Car Loans Now Second-Highest Household Debt

A Kia parked on a City of Milwaukee street. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Car loans surpass student loans: Car loans have surpassed student loans as the second largest debt Americans hold behind mortgages. After people paid too much for new vehicles during the pandemic, the bills with high interest are coming due and the cars can’t be offloaded without taking a loss on underwater loans. The built environment in most places and dependence on automobiles has given many people little choice in transportation. (Collin Woodard | Jalopnik)

No revenue without reform: A plan to merge the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, and Pace bus lines has been floated by the Illinois State legislature to stem the coming fiscal cliff that would severely impact service. In exchange for consolidating, the new transit agency would get $1.5B in new money. The bill would also end the requirement that agencies have a 50% fare box recovery ratio. But suburban interests aren’t big fans of the proposal, saying their riders would get short changed by urban interests. (Reema Saleh | The Chicago Reader)

Can everywhere be a 15 minute city? A new study in the journal Nature Cities entitled A Universal Framework for 15 Minute Cities takes a look at how much it would take for neighborhoods to redistribute amenities in order to become 15 minute neighborhoods. They found that some cities like Zurich Switzerland were already well situated while car dependent cities such as Atlanta would have a hard time moving the needle without drastic interventions. (Ajit Niranjan | The Guardian)

Goofy but lovable: The first of the funny looking next generation postal trucks have been rolling out on mail routes and postal carriers already love them. They cite the addition of air conditioning and modern amenities such as blind spot monitoring, but also the size of the payload area. Many of the first trucks are still internal combustion and get horrible mileage, but environmental groups were able to increase the total of electrics which should reduce emissions 40%. (Erin Marquis | Jalopnik)

An affordable home experiment: In San Bernadino California, a local affordable housing group has set up a community land trust on a parcel of land. While there are many land trusts around the country, coupling them with prefabricated manufactured housing and accessory dwelling units to increase affordability and the number of units on a parcel is new. With this, they are able to build new homes 45% cheaper. HUD recently announced that more housing types will soon be available under the national building codes. (Rachel Cohen | Vox)

Quote of the Week

Despite modern politicians’ insistence on using the book as a political compass (in addition to Adams, his mayoral challengers Brad Lander and Jessica Ramos cite its influence), we are living not in the world of Robert Moses but in the one that arose in his absence. The federal interest in cities was already dead by the time Joe Biden entered the Senate; it is the seesaw of disinvestment and private capital, not overpowering government intervention, that has determined the shape of the urban landscape since.

–Henry Grabar in Slate discussing a rethinking of Robert Caro‘s The Power Broker about Robert Moses

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we chat with transportation and planning expert Warren Logan, who is running for Oakland CA City Council in District 3. Warren talks about the differences in how people perceive government works, the need for more flexible streets, and gives thoughts on housing policy.

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