Many Americans want to live in walkable neighborhoods that are served by rapid public transportation. But these neighborhoods are few and far between and incredibly expensive to live in. That’s because in many cities and towns, building walkable neighborhoods is illegal, putting a premium on the few dense communities that exist.
The following blog is adapted from an excerpt of Smart Growth America and Transportation for America’s recent report, Driving Down Emissions, which explores how changing transportation policy and land use patterns are key to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
It may appear that the United States’ typical car-oriented suburbs and exurbs that we’ve been building for the last 60-plus years—where often the only way residents can access what they need is by car—is the most in-demand style of neighborhood.
This isn’t true. For the past few decades, the demand for compact and walkable neighborhoods connected to jobs and services by transit has skyrocketed, but the housing market hasn’t kept pace. That’s because local zoning rules often make building more of these types of neighborhoods illegal.
In 2017, 62 percent of Americans reported that living near transit was important in choosing their home, and 54 percent cited their desire to live near bike lanes and paths, as found in the National Association of Realtors’ Community Preference Survey. And despite numerous news stories warning of a mass departure of residents from U.S. cities due to COVID-19, data has shown the opposite: Zillow’s research showed that, during the pandemic, “suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.” Even during an unprecedented pandemic, large numbers of people are not fleeing the cities for the suburbs, and cities will endure.
Millions more Americans want to live in compact, transit-connected communities than can find or afford a home in one. And those who do pay a premium to be there. Yet in many towns and cities, local zoning regulations artificially constrict the number of these communities that can exist. By limiting how densely housing can be constructed or requiring minimum lot sizes, zoning interferes and prevents the market from meeting the demand for walkable, transit-served communities. In fact, it’s illegal to build anything except single-family detached houses on roughly 75 percent of land in most cities—which might explain why in the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., walkable neighborhoods account for between 0.04 percent and 1.2 percent of land area.
The consequences of making housing like duplexes or multi-unit apartment buildings illegal are severe. For one, the artificial dearth of compact, walkable neighborhoods dramatically increases property values in these types of communities that already exist—often to levels that make them unaffordable to those who could benefit from them the most. This trend has pushed low-income people out of compact cities to more affordable suburbs, where fewer transportation options fail to thoroughly connect them to jobs and services. Their transportation costs immediately go up, sometimes wiping out the gains of the more affordable housing. One study found that residents in low-income suburban neighborhoods with some transit access can reach just 4 percent of metro area jobs within a 45-minute commute. This means many people without access to a car can’t reach most jobs, further trapping them in a cycle of poverty.
In addition, it’s an immense challenge to efficiently serve a neighborhood of only single-family homes by transit. This fact, combined with the way that destinations spread farther apart, trips become longer or more frequent, and roads become wider and less safe to walk along or cross, results in more greenhouse gas emissions. Driving contributes the majority of transportation sector emissions in the United States, making transportation the largest source of U.S. carbon emissions and the only sector of the economy where emissions are rising, not decreasing.