When is a housing bargain not a bargain? When you add in the costs of getting from home to work, school, the stores and elsewhere.
Seems logical, right? But knowing how your transportation costs can affect your decision on where to live isn’t easy. Fortunately, along comes a new online tool that makes it considerably easier.
The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index lets you see which parts of the U.S. are truly affordable when you factor in both housing and transportation costs. The index lets you zoom in and explore 52 metropolitan areas across the country and, to be honest, it’s both fascinating and a little addictive.
Go to the index’s results for the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, for example, and you’ll see the outlying regions — the suburbs and exurbs — are the most affordable when considering housing costs alone. Switch to a view that shows affordability when both housing and transportation costs are factored in, and the picture is almost entirely reversed. Many of those “reasonably priced” suburbs, it turns out, have housing-transportation costs that eat up 48 percent or more of the region’s median income.
Cooler still is the index’s “goal for affordability” tool. When you highlight that choice for a region, you’ll see in stark teals (less affordable) vs. yellows (more affordable) which areas let you keep housing and travel expenses below 45 percent of median income.
The index was developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology in partnership with The Brookings Institution.
“The index tells an alternative story of affordability than we’ve become accustomed to hearing,” said Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. “The real estate pages may list 2- and 3-bedroom homes for under $150,000 in suburban communities. That sounds affordable, right? But once you factor in transportation costs, the bargain goes away. Transportation costs can be as much or more than housing costs. The index protects consumers by divulging those costs and helps planners and decision-makers work toward providing truly affordable housing.”
Check out the index yourself to see how your area measures in true affordability. I bet you’ll discover it gives a whole new, greener meaning to the old real-estate cliche of “location, location, location.”
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