Want to know where those hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to Virginia’s transportation budget are coming from? The $400 million or so worth of them that are direct cuts to construction projects are listed here (pdf). Mostly the cuts are to smaller projects, with the largest single cut being about $40 million from a highway interchange project in Hampton Roads. The other $450 million in cuts out of the $850 million total cited by the Post include other categories, such as maintenance and administration.

You can see what’s still in the construction budget by visiting VDOT’s six year improvement program.

The bad news: UMD East Campus, a massive expansion of downtown College Park that would have been the largest new TOD along the Purple Line, is dead in the water. The developer pulled out, citing the recession. Ultimately the University still wants to develop that parcel as planned, but without a developer the future is uncertain.

The good news: Howard County is excited about a developer proposal for a TOD in Elkridge, at the Dorsey MARC station. While not exactly a new Ballston, the 1, 400 residential units and 1, 000, 000 square feet of commercial space proposed is respectable. The site is a little far from the MARC station, so layout and urban design will be particularly important. Unfortunately, a plan doesn’t appear to be available online.

Not that kind of tiger. Photo by Wesley Hargrave of the UK Daily Mail.

Tuesday, September 15 was the deadline for submittal of applications to the TIGER discretionary grant program, that $1.5 billion pot of stimulus money that USDOT can award to whoever they want. As GGW has covered, the Metropolitan Washington Transportation Planning Board has been putting together a regional transit application. That application was submitted on schedule and will now compete with the thousands of others sent it from around the nation.

Here (pdf) is an overview of the TPB’s application. In the end it includes requests totaling $267 million, broken down into three packages, any of which could theoretically be funded individually:

• Package 1: $204 million for bus priority or BRT improvements to 16 corridors, most notably the K Street and Crystal City / Potomac Yards Transitways.
• Package 2: $13 million for a regional bike-sharing network with a total of 3, 250 bikes (including approximately 1, 000 being procured using other funding sources). The regional network would cover DC, Arlington, Alexandria, the City of Fairfax, and parts of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties.
• Package 3: $47 million for improvements to three major transit stations, Rosslyn, Medical Center, and Takoma-Langley.

Nobody knows how USDOT will distribute money. Will they go for a small number of big splashy grants, or will they distribute money more evenly across the country with a large number of small grants? By submitting one application that can be split into smaller packages, TPB is giving USDOT the flexibility to consider its application in either event. And while all these projects are important, getting any of them funded would be a major unexpected win for the region.

Personally, I think the bike-sharing package will be particularly competitive. Although the smallest package, it hits the innovative/sexy criteria that many believe USDOT is looking for.

The deadline for USDOT to announce TIGER grant awards is February 17, 2010. They hope to announce sooner than that, but the large number of responses may hold them up until the deadline. Hold your breath, starting… now.

Affordable housing isn’t quite the problem now that it was during the bubble, but there is still a lot of ingrained exclusivity in the system that keeps us from providing affordable housing as efficiently as we did in the past. Apartments above shops, granny flats, shared-houses, the places that served as affordable housing for most of American history are now illegal in a very large part of America.

Matt Yglesias adds an interesting twist to the story with a table comparing housing attributes in 1900 and 1990. As the table makes clear, a lot of things have gotten unquestionably better. Running water, electricity, heat, all enjoyed by virtually all homes now (or rather by 1990) and few then. But one statistic jumps out that informs the question of affordable housing: In 1990 24% of American households put up a boarder or lodger. That is to say, nearly a quarter of all American homes included at least one person who wasn’t a member of that household, but paid rent for access to a room. In 1990 that same statistic was down to 2%. What was an extremely common form of affordable housing, perhaps the country’s most common, is now effectively unheard of.

I can think of a few theories that might account for why such a common attribute so completely fell off the map: migration away from rural areas, income homogeneity in post-war suburbs, World War II itself and the GI Bill, exclusivity regulations as mentioned in the first paragraph, etc. But no matter why or how the common lodger ceased to exist, the effect has been that by removing such a sizable chunk of housing from the affordability market we have increased the demand for affordability by other means. The folks who might otherwise live in a rented-out basement are instead trying to find their own dedicated unit. That drives up demand for dedicated affordable units, which unless coupled with an equally dramatic increase in supply, inevitably drives up their cost in turn, making fewer and fewer of them affordable.

The only way out, short of hoping the economy never recovers, is probably to make it legal and much easier to provide a large number of affordable units, either as accessories to other units or on their own. Developers, after all, will build to fill any niche market they can find, provided they are permitted to do so by law.

There is an article in the Post today about development in Lovettsville, a sleepy hamlet northwest of Leesburg. Apparently as sprawl approached the town, planners drew up plans for a traditional walkable town center to anchor new development. Then the recession hit, and the grand plans came crashing down. Planned mixed-use has been un-planned, rules requiring alleyways have been rewritten, and plots for big expensive mcmansions have been replaced by diminutive starter homes. The shift to more affordable housing is a positive one, but the rest sounds unfortunate, and highlights the difficulties developers often face when trying to build walkable communities. When the going gets tough, defaulting back to normal sprawl is easier and cheaper. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Institutional supports for sprawl guarantee it.

One of these days I’m going to have to visit Lovettsville, as well as its exurban fringe TND cousin in Montgomery County, Clarksburg.

Just in case you don’t get enough micro-blogging via twitter…

• The Transportation Planning Board will vote today on inclusion of the Purple Line as light rail on the Georgetown Branch right-of-way in the air quality analysis of the regional transportation plan. Chevy Chase NIMBYs are sure to show up and make further impassioned arguments such as think of the children (but not all of them). Personally, I’m done taking Purple Line opponents seriously.
• Speaking of the TPB, their task force working on a regional bus priority stimulus application is meeting today and will be deciding exactly what to include in its application over the next two weeks. BeyondDC will report as appropriate. Fair warning: The final application is going to look a lot different than that first-draft map at GGW.
• TysonsTunnel, the group hoping to build a subway in Tysons Corner rather than an el, is suing. The ship has sailed guys, changing course now would seriously harm the project. What are you really trying to accomplish?
• In case you haven’t heard, Congressman Oberstar is expected to release his outline of the next TEA bill on Wednesday Thursday. T4America will have plenty of coverage, and I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it as well.
• No, we do not need to widen I-270. All those past widenings worked oh-so-well.
• Ryan Avent notes that the DC metro area is still outperforming most of the country in housing construction. Also, reports yesterday show that housing starts are up nationally.
• You know how Virginia has been totally unable to pass meaningful and constitutionally legal transportation funding legislation? Maybe the problem is systemic. Virginia is the dead last state to send in its transportation stimulus requests.
• Global climate change is here, and it’s real. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

When the stimulus bill passed it included a provision for $1.5 billion in discretionary, competitive transportation grants. For the past two and a half months, transportation agencies around the country have been salivating at the thought of getting their hands on some of the dough. Ideas have come forward for a regional BRT system and a national bike-sharing program, to mention just two of many. But while there have been no shortage of ideas floated, the actual criteria for grant applications did not come out until today. Now that it’s out, agencies hoping for grants can begin serious work on applications.

Submissions are due by September 15, 2009, and all the money will be awarded no later than February 17, 2010.

Virginia is slated to receive about $700 million in transportation funding through the federal stimulus package. According to a story in the Examiner, so far the Virginia Department of Transportation has allocated about $176 million of that money to various road and bridge projects around the Commonwealth. Of that $176 million however, only a little over $11 million is slated to go to projects in Northern Virginia, and of those projects, exactly zero are in the economic engine localities of Fairfax, Arlington or Alexandria.

Granted $176 million is only a fraction of the total VDOT will be spending as part of the stimulus, so NoVa could still get its fair share, but given Richmond’s history of ignoring what Northern Virginia wants, it seems worth pointing out that starving your economic engine is NOT a good way to stimulate the economy

Developers are building fewer of these… … and more of these

From an article in today’s Gaithersburg Gazette:

According to a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders, 89 percent of developers said they were building more lower-priced homes, and 88 percent said they were constructing smaller homes.

…

The average single-family home newly under construction in the fourth quarter of 2008 had a floor area of 2, 343 square feet, an 8 percent drop from the same period during the previous year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

…

“We have seen cycles like this before, ” Kettler said. “I think it’s accurate to say that when there’s tougher economic times, the houses get smaller.”

…

A larger proportion of first-time home-buyers in the market for a house is also driving the trend, according to the survey.

Skyrocketing fuel costs also may be making homeowners rethink investing in so-called McMansions, huge houses with high ceilings that can be expensive to heat and cool.

“People just see that as excessive, and as times have gotten tougher, I think people are going back and saying, ‘Hey, do I really need that big a house?'” Kettler said.

…

“We are cognizant of a trend to smaller footprints and traditional neighborhood designs, ” (says developer Steve Nardella).

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but maybe when America emerges from this recession we’ll have learned a thing or two about community building.

Here is the full stimulus bill text. The best explanation of the transportation-related funding I’ve seen thus far comes from last Wednesday’s meeting of the Transportation Planning Board – the same body that threw a wrench into VDOT’s plans to widen I-66 in Arlington. The TPB publicized a three-page summary of funding that could be available for transportation. It is far more in-depth and accurate than the AP report I cited back on the 12th.

To summarize the summary:

• $27.5 billion is allocated to the Federal Highway Administration, most of which will be distrubed according to formula to the state DOTs. Of that $27.5b, it is estimated that $1.25 billion will flow to DC, MD and VA (in total, not each). Of that money, at least $460.5 million must be spent in the greater Washington urbanized area.
• The Federal Transit Administration gets $8.4 billion. From that pot, $7.6b will be distributed via various formulas, such that the DC metroplitan area will receive $230 million. All $230 million of that money will go to WMATA. Most of the remaining FTA allocation will go to the New Starts capital investment grant program, and will be discretionary. It is likely this money will go to projects already in the FTA New Starts pipeline, such as Tysons Corner Metro.
• $8 billion will go the Federal Railroad Administration to be used for intercity high speed rail. Rumor has it this money will go to a maglev demostration project, but that is just rumor. If true, such a project would probably not be the DC-Baltimore proposal, which is currently out of favor in Maryland.
• $1.3 billion will go directly to Amtrak. Of that, $850 million is for capital upgrades and $450 million for security. No more than $510 million of the $850m in capital can be used in the Northeast Corridor.
• $1.5 billion is available via a new discretionary grant program. The reports last week claiming there would be no discretionary money were wrong. Discretionary grants must range from at least $20 million up to a max of $300 million, and can be used for any type of transportation improvement. This program is expected to be extremely competitive nation-wide, and at best will likely only result in one or two projects in the DC region (if at all).
• Additionally, though not listed in the TPB summary, the Energy section of the stimulus bill includes a number of transportation-related grants. Among them, $100 million in discretionary grants to transit agencies for energy reduction programs and $700 million for various electric transportation programs (including purchases of hybrid buses).