transit, housing type, and income

I have a habit of digging through data. In Ontario, there is something called the Transportation Tomorrow Survey which asks people about their travel habits on a particular day. This is used to calibrate transportation demand models when planners look to the future. I’m curious about the relationships of transportation mode to things like people’s income and neighbourhood urban form. Who is taking transit? Who is driving? Who is walking and cycling? How much are these travel behaviors a matter of economic or locational necessity and how much are choice?

In 2011, the TTS didn’t have income so I worked with colleagues to connect the trip data to neighbourhood income data and put this together:

This showed not only that people in neighbourhoods with lower than average incomes were making the majority of transit trips in the greater Toronto region, but also that these transit trips were mostly local bus/streetcar or bus/streetcar transfer with subway.

The 2016 TTS asked people their household income for the first time. Please note that not all respondents shared their income, so some trips are left out of the income-based analyses.

‘Apartments’ are multi-unit buildings that would also include condo buildings, making this is more of an urban form variable than a tenure variable. Houses include townhouses. This is interesting because these multi-unit buildings are spread throughout the region, not just in downtowns but also clustered along major arterials in the inner suburbs. And most low-density residential areas are in walkable distance of transit, so these patterns are not entirely attributable to transit service levels.

This shows how the majority of trips are made in private vehicles (includes cars as driver or passenger, taxis, ridehails, school buses and motorcycles). Public and active transit modes are a minority of trips, and although the mode shares for these alternatives are higher for lower-income houeholds, the absolute number of transit and active trips are spread across the income spectrum. The majority of driving trips are made by households with annual income of above $60,000 (the median household income in the City of Toronto in 2015 was $65,000; the region’s median is higher).

Vehicle ownership is linked to income. The majority of carless households are on the lower side of household income.

The TTS also allows us to query transit trip links by route. Routes can be grouped into streetcar, bus and subway routes for the TTC. This query looks at transit trips by whether they have links on subway only, bus/streetcar only, or a combination of subway and bus/streetcar links. What this really illustrates is how interconnected our transit system here is, where many trips involve transfers between transit types. The network is designed as a grid, so you can theoretically get from any origin to any destination using tranfers.

If we define sustainable transportation as non-automobile trips, then transportation sustainability is disproportionately borne and enacted on a daily basis by households with lower incomes living in multi-unit housing. Overall, though, sustainable trips are made by all income groups; and only a small fraction of all trips use sustainable modes. We have a long ways to go towards sustainable and equitable transportation.

I’ve been thinking about the incumbency advantage of housing and how there is a lag between when rents and housing prices rise and when the majority of people in a city feel it. For example, compare the average rents for available apartments in Toronto posted on the rental website Padfinder, as of December 2018, with the average 2018 market rents for all inhabited apartments in Greater Toronto as found on the City’s website:

	Average vacant rents	Average lived rents
studio	$1,900	$1,020
1 bed	$2,260	$1,200
2 bed	$2,950	$1,430
3 bed	$3,500	$1,600
4 bed	$4,500	$1,850

The rents for those looking to rent are roughly double the rents of those who are staying in their current rentals, on average. While they remain, the people staying in their current rentals are protected by partial rent control (attached to the tenant, not the unit). There is a lag in the timing of unaffordability. It’s not until you move that you are hit with a huge jump in rent. This may well contribute to a feeling of ‘stuckness’ where people do all they can to stay where they are, even if they would be better fit with a different size or location of unit. The high cost of available vacant units undoubtedly contributes to lower household formation rates in Toronto and Vancouver as compared to other Canadian cities, where people delay or avoid doing things they may want to do, such as getting their own place, ‘coupling up’, moving out of their parent’s house, or having kids – or moving into the city in the first place. It also may contribute to a different kind of stickiness, the inertia of ‘overhoused’ homeowners.

The gap between what current inhabitants are paying and the market price of housing is also evident in home ownership, and here there is an additional gap between those with mortgages and those without. The data below is from a cross-tabulation of the 2016 census for Toronto and Vancouver CMAs, with the exception of the last 2 rows, which are from CREA and a mortgage calculator respectively, assuming a 20% down payment and 5-year fixed rate.

2016	Greater Toronto	Greater Vancouver
Average monthly owner costs	$1,755	$1,622
….with mortgage	$2,309	$2,277
….without mortgage	$804	$628
% of mortgage-free owners	36.8%	39.7%
AVG home price	$730,000	$1,083,177
monthly mortgage payment	$3,500	$5,200

I wonder what this means politically, and if it helps explain the lack of significant progress to address housing affordability, because most people in the city are not feeling the housing crisis in the same way as newer households are. It’s remarkable how many homeowners in each city own their homes outright, without a mortgage – more than one third. They not only have very affordable housing, but they stand to gain the most from selling their house at current high rates. The most dramatic gap is between existing homeowners without mortages and potential new homeowers with mortages. In the most extreme case, in greater Vancouver, the former pay $628 per month in housing costs while the latter would pay $5,209 per month in mortage costs alone, after a 20% down payment. This gap may explain the slowdown in the volume of houses being sold as prices rise. (how many people can afford those prices?) The majority-incumbent homeowner advantage may also help explain why the media discourse on the housing economy often codes rising housing prices as desirable, and an ‘adjustment’ as dangerous or undesirable.

What do we have in common?

The air we breathe, the streets we walk on. The rules and agreements that shape space. When these agreements are not working, they can be renegotiated. The social contract is subject to renewal. 

This site is a space for me to think through what might be working and not working about these agreements on space – also known as urban planning. To reflect on what parts might be unravelling and what parts are holding up. It’s an attempt to sift through the data like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, to get glimpses of our situation. Recognizing that all knowledge is incomplete and that data itself is shaped by its origins and interpretation.