Balancing Act: The right jobs-to-housing development ratio can balance development needs against municipal capacity.
By Malorie R. Medellin
Anaheim, Calif., city developers and planners have proposed a downtown development design said to rival Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile. Dubbed Platinum Triangle, the roughly 591-acre mixed-use project broke ground in March of 2005 and is permitted for a whopping 32.5 million square feet of office and commercial space and 18,363 residential units when built out over the next 20 years.
These numbers ultimately compute to a 1.82 jobs-to-housing ratio that has many community members, housing advocates, and industry experts up in arms. They claim that such a design metric, which falls just outside the high end of the acceptable jobs-to-housing ratio range, will surely lead to traffic congestion, headaches for the city, as well as poor implications for the environment due to increased carbon emissions by area commuters. According to Jerry Weitz, a 22-year professional planner and author of Jobs-Housing Balance (American Planning Association Planning Advisory Service, 2003), 1.5 jobs per housing unit is considered an average balanced-development ratio, with a fair range falling between 1.3 and 1.7. Anaheim’s ratio, therefore, sends up a red flag.
However, Sheri Vander Dussen, planning director for the Anaheim Planning Department, believes maintaining such a strict ratio in all developments is an erroneous concept. “You can live and work in the Platinum Triangle if you want to, [but] not everyone who wants to work in Anaheim wants to live in Anaheim,” she says.
But with Platinum Triangle generating more than 33,000 additional jobs and what traditionalists argue is not enough housing, the issue remains contentious.
This ongoing regional debate highlights a major national concern: How can city planners and developers build-up downtowns, keep the jobs-to-housing ratio in balance, and ultimately avoid major traffic congestion issues and reduce sprawl?
Will It Work?: Platinum Triangle’s jobs-to housing ratio, which falls outside the norm, has developers questioning its feasibility.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
For the majority of Americans, a half hour or longer commute to and from work is the norm. After all, separating office, retail, and housing components in a development has been a prevailing design concept in the United States since pre-World War II.
“Developers believed that this would clean up the city and make it airier,” says John Norquist, president of the Chicago-based advocacy group Congress for the New Urbanism. But while the layout may have led to more space, it has inevitably resulted in sprawl, longer commute times, and disconnected, non pedestrian friendly cities. “It isn’t working,” he adds.
Despite this, many developers still want to deliver projects with a significant jobs-to-housing imbalance, Weitz says. Why? Developers argue that the housing market is self-correcting. If an area lacks a type of development, investors will help build new projects to meet the need.
This thinking has governed many projects, including Platinum Triangle, which was designed to rebuild and modernize Anaheim’s dated downtown. Through a 2004 rezoning of an 820-acre industrial district, the idea was born for Platinum Triangle to serve as a dense employment center with limited housing.
But Weitz’s research warns that imbalanced planning like this doesn’t always work. “The self-correcting system will correct some problems but not all,” he says. For example, during economic downturns, developers won’t invest in commercial/offi ce developments despite a need for jobs. Given the current state of the housing market, it’s easy to see why residential developments are also neglected—especially aff ordable ones.
As more people want to live closer to their work, land planners and developers are tasked with achieving a workable jobs-to-housing ratio. However, Weitz admits that recently there has been a trend leading to more jobs per household.
He also stresses that the ratio cannot be considered just for one development, but should instead be looked at in the greater context of a region or city as a whole.
These are important concepts for developers to keep in mind when crunching the numbers. According to a June 2007 Urban Land Institute survey, 57 percent of all commuters said they would be somewhat likely to move closer to work if affordable housing was available. But Weitz says living options are severely limited for blue-collar, even white-collar, employees.
“There is a huge mismatch in terms of where jobs are and where the labor is,” Weitz says. “The market doesn’t provide affordable housing at the level most workers need.” This is due, in part, to exclusionary housing ordinances that restrict the use of more affordable materials such as vinyl siding. In addition, city ordinances will require more expensive building elements for each project, such as extensive brickwork and two-car garages for all homes. These restrictions can often leave small starter homes—1,600 square feet or so—out of the picture, Weitz says.
