Visit the Are We There Yet? home Some places just don’t have the density of jobs and residents and intensity of activity that justifies an investment in rail transit. Many of these communities are investing in bus and shuttle service as well as in programs that make it easier and more pleasant to carpool, walk and bike to jobs in an urban or suburban downtown, and to get healthier while doing it. Des Moines, for example, which has a population 400,000, has been investing nearly $2 million a year to make the downtown more walkable and create a network of bike lanes and trails. Google — which offers job perks that are the envy of Silicon Valley, including chef-prepared food at all hours — is trying to make commutes as painless as possible by ferrying its pampered workers on shuttles that run on biodiesel, with leather seats, wi-fi, and even room for dogs. The Google shuttle carries a quarter of the company’s…

Visit the Are We There Yet? home Research by CTOD in 2008 found that people who commute by transit tend to work in the professional, technical or financial services sectors, or in insurance, government, or quasi-public agencies such as utilities — because these are jobs that are typically clustered together. Other industries that generate considerable ridership are hotels and some types of clothing stores. Not coincidentally this mix of businesses closely resembles what is typically found in transit-rich downtowns. It’s not quite so easy for lower- and middle-skilled workers to commute by transit, however, either because they work at all hours — while transit service is most frequent during regular business hours — or because they work in manufacturing, warehousing or big box retail, which can’t be built at the densities and concentrations that are required to make it financially feasible to build transit to…

Visit the Are We There Yet? home Job sprawl has been especially bad news for low-skilled underemployed or unemployed workers because it creates a “spatial mismatch” between where they live and where jobs are located. A number of studies have found that while minority and lower-skilled workers still tend to live in core urban neighborhoods in disproportionately high numbers, lower-skilled jobs are often located in outlying suburban areas that tend to be more white. A 1997 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study found, for example, that 87 percent of lower-skilled service jobs were being created in suburban areas. “People sprawl has long been known for its effect on the environment, infrastructure, tax base, quality of life and more,” Brookings Institution analyst Elizabeth Kneebone writes in a 2009 report on job decentralization. “Now we must recognize what ‘job sprawl’ means for the…

Five research papers covering a broad range of topics have been added to the Resource Center best practices database. The reports include:

Visit the Are We There Yet? home While the creative class is causing seismic shifts in the urban landscape — bringing investment, entrepreneurship and creative class jobs into downtowns and urban neighborhoods — shifts are also underway in the suburbs. For every decade since the 1920s the suburbs have grown faster than their city centers but this summer census data showed that between 2010 and 2011 city centers grew faster than suburbs in 27 of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. From 2000 to 2010, in contrast, only five metro areas saw their cores grow faster than their surrounding suburbs. There is also anecdotal evidence of a similar shift in commercial real estate. The Wall Street Journal, for example, noted in 2012 that the big box chains Lowe’s and Best Buy are saddled with poorly performing stores “whose problems may have less to do with how they are run but more where they are located . .

Editor's Note: What do the housing bust, major demographic changes (more families without children and more older Americans), and employment centers all have in common? The answer found in this excerpt from Are We There Yet? is that together, they point to an enormous opportunity for the US to rethink where our homes go and what they look like. We quote Urban Land Institute CEO Patrick Phillips in calling this a “Sputnik moment,” giving US towns and cities the chance to link downtowns and those closer-in suburbs with housing in walkable, compact neighborhoods. The challenge is capturing this moment and turning it into opportunity for families of all incomes. As the interest in walkable, “gritty,” urban places grows, the lower-income families that have lived in many of those close-in neighborhoods can be vulnerable to being priced out. Capturing the next round of housing growth in opportunity areas equitably will be the indicator of our success in the future.