Another really interesting article from The Atlantic Cities, this time looking at the price premium people are increasingly willing to pay to locate in a walkable neighbourhood:
Instinct probably tells you that you’ll pay a lot more to live in a downtown apartment, above a grocery store, next to a bar strip and within walking distance of your work place than you will to settle into a comparable home in a bedroom community outside of the city. As this model of compact urban living grows more popular – and every new housing projection reaffirms that it is – walkable places are also growing more expensive.
Just how much more expensive, though, may shock you. New research from the Brookings Institution has created a five-tiered scale of walkability for metropolitan neighborhoods, from completely non-walkable places (exurban residential communities where everyone gets around by car) to mixed-use, dense and amenity-rich neighborhoods where you may not need a car at all (think, in the Washington, D.C., region, Dupont Circle and Georgetown).
Brookings researchers Christopher Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo wanted to put hard numbers to the difference between these places. Looking at the Washington, D.C., region, they’ve calculated that moving from a Level 1 to a Level 2 walkable neighborhood (from a non-walkable place to a slightly less non-walkable one), you will wind up paying $301.76 a month more in rent for a similar home. If you’re really moving up in the world – from, say, that car-dependent exurb to a Georgetown flat – that means the premium to live in a walkable urban community may run you as much as $1,200 a month.
I think we’re seeing similar trends in Auckland, with recent house price statistics once again showing the strongest gains (prices compared to the previous November 2007 peak) in inner isthmus areas, whereas house prices have been static or even falling in the outer suburbs and rural towns.
Leading the Auckland pack are Kingsland (up 19 per cent to the end of March), Grey Lynn (up 17.9 per cent) and Mt Eden (up 16.1 per cent).
Then, all above 10 per cent, come Western Springs, Epsom, Westmere, Meadowbank, Pt Chevalier, Sandringham, Lynfield, Onehunga, Glendowie and Mt Albert.
While outer areas such as Wellsford (down 17.4 per cent), Clendon Park (down 14 per cent) and Manurewa East (down 12.3 per cent) are struggling, prices in the central Auckland suburbs continue to rise.
Back to the USA:
…all of this means that truly walkable urban communities are much more economically vibrant than their drivable suburban neighbors. For each step up this walkablity ladder (which was constructed using the Irvine Minnesota Inventory of urban design dimensions linked to walkability), a store is likely to boost its retail sales by 80 percent, in part thanks to all this sidewalk traffic. The value of your home is likely to go up by $81.54 per square foot. Average rent per square foot of office space, meanwhile, goes up $8.88. (These are all, by the way, correlations, not causal explanations, although Leinberger expects that urban researchers will prove that link eventually.)…
…“It wasn’t that many years ago that walkable urban places had a price penalty associated with them, not a price premium,” Leinberger says. “That’s the structural shift. And when you have a structural shift, it’s important to change your public policy to take it into consideration.”
Those “walkable urban places” he’s talking about did not necessarily have people walking around in them 20 years ago (“Maybe they were running around because they were fearful of being mugged,” Leinberger says). These were the inner-city neighborhoods that middle-class city-dwellers abandoned decades ago. Over time, they deteriorated. They became the cheap places to live. And now that trend is reversing.
Surely the development market in Auckland will catch on to these trends eventually and we’ll see a boom in the provision of inner-city housing (as long as our planning rules provide for it). Surely.
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