Housing, Transportation, Affordability and Greenhouse Gases

I live in Manhattan Heights. It takes me 10 minutes by car to get to work Downtown. Actually it takes me 5 to 10 minutes to get most anywhere I need to go in a day: grocery store, good restaurants, gas station. My kids can walk to school. We can walk to two parks, the library, the coffee shop in the library, the swimming pool, the House of Pizza, Papaburger and Food Q in five minutes. The bus runs down Piedras and Alabama, just two blocks from my house in either direction.

According to the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), this means I live in a location efficient neighborhood.

While the concept of energy efficiency is a familiar term, locations can be efficient too. Compact neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services have high location efficiency. They require less time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel requirements.

Based on this idea, CNT developed the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. which takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also its location efficiency, by measuring the transportation costs associated with place. Some places cost more to live in not because of the costs of housing but because of the costs of transportation associated with living in that place. Location inefficient places require you to spend more time in your car and more money on gas and car travel.

The City recently contracted with CNT to analyze how affordable El Paso is when you take into account housing costs and transportation costs as a percentage of income. You'll be suprised at the results which can be found at http://www.htaindex.cnt.org/. There are also maps that show the greenhouse gas emmissions associated with car travel in El Paso.

Let me know what you think.