John Wirtz made a great post on XINGColumbus yesterday about the the affordability of housing and transportation in Columbus using an interactive mapping website put together by The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative.
Basically, the map shows the combined weight of living in certain parts of Central Ohio with housing costs and transportation costs. A cheap home doesn’t always mean a cheap cost of living, and an expensive home doesn’t always mean an expensive cost of living.
I’m glad to see Downtown and the immediate areas surrounding it rate very well in terms of affordability, no doubt due to the close proximity to close-by amenities, but also the central location giving easy access to suburban areas in all directions. There’s an indirect cost of living in suburbia that I think a lot of people have overlooked in the past, but that’s starting to change as the cost of transportation continues to rise every day.
We chose downtown Worthington because it was cheaper for us. We wanted an area with lots of walkability, on the busline, close enough for my husband to ride his bike or walk to work, (which it was before he got laid off but now he’s home) and had lots for our 11-year old son to do on his own. (Library, parks, rec center etc.) Also because he’s homeschooled it needed to be near our homeschool community (mostly centered in Clintonville, where housing was much too expensive for us), our families and have a decent school system so that if our son or daughter choose to do school at some point they have options. We also wanted an area with a strong sense of community.
Downtown would have been more expensive for us because we would have been in the car more to get Noah to his homeschool activities and to see our families. Other parts of Columbus didn’t have the walkability, especially for a tween who wants to head out on his own. Other suburban districts — Arlington, Bexley — were *way* too rich for our blood and also less diverse than the area we live in now.
Sounds like you’re ahead of the game in choosing a location based on walkability and proximity to your personal amenities.
I don’t really expect higher gas prices to send everyone soaring back into the urban core downtown, but people will definitely try to live closer to where they work and spend their time, especially if they have a fairly lengthy commute that wasn’t so bad five to ten years ago.
[...] Site Maps Affordability of Areas by Transportation+Housing Costs In Transition – April 24, 2008 Housing+Transportation Affordability Index in Columbus The Walker Evans Effect – April 24, 2008 Housing+Transportation Affordability Index XING Columbus – [...]