City Plans Incentives For Downtown Homes

[livincinco]

I think on the housing and transportation stat, it's best to compare cost/sqft and gasoline prices and distances traveled.

The size of house a person would choose to buy and where it is located are choices made for reasons that improve that individual's quality of life.

The cost of a BMW X5 is going to be the same in Houston as in LA (maybe not for used quite so much), it's the distance traveled and the price of gasoline that because our cost of housing is so low can be more variable.

Being single with no kids (yes ladies, I'm available), I couldn't imagine sitting in hour long traffic going into work. If I had a kid though, I might use that hour to reflect (as I sit crawling in traffic) that my commute might suck, but at least my kid is going to school in a good district.

I agree that many times commute distances are a quality of life choice.

Having lived in the suburbs for a number of years (yes, I have kids) and having done commutes up to an hour at times, I can tell you that commute time is not all wasted time. I get a lot of phone calls out of the way during my morning commute (something that I wouldn't be able to do on public transportation) and use the afternoons as my downtime. Those of you that have raised kids know, sometimes you don't get a lot of time to yourself. Having an opportunity to have some mental health time to prepare you to really be available to your kids when you do get home can be a benefit.

I've personally always found that about 30 minutes was a very manageable commute and I don't think that it's a coincidence that the average commute time across the country is right in that range.

The main question that I have with the transportation costs though, is that I would expect that the higher costs would be directly reflected in commute times and given that the average commute in Houston is 10% higher than the national average, that doesn't seem like the type of indicator that I would expect to see. To Tory's point, that would seem to indicate that the majority of the additional expense is discretionary.

[lockmat]

http://news.rice.edu/2013/02/25/rices-shell-center-for-sustainability-outlines-sustainable-strategies-for-houston-2/

I mentioned this on Swamplot. Anglos are the only ethnic group to decline in population? It seems like they are talking about totals, not percentages. That seems strange. I wonder what cities have increased in anglos? Phoenix? Austin? Seattle and Portland? Lol

I'm assuming this was a metro study