Daily Score Blog

Yikes!  Rental rates are rising the way housing prices were a few years back:

Apartment rents averaged $1,026 in King County and $1,071 in Seattle in March -- up 2.5 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively, from September and about 8.5 percent in both cases from March 2007.

In my view, rental costs are a far better bellwether of housing affordability than the more commonly cited indexes based on the cost of purchasing a home.  Rent matters much more to low-to-middle income families; the lower down on the income ladder you are the more likely you are to rent rather than own.  And for years, housing markets have been wacky -- "irrationally exuberant," as they say -- so rental rates have more closely reflected the true value of housing as shelter, rather than the speculative value of housing as get-rich-quick scheme.

Obviously the increase in rental costs is a real problem for lots of working families.  Coupled with the  rampant inflation in food and fuel costs, it's adding injury to insult. But the question is, what can be done about it?

Seattle's rent increases seems to represent genuine supply scarcity; vacancy rates are plummeting as prices rise.  And high demand for the available rental homes may be driven by another force:  people are looking to move closer to work (ie., to Seattle proper rather than distant suburbs) to save on transportation costs.  In fact, NPR is reporting that, nationwide, homes with long commutes are plummeting in value faster than homes closer to the city center.

Economists say home prices are nowhere near hitting bottom. But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.

The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

All of this points towards an action item that the city can take to ease rental woes:  make it easier to build more housing -- rental and otherwise -- in close proximity to downtown, or with easy access to concentrated job centers.  Increasing the rental supply can help take the edge off rising demand.  That may not be a complete solution to rising rents, but it's a start.

Ok, this is weird.  Washington's transportation department thinks that vehicle travel is going to go up up up.  See, for example, this graph...

Total Vehicle Miles Traveled 1980 - 2030 (projected)
(Miles in billions)

The solid red line to the left represents historic traffic volumes -- technically, vehicle miles travelled, or "VMT" in planner-speak.  The dashed line to the right is a prediction of future VMT growth.

But look:  there's something awfully suspicious about these predictions.

If you close one eye and tilt your head to one side, you'll see that the dotted line is much steeper than the solid line. In the real world, traffic growth has slowed way down in recent years, and looks like it's on the verge of flattening out.  A closer look at the numbers (pdf link) tells the same story:  the recent slowdown in vehicle travel has been pretty remarkable. As oil prices have soared, the growth in vehicle travel has slowed; and travel per capita has actually fallen.

But the reality of rising fuel costs hasn't sunk in to the planning department.  Instead, they're predicting a massive, immediate increase in the growth rate of traffic, starting next year.  Yep, if you believe their predictions, traffic will grow four times faster over the next 5 years than it did over the last 5 years, at a pace 50 percent quicker than the long term average.

Huh?

Walk Score lands in the NYT:

Last summer, a trio of Seattle software developers started walkscore.com, which calculates the number of potential destinations within walking distance of any given address and then produces a rating. If your neighborhood scores 90 or above, you can easily live there without a car; if it scores under 25, you’ll be driving to the backyard. More than a million addresses were searched in the site’s first month. Matt Lerner, one of the site’s developers, knew the concept had arrived when a condo in Seattle hung out a gigantic banner that said “Walk Score 100.”

The Walk Score guys are cooking up some more goodness even as we speak, but we'll have to wait a while before they're ready to unveil it.  Meanwhile, the Times gives our own Alan D. a shout-out, too.

Alan Durning, an environmental researcher whose blog about living without a car inspired Walk Score, argues that walking may be the ultimate timesaver. He cites a British study that suggests that for every minute you walk, you live about three minutes longer. “You’re not using time,” Durning argues; “you’re generating time.”

Not much else to say here -- but if you're hard up for a way to celebrate Earth Day tomorrow, a simple walk around your own neighborhood (with a quick glance at your Walk Score) is a place to start.

Sure, it borders the Atlantic Ocean. But Quebec just announced that it will join the Western Climate Initiative. It's more evidence that the agonizingly slow federal leadership in the U.S. and Canada need not prevent more aggressive local action. Quebec brings another 7.5 million people -- and an economy worth more than $220 billion a year -- to the effort.

The press release is here.