Geoff Ghitter

The high cost of the automobile. Calgarians spend almost as much on cars as they do on housing.

This month an interesting casting call appeared in local papers — HGTV is recruiting families that are looking to buy a new home but “can’t decide between living in the [inner] city or the suburbs.”

Once upon a time, the rule of thumb was drive “till you qualify,” meaning as you go further and further away from the inner city, the price of your dream home drops or the size of the house you can get for the mortgage you qualified for, gets bigger.

But research out of the U.S. is challenging that approach to house hunting. Penny Wise, Pound Fuelish, the latest in a trilogy of research reports by the Centre for Neighbourhood Technology (CNT), argues that in this era of $100-per-barrel oil and $1.20-a-litre gasoline, you ignore transportation cost implications of where you choose to live, at your peril.

The emerging wisdom is that rather than a singular focus on affordable housing, the savvy buyer is looking for affordable living. The American research proposes what they call the Transportation-Housing Affordability Index. Researchers found that the combined costs of transportation and housing in 28 of the largest cities in the U.S. consumed about 60 per cent of household income and that inner-city living, with good public transit, is often easier on your pocketbook than suburban living. For example, living in more compact neighbourhoods was found to result in annual combined transportation and housing cost savings of $1,830 in Minneapolis and $3,850 in Boston.

This summer, Sustainable Calgary will be releasing a research report that applies this approach to our city and the results may surprise you. In 2009, 28 per cent of the average Calgary household’s spending went to shelter while 20 per cent went to transportation. When you add up all private transportation spending, it works out to about $5.2 billion annually with the overwhelming portion devoted to buying, operating and maintaining our cars! That’s equivalent to about three southwest LRT lines plus 1,000 kilometres of streetcars. All for the cost we spend in just one year on our cars.

Some of the implications of these numbers for choice and affordability are eye-popping. For example, using data from the 2006 census, if a family with an income of $80,000 could live without a car (or with one less car), and devote that savings to their mortgage, the number of Calgary communities where they could afford the average house price increases fourfold.

The implications are even more dramatic for low-income Calgarians. Imagine a family with a meagre $20,000 income looking for a place to rent on an average day in 2009. Using the 32-per-cent-affordability threshold, this family would need a place for less than $500 a month. But if they could devote $300 — the difference between what a family spends on a private car versus their costs for public transportation — to rent, such families would have had 10 times as many rental units to choose from, based on a survey of the city’s most popular rental accommodation website.

All fine and good, you say, but Calgary is a car-dependent city. Well, yes and no. Life in most Calgary communities is certainly held hostage to the car. But as we shift to more residential construction in inner-city neighbourhoods, and transit investment increases, more people will have the option of going car-free. The city’s most recent Mobility Monitor newsletter shows us where some of those communities are. For example, communities such as Sunalta, Hillhurst, Sunnyside and East Village score “excellent” where “most trips are convenient by transit,” whereas anything south of Southwood scores “minimal” transit, where “it is possible to get on a bus.”

Recent University of Calgary research suggests that rapid expansion of bicycling infrastructure could bring 10 times as many Calgarians within the catchment zone of the existing LRT with relatively modest investment.

A big piece of the puzzle here is information. If the city developed a reliable transportation housing affordability index, similar to the one developed by the CNT, mortgage lenders might be persuaded to offer location efficient mortgages. This could guide families to neighbourhoods in which transportation costs are lower, helping both lenders and borrowers make more prudent decisions.

Calgarians love their cars — so we tell ourselves. We can’t possibility change, right? And why should we? But the downside is getting too big to ignore. Given a choice, maybe some of us can. With or without location efficient mortgages or improved transit service, these savings are real — today. So next time you are in the market for a new home, think about affordable living. It could mean substantially less time in congested traffic, more money in your wallet and more time with your kids. The HGTV series might be stage-managed, but the savings from reduced car dependence is the real thing.

Next Column: It’s time for an urban growth boundary

Geoff Ghitter teaches urban studies at the University of Calgary and his blog is geeessgee.blogspot.com. Noel Keough is an assistant professor in the faculty of environmental design at the university, and is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary Society. He can be reached at nkeough@ucalgary.ca.