The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), one of America's more prominent pro-transit advocacy groups, has countered this criticism by claiming that efforts to reduce sprawl and expand transit spending will actually promote home ownership. As this report demonstrates, no evidence supports the STPP's hypothesized relationship between transit and home ownership: In fact, even the STPP's own data show exactly the opposite.

Environmentalists Counterattack

As the evidence of disproportionate harm to the less well off builds, advocates of growth controls and their allies in the environmental movement and the transit industry have been searching for ways to challenge the claim that growth controls increase housing costs and hurt the poor. Typical of the defensive effort getting underway is a July 2003 report by the STPP that, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, attempts to link the existence of sprawl to burdensome automobile costs that in turn absorb a share of a family's income that could otherwise be devoted to buying a house.

In other words, the STPP claims that sprawl reduces home ownership. This hypothesized relationship between cars and houses leads the experts at the STPP to urge the "working poor" to reject auto ownership and turn to public transportation or bicycles so that they can afford to become homeowners. The STPP also recommends that government spend more on public transportation and bicycles to give the poor more transportation choices.

Cars are apparently acceptable for the better off, and the STPP acknowledges that "For middle- and upper-income families, the cost of transportation is taken for granted." The poor, however, are different: "But for the poorest American families the high cost of owning and maintaining a car may put homeownership out of reach."

The STPP report offers no meaningful evidence to support this claim. Instead, it relies on the reader's intuition to accept that a cost connection exists between cars and homes. Indeed, what little data the STPP does provide prove nothing about the postulated relationship between homes and cars, and the report completely ignores the more firmly established positive relationships between car ownership, employment, and economic opportunity.

Instead, the report focuses only on costs, not outcomes or benefits. For example, the STPP notes that the working poor who drive spend 21 percent of their income on commuting, while "the working poor who were able to take public transportation, bicycle, car pool, or walk to work spent far less." But did more of the latter own their own homes than the former? On this, the STPP is silent.

The STPP also cites a study that claims an "inverse relationship between increasing car and truck ownership and diminishing family savings." But if the two events are connected, what does this mean for home ownership? Again, the STPP fails to make the connection, most likely because there is none. Since World War II, both home ownership and vehicle ownership have soared--an accomplishment the STPP analysis implies could not have happened.

But it did happen, thanks to rising prosperity. For the most part, the growth in ownership of both types of valuable assets reflects the extra mobility and freedom that automobile ownership allows individuals, often giving them access to better jobs and the means to buy a house and a car. In other words, the extra benefits of car ownership offset the extra costs. Although the STPP denies the existence of such a relationship, it is largely alone in this belief. Most other social welfare advocates on both sides of the political spectrum believe that access to an automobile is essential to economic advancement.

The Job Benefit in Auto Mobility

For example, President Bill Clinton proposed relaxing auto ownership restrictions in food stamp eligibility requirements "so that people can access reliable transportation to get to work without sacrificing their food stamp benefits." An October 2000 press release from the Clinton Administration in support of the eligibility change noted: "One national study found that twice as many welfare recipients with cars were working than those without cars, and 25 percent more low-income families with cars were working than those without cars."

More recently, a May 2003 Brookings Institution survey found:

Most welfare recipients do not have access to a dependable automobile, and research indicates that lack of access to an automobile is one of the most prevalent barriers to employment. Research further indicates that car ownership improves the likelihood that low-income people will get and keep work, and improves access to better jobs. According to another recent Brookings study on transportation policies for the working poor:

In recent years, new sources of federal funds have helped agencies initiate transit services aimed at moving low-income adults into the labor market. By contrast, policymakers have paid far less attention to increasing automobile access among the poor. Given the strong connection between cars and employment outcomes, auto ownership programs may be one of the more promising options and one worthy of expansion.

An earlier study on a similar subject by the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, noted:

In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car. Prosperity in America has always been strongly related to mobility and poor people work hard for access to opportunities. For both the rural and inner-city poor, access means being able to reach the prosperous suburbs of our booming metropolitan economies, and mobility means having the private automobile necessary for the trip. The most important response to the policy challenge of job access for those leaving welfare is the continued and expanded use of cars by low-income workers. Across the country, state and local decision-makers are inventing new programs to do just that and devising new ways that public funds can help.

Since transit service is so much slower than cars and is focused principally in the core and central business districts of major metropolitan areas, people who use transit because they do not have a car face limited mobility and diminished job prospects. Much of a given metropolitan area simply cannot be accessed by transit.

This imposes a significant economic burden according to Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll of the University of California, whose research indicates that raising the rate of automobile ownership among African-Americans to the rate found among non-Hispanic Whites would eliminate 45 percent of the unemployment gap between the two ethnic groups. Similarly, if the Hispanic automobile ownership rate were increased to that of non-Hispanic Whites, 17 percent of the differential would be erased.

It is easy to see why cars can help close the unemployment gap. At average transit operating speeds of 15 miles per hour, a maximum "job shed" of 175 square miles can be accessed in 30 minutes. In reality, however, the actual job shed would be much less because of the necessity of transfers and limited service areas. On the other hand, a person with an automobile can expect to average 30 miles per hour and reach a job shed of 700 square miles in 30 minutes. This vastly increases employment and other opportunities, offering a better quality of life.

In spite of the long-standing bipartisan support for improving low-income access to automobiles and the growing body of evidence indicating that an automobile offers the working poor much greater access to better jobs, the STPP has maintained that such access should be discouraged. In June 2002, the STPP took its case to Congress when STPP board member and former director Hank Dittmar expressed his opposition to greater auto mobility for the poor in testimony before a Senate committee:

It is indeed ironic that many social scientists believe that the best way to help former welfare recipients secure jobs is to give them automobile purchase assistance, thereby trapping them into the poverty cycle even more profoundly, as the poor typically end up with less reliable cars which are more expensive to operate and maintain.

Recognizing that effective advocacy in Washington requires that one offer a counter-solution as an alternative to the one you oppose, the STPP revealed what it thought government should be doing to accommodate the mobility needs of low-income families. In a letter to Senator James Jeffords (I-VT), the STPP proposed that government create and fund "Bike Purchase Programs and Car Sharing Programs to help low wage earners secure reliable and affordable transportation options." One can only imagine the ridicule that some Senators would have heaped upon such a "let them eat cake" proposal if it had come from a fiscally conservative organization rather than one supported by environmentalists, unions, and transit system contractors.

End Sprawl, Use Transit?

Although the STPP's postulated relationship between cars and homes has no basis in fact and is at variance with the findings of most social scientists regardless of where they stand on the ideological spectrum, the STPP has persisted in its efforts to keep the poor on the bus. In addition to advocating bike and bus subsidies, the STPP recommends changes in land use and residential development patterns in order to push people onto transit as a way to resolve the nonexistent relationship between transportation costs and home ownership.

As the STPP sees the world and its deficiencies, the suburbanization of America is the heart of the problem, which it believes has led to increased transportation costs as people living in "sprawling" suburbs make greater use of their cars than they would have if they had remained in inner-city neighborhoods with greater access to public transportation.

In a letter to Congress's Millennial Housing Commission, the STPP argued that its earlier "report, Driven to Spend, found that residents of more sprawling metro areas tend to spend a much higher proportion of their family budget than residents of more compact, traditional metro areas with good public transportation service."

That statement, however, has no basis in fact. In fact, data presented later in the current report demonstrate that the relationship between degrees of sprawl and household transportation spending is exactly the opposite of what the STPP claims--using the same data on the same set of metropolitan areas as the STPP used in its report.

In its most recent report of July 2003, the STPP hedges its bets by noting that "the sample size is too small to allow a rigorous statistical analysis," but then adds that "a quick glance at the list of metro areas shows that in many sprawling metro areas, families spend a much larger portion of their household budget on transportation than in more compact, transit- or pedestrian-oriented areas."18 Yet a lingering glance over the STPP's data would reveal precisely the opposite, as presented in Table 1, which categorizes the STPP cities by degrees of sprawl.

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau show that over the past decade, 39 of the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas experienced a decline in the share of commuters using public transit--buses, rail, and subways--to get to work. (See Table 1 on back.) Of the 10 areas that saw an increase, the gains were modest except for Las Vegas, where a 100 percent increase in transit market share occurred--largely in a new transit system contracted out to private operators.

Source from http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/bg1687.cfm