Quote Originally Posted by Bham1982 View Post
I think this is mostly quite a stretch. Well over 90% of households in Metro Detroit own/use vehicles. The existing roadway network serves the vast majority of households quite well, and any improvements in this network are beneficial to almost everyone.

There is no public policy need to "afford housing that is close to jobs". For one, people tend to switch jobs with regularity in the modern economy; lifetime jobs no longer exist. There is no possible way of triangulating all your future employment prospects to ensure the ideal residential location.

And Metro Detroit doesn't have an affordability crisis; if anything it has a housing valuation crisis. Outside of the top school districts, housing is cheap. Outside of a few parts of Birmingham, Bloomfield and a couple others, there is almost no barrier to someone renting/buying in a Metro Detroit community.

Linking auto-centricity to "crime, substance abuse, entitlement fraud" seems to be quite a stretch. There are centralized, transit-oriented metros with high crime and substance abuse, there are sprawling, car-oriented metros with low crime and substance abuse.

I'm not anti-transit, but major transit investments simply don't make much sense in a region designed like ours. I have no problem with spending megabillions on subways in NYC, but this region is built around the auto, and the auto generally serves the region well, at least in terms of mobility.
I think your "well over 90%" number is VERY inaccurate.

According to a study released in 2014 by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 9.2% of US households did not own a vehicle. This was up from 8.7% in 2007. The study also noted that 26% of households in the city of Detroit did not own a car.

According to the US census, there are currently 254,197 households in Detroit. 26% of that is 66,091 households in Detroit without a car. By itself, that represents 4.6% of the 1,442,537 households in the Detroit Urbanized Area.

By subtracting the number of households in Detroit from the total households in the urbanized area, we know that there are 1,188,340 households in the Detroit Urbanized Area that are outside of the city limits of Detroit. If we assume the national average of 9.2% applies to those households, that means there are 109,327 households in the urban area outside of Detroit that do not own a car.

That puts the total number of households without a car in the urbanized area at 175,418, which is 12.2% of the urban area. Therefore, your "well over 90%" suggestion is much more likely to be around 87-88%.

While that settles the details of numbers, it doesn't tell the whole story. Sure, the vast majority are well served by the automobile, but what about those that aren't? 12% of households in a region as populous as Metro Detroit is still a significant number of people.

What about those that cannot drive due to old age or disability? How do they get to their medical appointments, the grocery store, etc in an autocentric region without reliable transit?

What about those living in concentrated areas of poverty? Economic activity, investment, and jobs tend to follow where the money is. People living in areas of poverty are isolated from those investment centers where jobs concentrate. If a large percentage of them don't own a car [[like the 26% of Detroit households), how are they supposed to travel to the job centers where they can find employment to get themselves out of poverty without reliable transit?

You can't tell people to pick themselves up "by their bootstraps" when you put the bootstraps north of 8 mile and give them no reliable means of getting there.

I agree, we don't necessarily need policy that brings affordable housing close to jobs. However, if you don't do that, you need to provide adequate transit services to get those people who require affordable housing to the job centers that would employ them.

Failure to do so essentially creates a de facto policy where groups of people are isolated in a perpetual state of multi-generational poverty.