Just wanted to note my thoughts on some interesting things Terrance Ruth noted in his AMA earlier today:
Ruth is probably talking about the commuter rail project’s analyses on the supplies of natural and legally-binding affordable housing and our region’s travel markets -though most of that work came up within the past year (so it’s more recent than he made it sound). He’s clearly right in that affordable housing doesn’t matter if it doesn’t enable an affordable life -including ways to get around, and places to meaningfully go to. I’m glad he seems to be thinking about that, specifically, here.
This is actually a very fair critique of the collection of reports that recently came out for commuter rail, as well as (more urgently) our BRT projects. Especially since our planners have been putting in extra work to look at how to improve zoning, housing availability etc. throughout our future transit corridors, it would be a shame if our elected leaders just treat the studies as a rubber-stamping exercise and only focus on the shiny transit portion of this entire project.
But there’s nothing preventing City Council from doing that, as an institution.
Note, though, that you can see some of his implicitly preferred solutions baked into Raleigh’s policy document on making TODs happen equitably as well as its follow-up study that focused on the New Bern BRT line. So at least there’s that safeguard, I guess…