federally-backed TIFIA low-interest loans. As Steve Hymon writes on the Source: "The loans, the bonds, the New Starts money and Measure R combined -- that's the big kahuna here, folks. Those 4 things together give Metro the resources to build the expanded transit network many readers here want." Read more.

Interesting story in The New York Times about initiatives in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Detroit and other cities to freeze property taxes for lower-income homeowners in an effort to "promote neighborhood stability, preserve character and provide a dividend of sorts to those who have stayed [in the city] through years of high crime, population loss and declining property values." These tax adjustments are part of a broader strategy by cities to aid homeowners who continue to struggle since the home mortgage crisis. Housing experts say the arrival of newcomers into formerly working class neighborhoods such as the Mission District in San Francisco is more disruptive than it used to be because these newcomers tend to move into new condominiums or lofts instead of existing housing. Read MORE.