Reconnecting America and the Center for Transit-Oriented Development have been working in the Twin Cities for several years. Recently, CTOD partner Nadine Fogarty of Strategic Economics participated in a Central Corridor Funders Collaborative program entitled "Preserving our vision through an uncertain market."

Today Housing California released its evaluation of Prop 1C TOD housing program funding.  The Housing and Emergency Shelter Trust Fund Act (Proposition 1C), passed by California’s voters in 2006, authorized $2.85 billion in general obligation bonds to fund 13 housing and development programs. The program allocated funding over two years but unfortunately those were the same years that the housing market crashed and many of the projects have yet to be constructed. 

Metropolitan Transportation Commission press release The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) today approved a $10 million anchor commitment through its Transportation for Livable Communities program to establish a new $50 million revolving loan fund for affordable housing developers to finance land acquisition in select locations near rail and bus lines throughout the Bay Area. Other investors in the Bay Area Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund include Morgan Stanley and Citi Community Capital, each of which provided $12.5 million; The Ford Foundation and Living Cities, a collaborative of foundations and financial institutions, which invested $3 million each; six community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which combined to contribute $8.5 million; and the San Francisco Foundation, which provided $500,000 plus the 2007 seed funding to develop the fund's business plan.  San Francisco-based Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) will serve as the manager of the Bay…

  A new study by the Transportation Equity Network suggests that metropolitan areas could produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs by simply shifting existing transportation spending from highways to public transit.  The study, entitled More Transit=More Jobs: The Impact of Increasing Funding for Public Transit, examined the use of Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) funds in twenty metropolitan areas of various sizes and found that public transit investments produce nearly 20% more jobs per dollar than road investments.  If these twenty metropolitan areas shifted 50% of their existing highway funds to transit, there would be a net gain of 180,150 jobs over five years without a single dollar of new spending.  Moreover, the majority of these jobs could be created within existing transit systems, as the study also found that investing in transit operations produces…

The Government Accountability Office has sent a report to congressional committees exploring what the federal government might do to facilitate the efforts of state and local agencies  to fund transit systems by capturing the value generated by the transit-oriented improvements.

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), Transportation for America (T4America), the National Housing Conference (NHC), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and LOCUS: Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors hosted a Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Financing Forum on May 17, 2010 in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. The event brought together more than70 participants from the housing, development, public and private finance, transportation and policy sectors to discuss the complexities of financing TOD. The Forum was designed as an opportunity to exchange policy ideas between TOD practitioners, advocates and federal policy makers. CTOD released a set of 10 federal policy recommendations to accelerate equitable TOD through upcoming transportation, tax, and livable community legislation. AIA also released its…