Ranking walkble places

The narrative in the opening of this story on CNN.com encapsulates how more people are voting with their feet by increasingly seeking out walkable places — and what developers and builders need to do to meet the growing demand created by those who are looking for another option than the strictly car-dependent lifestyle of their parents:

Caitlin Jones and her fiance, Evan Oxfeld, grew up in suburbs where getting anywhere worth going required a car. When the couple started looking for their first home together, they wanted something different: walkability. “For me at least, that was the thing I missed most about college — just being able to walk everywhere,” Oxfeld said as he and Jones strolled through Arlington’s Ballston neighborhood, where they are moving into a condo.

Whether it’s the viral popularity of websites like WalkScore, prices remaining steady in walkable neighborhoods as the prices of conventional subdivisions fall around them, or front page stories on CNN and major newspapers around the country, it’s clear that more people are desiring places where they can live without being married to their car (or two) for everything they need.

The only problem is that as fast as walkable places have gained traction and momentum in the market, it’s still a drastically underserved market, according to Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at Brookings and a real estate professor and developer.

Option of Urbanism, one of many quality books on environmental education, environmental science, and biodiversity available from Island PressPartially to accompany his new book, “The Option of Urbanism”, Brookings released “Footloose and Fancy Free“, a walkability survey of the top 30 U.S. metros that ranks them in a slightly different manner than you might expect. Instead of measuring just the numbers of people who walk and how much walking happens per capita, they measured the static number of “walkable urban places,” and then calculated how many distinct “places” that each metro had per capita.

Which explains how the Washington, DC region came in first in their rankings, ahead of cities that do more walking — like New York City. This of course, led to predictable debates in the blogosphere among advocates for this city and that city, criticizing the ratings and standing up for their walkable (or in some cases, unwalkable) cities.

Whether DC is more “walkable” than New York is to miss the point, really.

The crux is really how much we have invested in walkability over the last 25 years, and how far we still have to go to satiate the demand for classic places — places where you can select a house, rowhouse, townhome, condo or apartment, and get to where you need to go each day on foot, bike, transit — or car. (You could also say the point is that we’re all talking about walkability!)

As we’re learning, there are other benefits. Investing in our existing urban places to provide better transit, more walkability, more retail and more housing options — along with creating new walkable places — could have a more drastic impact on climate change than even the most strict proposed vehicle emissions standards. (Have you heard of Growing Cooler, yet?)

On the Creative Class Exchange, Richard Florida noted some of the other competitive advantages for the places that invest more in walkability, transit, mobility, housing choice, and less in sprawl, in light of the continuing shift to a knowledge-based creative economy — especially in our major metros:

Well, if Jane Jacobs and Robert Lucas are right, the creative-knowledge-driven economy gets its greatest productivity boost from clustering and agglomeration. The more clustered, the more dense, the more face-to-face interactions and random collisions the greater the rate of innovation, the greater productivity growth.

I have said many times that America’s stretched-out spatial structure, which was such a boon to Fordism, isl be a dead-weight competitive disadvantage in the creative economy.

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