You're about to see a train — come out of an apartment building!
How would you like to live above a train?
This is Del Mar Station in Pasadena, California.
And about 15 years ago some clever developers and architects
convinced the Pasadena city council to move an existing park-and-ride lot underground
and replace it with 350 new apartments on just three and a half acres.
Among the residents? This guy!
(Off camera): You're Road Guy Rob!
Oh, you know me?
(Off camera): Yeah, I watch you on YouTube.
Nick is a huge fan of trains.
It's partly why he chose this apartment to live at.
(Nick): I actually go to the desert just to go camping by trains.
Are you able to get by without owning a car or do you still have one down in the garage?
(Nick:) Oh no, I got one in the garage. I used to live in San Francisco. I moved here and after
about a year and a half I said, "I got to put the bike on the wall and get a car."
The city has almost no vacant land.
Without Del Mar Station's hundreds of units, Nick—
— or another person he'd displace —
would not get to live in Pasadena at all.
Which makes me wonder: if we built something like this at every rail transit station,
would it help solve America's affordable housing shortage?
(opening graphic)
The west coast is a great place to live—
If you have a place to live.
(Knowlton): California's inability to address housing is actually affecting the whole west.
Salt Lake City, along with Boise, Denver, Las Vegas, Austin,
and Phoenix— all popular escape plans for west coasters fleeing high rents.
But lately there's been a problem.
A few too many people are taking up the offer.
(Knowlton): So we've always been a bargain compared to Denver. Even that gap has shrunk.
Ted Knowlton helps elected officials from the six counties surrounding Salt Lake City
plan transportation for the city's exploding growth.
Home buyers are flooding the market faster than the region can find lots to build housing on.
(Knowlton): The west is a popular place to live with a lot of growth.
So Utah is building roads to unlock land for houses in rural valleys.
But these freeways cost a lot of money.
And rural residents are not making it easy.
(News interviewee): If you live in Erda, you love the farms.
(News reporter): Developers want to move in with this plan.
Rural opposition, environmental problems,
and lawsuits mean few build-able lots ever make it to market.
The ones that do are just too expensive for starter homes.
(Knowlton): Let's identify the most strategic locations for more housing development. If 3%
of the land could accommodate one-third of the housing, that the benefits would ripple.
Clustering housing together uses less land. That should save money.
But where do you put it?
And typically only one place has the infrastructure to
handle that level of traffic— that level of land use intensity
and that's been downtown.
And it hasn't worked, because no matter how dense you make it, it's never going
to be affordable when it has to sit on some of the most expensive land in the region.
There's another form of transportation which unlocks land—
What about suburban rail stations? Those can move a lot of people and
the land they sit on is a lot cheaper than the land you'll find downtown.
Inexpensive enough for a big park-and-ride lot, ready to redevelop.
We can unlock land. We spent a billion dollars on this train, so let's put this land to work.
Second of all, when we have a bunch of people living here—
it's too convenient not to take the train. So that boosts ridership numbers.
And third of all, it builds a town center. Something a lot of suburbs desperately need.
As people get off the train, research shows they're willing to walk about a quarter of a mile
comfortably. That's kind of our engagement area.
So we can take each suburban rail stop, buffer the pedestrian pathways—
And these centers, if we look at them regionally, it's not much land.
And sometimes you just get lucky. There's a little old town right within your quarter mile circle.
All you have to do is make a few little changes to make it
easier for people to get from the train station to the old town and you're set.
And at other stations, it's a totally blank canvas.
Architects call that "seeding."
If you plant the right elements, a new center can grow.
This happens with cars. When a new freeway goes in, the old mismatching land uses disappear—
to make way for new car based customers. Land which capitalizes on the good road transportation.
(Silly fake radio ad:) "Still the high price leader!"
They're doing the same thing.
Old mismatching land uses disappear to make way for the thousands of walking customers—
Land which can capitalize on the rail transportation.
Engage every inch of wall space.
Blank walls are what make alleys scary. It's a place where nobody can see you getting mugged.
A lot of really good downtowns have lots of really bad blank walls.
Come on! Don't turn downtown into an alley!
(Fake TV commercial:) "Thanks for visiting downtown. The center of all the action!
No trip would be complete without a souvenir. Order now!"
We don't want that in our train station. It would make people not want to come here.
Nope. We want lots of glass so we can have lots of people there.
And we can't rely a hundred percent on private developers. Cities should plan
to build places to sit, fountains, libraries, museums, city services—
invite the post office to open a branch there!
Really create a town center.
When you think about all the best places to go, to visit—
there's a place that's the center of town. A place that's iconic. A place that tells you
you've arrived.
In Portland, Oregon, that might be Pioneer Square.
In Philadelphia, it's the "Rocky" steps.
In Cincinnati, it's the fountain from "WKRP."
Iconic places which, back in the old days, you'd buy a postcard of.
But chances are in your suburb, you never really *arrive*.
No matter where you're driving around in town, you never feel like you're in the center of town—
because there isn't a center of town.
(Rob mumbling off camera): Dear Mom
California is awesome. Love, Rob
That's good.
Not great, but you know—
Good.
Building a really good development at your suburban train station could fix—
How about a senior center? That ties in really nicely with rail, because you have a lot of
elderly people who can't drive anymore. The train is right close by.
Which is annoying because— the train is right close by
but to get there you have to walk around a parking lot.
It could have been tied in better.
A center that faces transit? The proper term for this is transit-oriented development.
Commuter rail lines often reuse old freight rail
corridors. A lot of vacant lots and old warehouses that are abandoned.
And other times there's just mismatched underused private property—
which we could reimagine and put to better use.
That's a good thing.
It gives us more canvas to paint.
Here's some redevelopment art: West Valley City, Utah.
Kind of close to where I grew up. An old shopping center.
A site that since the 1980s, city leaders have been dreaming of creating a
downtown for this lower middle income suburb. When light rail showed up 10 years ago,
land use changes started showing up too—
(Candid response): That's where the restaurant got shut down by the health department!
Some of it welcomed.
Some of it not.
(Toys R Us jingle)
(sad demolition noises)
When redevelopment is this intense, it's really jarring for local people.
Yes, some junky places vanish— but so do some really nice places.
Transit-oriented development might be able to save the suburbs.
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) says suburbs are set to double in population by 2050.
People are not moving downtown as fast as they're moving out here.
These new suburbanites have to live someplace.
People move— even if the zoning rules don't keep up with what the market dictates.
This neighborhood is one house per lot— one family per house.
But look at the cars.
The city might be able to enforce the one house part, but one family?
You just can't fight supply and demand.
We could remove single-family zoning rules and let the buildings catch up with the free market.
That'd be fun /s
Rolling into your neighborhood with a bulldozer and knocking down single houses
and replacing them with two or three— just like this street here in Portland.
It's a little bit jarring though.
Or we could contain density to a small area by the train.
Here in South Pasadena, the architect did a really good job blending in with the surrounding houses—
even down to the color the roof line. Everything.
This high density project behind me has 45 units per acre! And you never know it.
The West Valley City project has 1,000 new housing units when it's all finished.
Compare that with the impact of redeveloping 1,000 single family houses.
(Knowlton): Communities are never going to say "yes" to density everywhere. At least not in Utah.
(Knowlton): Significant density
in a very small area is the exact same as a pinch of density across a really big area.
(Knowlton): That helps us in turn say "no" to density in the areas that aren't centers.
The taller the project, the less demand there is to redevelop the adjacent suburbs.
And transit-oriented development projects can get very big.
This is
Buckhead
Offices, shopping, and thousands of people living practically on top of the train station.
And as more condos go up, the more riders there are to walk downstairs and take MARTA.
It's basically Atlanta's second downtown— with prices to match.
$400 grand for a two-bedroom?
$419?
$13.95 million? (laughing)
It's even in the "Welcome to Atlanta," hip-hop video. If you have Ludacris,
you know, millionaires like him repping the community— that's not an affordable place to live.
(Wyatt): If it were easy, we wouldn't be having this affordable housing issue. You
have product that's delivered at the low end and then you have most of it which
is luxury oriented housing. Because that's what developers can actually make pencil.
Derek Wyatt and his colleagues use data to show property developers if
a new project has potential to make money or not.
(Wyatt): It's a challenge that we're all trying to address. Find ways to provide more housing at
lower price points that can meet and serve a huge and growing segment of the market.
His consulting firm researched the interaction transit has on rent prices.
If you measure apartments cost per square foot, the measuring tool developers care about most,
there's a 59% premium on rents where transportation is excellent.
People pay more to be near nice things.
(Wyatt): Also, just thinking about mobility in general and other mobility options that
overall influence people's decisions. Biking, bike shares, car sharing.
This also includes living next to a really good rail transit station.
(Wyatt): In most cases,
those transit-oriented developments tend to achieve premiums and top of market rents.
Rats!
So once again it's all an exercise in futility. California sets out to build affordable housing
and ends up with a bunch of luxury units a small portion of government subsidized units
and everybody else in the middle— good luck nothing for you.
Well, maybe not quite.
(Wyatt): Rents might be higher but the trade-offs, relative to what they're
spending for on transportation, might make it become a more affordable and attractive option.
If a renter or a buyer can get rid of one car in their household, they can subtract that payment—
the insurance, the gas, the maintenance, from the rent price.
And they might come out ahead.
We've done a really bad job providing housing to certain groups of people. Seniors, certainly.
And other people who don't have a driver's license—
the disabled or people are just not comfortable driving a car.
We require them to drive just to go get groceries. A lot of elderly people are captive at home—
they need a car to drive. They can't drive. So they're stuck. If they lived in a community where
they could walk to go buy bread, that's very freeing— that's very liberating.
Another group could be young singles. Right out of college. They can't afford an entire apartment.
We end up doing what you and I did—
You go find a bunch of strangers and split a suburban apartment.
But what if there was some type of a dormitory style product,
that could work for them or for young couples?
(Wyatt): Developers are getting creative on exactly how to kind of address some of
those issues. I think one, you know, unique instance and we definitely see this in more
transit-oriented developments, is the growth of the co-living product type. Where you're
building much larger unit types and renting them by the bed, as opposed to by the unit.
Something they're used to. They just got out of college.
And then make all the living space shared more in common.
(Wyatt): Which in the end actually becomes a more affordable product.
It might also work well for single parents who are just struggling to try to
have a little apartment for them and their child.
(Wyatt): The overall check that the renters are paying is lower. but what they're getting is much
different. They're getting smaller private spaces but they're also part of a bigger community.
And that's probably going to be the key.
These type of apartments are obviously going to lend themselves more to
non-traditional buyers than say, My friends who have kids? They're
still looking at renting and buying houses on the fringes of the city.
But if more non-traditional renters are
over by the train station? That frees up traditional units for traditional renters.
Transit-oriented development is still really limited, but a future wave of new construction
may help developers find ways to really maximize value and bring the price down.
So I asked you on Twitter @roadguyrob and also checked
YouTube comments. Would you be willing to live next to a train station?
And the comments varied from "hell no" to
"heck yes" and there was even one "me like train" thrown in there.
Now the number one concern you had was noise. And that's something interesting. In all these
seminars I've been watching about transit-oriented development, that doesn't get brought up a lot.
But it's true. Trains are noisy. But also just
having neighbors close by living in high density housing.
Out in the suburbs the saying is, "good fences make good neighbors."
In an apartment complex, and I know this from having lived around a university for too long,
"good walls— good sound proofing in the walls makes good neighbors."
[Captioning made possible by Patreon contributors.]