The Access magazine of the University of California Transportation Center recently published a study investigating the impacts that urban design factors, street density, business counts, job counts, and retail sales have on walking behavior in suburban downtowns and auto-oriented corridors. The authors sought to identify the role that urban design and land use factors play to encourage walking, as well as...

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released Housing Characteristics: 2010, a brief discussing change in housing unit counts, vacancy rates, and homeownership in the US. The press release notes that homeownership rates have declined over the last decade but are still at their second-highest rate since the bureau began collecting data in 1890. At the same time, vacancy rates have increased in the Chicago region...

A key component of creating livable communities is providing a range of housing options for residents.  However, as noted in CMAP’s analysis of Census 2010 housing tenure data, the region added 133,464 owner-occupied housing units and only 31,557 renter-occupied housing units between 2000 and 2010. The City of Chicago lost rental units, and many outer-ring suburbs added housing units but experienced a...

This is the last post in a two-part series describing results from CMAP's survey of municipal staff to determine the status of local plans, programs, and operations.  The first post focused on the survey methodology and on its findings with regard to municipalities' efforts to link land use and transportation and to address issues of the environment and housing.  This second post looks at...

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has commissioned a study to develop a national index for Housing and Transportation Affordability (H+T Affordability). HUD’s current measures of housing affordability focus solely on the proportion of a household’s income that is devoted to housing costs.  However, many households incur high combined housing and transportation costs by moving...