Walkability expert Dan Burden (right) works with the Michigan Municipal League and several Michigan communities.
Chris Leinberger, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution with a real-estate background, makes perhaps the strongest argument yet that the most bikable and walkable communities are the communities of the future, and the ones with the most market value when it comes time to sell your place.
These communities may be located in rural or urban areas. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that amenities are close and don’t require driving into traffic or far down the road to pick them up.
In Sunday’s New York Times, Leinberger writes:
Until the 1990s, exclusive suburban homes that were accessible only by car cost more, per square foot, than other kinds of American housing. Now, however, these suburbs have become overbuilt, and housing values have fallen. Today, the most valuable real estate lies in walkable urban locations. Many of these now pricey places were slums just 30 years ago.
Mariela Alfonzo and I just released a Brookings Institution study that measures values of commercial and residential real estate in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, which includes the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. Our research shows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable, where everyday needs, including working, can be met by walking, transit or biking. There is a five-step “ladder” of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values.
As a neighborhood moves up each step of the five-step walkability ladder, the average household income of those who live there increases some $10,000. People who live in more walkable places tend to earn more, but they also tend to pay a higher percentage of their income for housing.
To read the rest of Leinberger’s op-ed, go to the New York Times here.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Michigan Municipal League