Transportation issues are land use issues
Along with fellow urban planners Lynda Lopez and Yonah Freemark, I co-created a new transportation platform for Chicago’s next mayor. The platform was devised based on our experience reporting on, analyzing, developing policy, and experiencing personally and socially, the transportation shortcomings in Chicago.
The Chicago Sustainable Transport Platform first aims to increase bus speeds so that people can get to work and school faster. Bus ridership has been falling in Chicago, in part because of how slow riding the bus is but also because of reduced service periods.
Read about it on Streetsblog Chicago for the full overview — the post below summarizes only the land use portions of the platform.
The platform prefaces the six topics by acknowledging that Chicago hasn’t had much success engaging its residents to develop plans that equitably serve seniors, students, low income families, people without cars, and bicycling and walking. The mayoral candidates who adopt our recommendations will also need to propose how they intend to engage impacted communities and continuously involve Chicagoans in plan making. For example, deciding where bus route improvements go should be a decision that the Chicago Transit Authority makes alongside its riders.
Most of the topics address transportation issues, but since transportation is also a land use issue, one topic addresses zoning, TOD, and land use policies.
The city’s TOD policy (called “Transit Served Location”) gives property owners a free density bonus if the property is in a Bx-3, Cx-3, Dx-3 zoning district. The platform recommends that the benefits apply in all B, C, and D zoning districts. Look up a Chicago address to see if it qualifies.
Most of the units built in TOD buildings since the policy was enacted in 2013 are rented or sold at market rate, and “the market” is good at creating new housing for middle and upper-middle class households, but doesn’t create housing for those households earning less than 60 and less than 30 percent of the area median income. However, when there are more units built because of the density bonus, the builder is required to create even more affordable units.
Another recommendation is that the Chicago Housing Authority spends down its cash reserves by building and purchasing apartments near ‘L’ and Metra stations to be preserved as affordable housing.
Additionally, other housing builders and buyers should be contributing to the city’s affordable housing fund — currently only those constructing 10+ unit residential buildings must create or pay for affordable units, while those who build single-family housing near ‘L’ and Metra stations that sell for 2-3 times as much as units in the multi-family buildings contribute $0.
One other recommendation is that, in TOD areas, which are blocks within 1/4 mile of train stations and 1/2 mile on blocks designated as a Pedestrian Street, the process to be allowed to not build any car parking spaces would be eliminated and a parking maximum would be implemented. Parking minimums increase the cost of construction and thus rental rates, and many parking spaces go unused. (Read more about parking provision policies.)