Working Households Face Increasing Rent Burden

Homes on S. 15th St. 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. Each 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.

Care infrastructure: In Flint Michigan in order to avoid the impacts of poverty on unborn children, a program called RX Kids gives expecting mothers $1,500 during pregnancy and $500 per month for a year after birth. Researchers found the program helps avoid stress and saved millions of dollars in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) costs in addition to other health benefits for mother and child. (Cecilia Nowell | The Guardian)

Desire paths: A desire path is a term used to describe the dirt walking paths worn into grass or landscaping. The paths are created when people choose to step off a designated route such as a sidewalk or paved walkway. Taylor Slavens believes these paths show human adaptability and that while planners can choose walkways, people have preferences and habits that exist outside of formality, sometimes damaging ecosystems. (Taylor Slavens | Arrow)

Blue/Green traffic lights: Despite a treaty signed by 35 countries in 1968 to require traffic control devices to use red for stop and green for go, Japan has blue-ish go lights. The reason being the traditional Japanese language had one word for red and green and instead of confuse the language, Japanese officials installed “blue-green-ish” lights. (Shane Schmid | Jalopnik)

Reduced fare usage: A new report from the Regional Plan Association in New York takes a look at 35 transit programs with free or reduced fares for residents. But what they found was that many of the programs were not well utilized by eligible participants. They suggest some possible solutions including better outreach, increasing eligibility, and promoting automatic enrollment. (Dan Zukowski | Smart Cities Dive)

Rent eats income: New research from the Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that rents are a cost burden for households and eating away at modest incomes. 65% of working households are now burdened by rents compared to 50% pre-pandemic. Researchers believe that subsidies that cap housing costs at 30% would be beneficial, but would not completely alleviate budget pressures given other non-housing cost burdens. (Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, Alexander Hermann, Sophia Wedeen | Joint Center for Housing Studies)

Quote of the Week

Right-to-Build Zones would see the federal government create a model zoning code that is intentionally much, much less restrictive than that in most cities; cities and towns could choose to adopt these codes, but only for specific neighborhoods if they want; the municipalities would then receive payments for each new home built under the code. Developers could then exploit these much simpler legal regimes and concentrate their building in the designated special zones.

–Dylan Matthews in Vox discussing the ROAD to Housing Act that has bipartisan support on some housing reforms.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re sharing two parts of a discussion we had with Sam Sargent of VTA. We talk about VTA’s future, moving Caltrain’s vehicles to Peru, and what transit leadership like Randy Clarke’s is effective.

Want more links to read? Visit The Overhead Wire and signup.