The Cost of Commuting to DC

Suburban housing places a heavy financial strain on working families in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region, concludes a new publication released yesterday from the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing. Beltway Burden: The Combined Cost of Housing and Transportation in the Greater Washington, DC Metropolitan Area, analyzes the inverse proportionality between the cost-savings on distant homes and expense of commuting to the District from without. The study's deduction, if not entirely intuitive, is that DC-area working families who are forced to "drive ‘till they qualify" for housing incur higher transportation costs that eventually erode their housing cost savings. Well, ya.

The study finds that region-wide, households spend an average of $23,000 on housing and $13,000 on transportation annually, and that increases in transportation costs start offsetting housing savings when families locate roughly 16 miles from employment centers; drivers who spend an average of 60 hours per year sitting in traffic and waste nearly 91 million gallons of fuel.

To lower the housing-transportation cost burden for the Washington metro area, the report suggests that part of the answer is “creating more housing and transportation choices...us[ing] our existing infrastructure more wisely and more intensively...and [m]ore compact development." The report predicts the addition of 1.7 million new households over the next 20 years in the DC region, half of which will occur in the outer suburbs and outer-ring jurisdictions. These areas currently are home to just over one-fourth of the region’s population, and have the highest combined costs for housing and transportation.

North Bethesda Square's First Building Tops Out

The nearly $900m North Bethesda Town Center project saw its first building topped out this week as the Wentworth House, an 18-story, 312-unit apartment building, reached its full height last week. The apartment building will house a swimming pool deck above the 18-story-wing and a “sunset” terrace above the 15-story wing, green roof, and 65,000 s.f. Harris Teeter for the "Whole Foods effect" on the neighborhood. Construction on the building began in June 2006, completion on both the supermarket and apartment is scheduled for July of next year.

LCOR, a large east coast development team headquartered in Pennsylvania, was chosen by WMATA as the master developer for the 32-acre North Bethesda Town Center Project, developing a master plan that includes approximately 930,000 s.f. of office space, 1,275 residential units, a 320-room full-service hotel, and 202,000 square feet of retail space at the White Flint Metro station. LCOR anticipates this project will generate 5,400 new jobs and almost 6,500 additional daily Metro trips, citing it as "the largest joint development project ever approved by WMATA." The project received a "Smart Growth" award from the D.C. chapter of the Urban Land Institute and The Smart Growth Alliance.

The Wentworth House was designed by Dorsky Hodgson Parrish Yue Architects (DHPY), with offices in DC, Cleveland and Fort Lauderdale. DHPY is also designing the Midtown Bethesda North condo project by Kettler.