Housing Affordability
Following up on Matt's post below, it's worth linking to the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. This got some play in the blogs a few months back. Here's a map of "affordable" Puget Sound, if you only consider housing costs:
And here's the same map of affordability when you look at housing and transportation costs combined:
Take a few minutes at the site and play with the tool. You can make all sorts of fun graphs taking into account gas prices and more.
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My favorite map is the transportation as a percentage of income map.
Affordability is a tricky concept. In my post I ignored affordability and assumed a person can either spend their money on transportation or a house. In reality, you're limited by how much the bank will lend you. I think it's this effect more than anything that pushes working class families to the exurbs.
I think that's exactly right. I'm pretty sure that the reason that this think tank (in collaboration with Brookings) came up with this tool is specifically to convince banks to re-think how they lend money and to whom.
Honestly, I can't make any sense of the maps- whichever of the colors you assume to represent "affordable" doesn't seem to work- and in any case, affordable for whom? Mercer Island, for example, is turquoise, but there are obviously people who can afford to live there. In any case, whichever color you assign, the map doesn't change that much in the example offered- certainly not more than the difference I would expect a sharp buyer to find in the marginal area between affordable and not affordable.
For my own part, I would buy a roadmap and use a felt-tip marker to put a dot on each major potential employer- and I sure wouldn't trust any on-line tool I've seen to get that right.
I understand that younger people might be more inclined to use a computer (to a man with a hammer, every problem...) but, in view of recent events, I'm also inclined to think that may be one way we've become so, shall we say, "highly leveraged".