May 6, 2020
BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES ANDLISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE.
Eve Picker: [00:00:16] Hi there, thanks so muchfor joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real EstateInvesting.
Eve: [00:00:22] My guest today is HarrietTregoning, the director of NUMO, the New Urban Mobility Alliance.As a self-described "planning geek" and "transport nerd", Harrietis a veteran, smart-growth advocate. She has been wrestling withissues of planning, mobility, disaster resilience, housing andcommunity development issues for over two decades. In her work, shehas focused on resilience in the face of disaster and challenge,including the changing climate and equity in transportation andaccess.
Eve: [00:01:06] Be sure to go to evepicker.comto find out more about Harriet on the show notes page for thisepisode and be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can accessinformation about impact real estate investing and get the latestnews about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.
Eve: [00:01:27] Hello, Harriet, I'm reallyhonored to have you on my show today.
Harriet Tregoning: [00:01:31] It's my pleasure.I've been really looking forward to it.
Eve: [00:01:34] Great. You know, you've saidfor many people, change is a really difficult topic. And youactually said I can't say I love it myself in my own neighborhood.And it sounds to me like change has been a theme in your careerfrom planning director in DC to director of HUD's Office ofEconomic Resilience and now heading up the new Urban MobilityAlliance. So you wrestle constantly with what could be better andwhat should come next. And right now, the huge change we're allconfronting is driven by this pandemic. I'm wondering what thethread is that you see emerging around Covid19, this pandemic, andtransportation issues.
Harriet: [00:02:17] Well, I think the link hasbeen really, really an important one and I think the pandemic hasrevealed both the vulnerability of our transportation system andpointed out who is not being well served, how transit is vulnerableand yet essential, but also highlighted that while there are somerisks to being close together, that is also essential in many ways,to have things and people that you need near you. So I think inmany ways you could see the pandemic and its impact very muchthrough the lens of transportation and, you know, even ourdevelopment pattern and how that affects what people can get toeasily or not.
Eve: [00:03:13] Yeah. In Pittsburgh, we have apretty active bus system, which is all about, you know, crammingpeople onto this moving box, right? And that's the exact oppositethat you want right now. What other way can these can people getaround right now?
Harriet: [00:03:32] Well, I think what ithighlights maybe, Eve, is not so much even that that type oftransportation is that, is an optimal right now. I think itsuggests that we need redundancy in our transportation system. Thatwe, there are many occasions, you know, global pandemic or not,where one mode of transportation isn't suitable for you, but yetyou're trapped if that's the only mode you have, whether that'sauto mobility, whether that's transit, whether that's, you know,maybe you have mobility issues in general and it's hard for you todo other things like walk or bike.
Harriet: [00:04:14] But, you know, one of thegreat things I got to do when I was at HUD was really work onresilience from disasters. And at the same time, in D.C., I had afirsthand experience with being a local official during the lastgreat, you know, during the Great Recession and an economic crisis.In both of those roles I got to see first-hand how important thosetransportation choices and options really are. Think of evacuatingHouston in the advance of a predicted hurricane. Now, despitehaving more lane miles and freeway than virtually any other U.S.city, things were utterly grid-locked and people couldn't get out.We had an earthquake in D.C. in 2011. The federal government andall the governments in the area told people to go home while theycheck the stability of buildings at exactly the same instant andthe gridlock was unbelievable. But if you were on a bicycle, youhad not just a normal commute home, but you had a space commutebecause no other vehicle was moving. And so you didn't have toworry about speeding cars or things like that. So, that redundancyis really, really an important thing. And what we're seeing is thatwe don't have that in the US in most cases, that people have atbest, they have one choice and when that choice is no longersuitable for whatever reason, they're really stuck.
Eve: [00:05:47] How do you change that? How doyou design that redundancy into a transportation system in scity?
Harriet: [00:05:54] Well, one of the greatthings, you know, that's true about the moment we're in right nowis both the technology and some degree of electrification haveprovided us with a lot of additional choices that can eithersubstitute for or better complement the transportation that wealready have. We're a long way away from a perfect intermodalsystem, but e-bikes, e-scooters, e-mopeds are recent additions tomany cities across the globe and those additions can cover a rangeof trips from, you know, a few hundred yards to, you know, to on ane-bike you could easily go seven or ten miles without breaking asweat. Those options are really, really new things in cities and alot of ways and so, having those to help you get more easily to atransit stop or help you get from a transit stop to the place thatyou need to go, bikes can be great because they can carry cargo andprobably electric cargo bikes are one of the fastest growing typesof of individual transportation that's out there. Some places,Germany for example, have seen unbelievable increases in e-bikes. Ihave to say, I'm a proud bike owner myself as of last summer. It'sreally game-changing and super fun as a way to get around. So Ithink that making provisions for walk, bike and and micro-mobilityon our streets where people don't have to be in fear of their livesfrom fast moving vehicles is really critical.
Eve: [00:07:38] Probably in my mind that's thereal issue, you know, these solutions like e-bikes and e-scootersand e-mopeds are all fabulous, but it's the traffic on the streetand a cultural shift that really has to happen, maybe as much asthese solutions, right?
Harriet: [00:07:55] You know, you've really hitthe nail on the head with that comment. It's absolutely true thatthere's a lot of latent demand for that sort of transportation,that people are totally fearful about riding in mixed traffic withautomobiles, and so I think it's really up to city planners andtransportation departments to provide those safe facilities and,you know, it's absolutely been demonstrated that if you build it,people will use them. Those things are really important. I couldgive you another example from when I was a local official duringthe recession. You know, we saw hundreds of cars drop off the DMVrolls in D.C. I was afraid people were fleeing the jurisdiction.But it turns out they were dialing down their transportation costsbecause they could. So, they were getting rid of a car. So theywere a two-car household they were becoming a one-car household.I'm sure in their minds, temporarily, right? Just a temporary stepto lower their costs. [Right.] And some one-car households becameno-car household. Again, maybe they thought of it as a hardship,but there were other options that they could use so it wasabsolutely doable for them. As a consequence. we had very littlebankruptcy, very little foreclosure in the district because peoplecould manage those economic hard times and it was similarly truefor the other inner ring jurisdictions, Arlington and Alexandria.But in the same jobs and housing market, which was the Washingtonmetropolitan region, the jurisdictions fared extremely differentlyand so did households. If you didn't have those transportationchoices, you were stuck. And those communities saw so much morebankruptcy and foreclosure, so much more, so much higher declinesin property value. There are still some parts of our region whohave not fully recovered. Whereas the places that had thesechoices, the market and the budget debt, but they didn't plummetand the rebound was so rapid that this was really a case wherethose jurisdictions sprang ahead in terms of their resilience. Theydidn't just recover, they did better. They improved on their shareof the region's job and housing growth post-recession. I know inpart because of the lesson of those choices and what they can dofor the resiliency of households and of jurisdictions.
Eve: [00:10:19] I was in Beijing a few yearsago and was really struck by, you know, first of all, they have apretty wonderful subway system. But the stops are really far apartand whenever you go to a subway stop, there are literally thousandsof bicycles parked outside it. Thousands. So, the culture there isvery much you have an old battered bike and you get yourself to,you know, the next bit of transportation which gets you where youwant to go faster. And so it's sort of this connected string ofthings that get you to places, not just one type of transportation.I thought it was pretty fabulous. I'm afraid China's probably goingthe other way now. The other thing in China that I thought wasreally amazing was, if you watched bicycles on a street with carsit was almost like a dance. They just sort of respected each otherand the bikes would keep going and the cars would move around them.It aas an entirely different arrangement then in our citieshere.
Harriet: [00:11:22] I think that that's a goodpoint, too. And I think that you see, when bicycles become avisible and significant part of the transportation picture, theyare treated differently. You know, I've been in Shanghai and beenin a mob of cyclists. I mean, the largest group of cyclists I'veever been in and it wasn't an organized ride. People were just, youknow, riding, you know, going about their business and, you know,and they took up lanes, you know, travel lanes, general purposelanes, you know, for the bikes. And it didn't, you know, it wasn'tcausing an outcry. And in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, thecyclists easily outnumber the vehicles on any given day and they'vegiven over more and more of the right-of-way to accommodatecycling. You have to wait through several light cycles in someplaces, you know, on your bike in order to get through anintersection because there's so many cyclists. So, yeah, that makesa difference.
Eve: [00:12:20] Why are we not there in the US?Like, why are we sort of lagging behind all these othercountries?
Harriet: [00:12:25] Well, I know that you'reall about real estate. I mean, I think the answer is the realestate issue. We, in the U.S., with the advent of the automobile,you know, more than a hundred years ago, we started makingdecisions that, more so than any other western country, we startedsubstituting auto-mobility for proximity.I mean, think of how muchproximity was valued and how, when we didn't have an automobile fortransportation, you know, things were close together. You know,neighborhoods had almost everything you needed, you know, inwalking distance. Even the streetcar suburbs, which is one of theearliest examples of transport and real estate kind of goingtogether, a lot of those early streetcar suburbs were actuallyowned by property owners and developers who wanted to open up landfor development, even though distances weren't very far. But withthe automobile, you know, our U.S. cities in particular really bentover backward to accommodate the automobile and accommodate thosewho wanted to use auto-mobility in order to access what was largelycheap, undeveloped land, you know, to put factories, to put officeparks, to put housing and to use cars instead of walking or bikingor streetcars to be able to get people there.
Harriet: [00:13:57] And what's happenedincreasingly is that auto-mobility is out of the range, theprice-range for many households and that means that they don't getaccess to really important things that are part of economicmobility. They can't get or keep a good job because theirtransportation is unreliable. They can't access healthopportunities, educational opportunities, you know, without a lotof time and effort. So it's really created a bifurcated society.And I think one of the things about this crisis that we're inglobally, is that some of the workers that we most value, that wemost rely on, who are part of the food chain, the supply chain forour food, who re-stock grocery stores, who clean, ICU's, these lowwage workers are really struggling to get to their jobs and to keepdoing the important and at this point, even dangerous things thatthey're doing to serve the rest of us. And, you know, that is partof the example of why and how our transportation system is notserving us.
Eve: [00:15:04] And I think also in terms ofreal estate, 30 years ago people did not live in cities. So citieshave really seen a pretty, pretty significant comeback. And inplaces like San Francisco, especially, it is out of reach of thoseworkers to be living in the city. So they're being pushed furtherand further and further out, which means that transportationbecomes an ever bigger problem, right?
Harriet: [00:15:32] This whole conversation isreally about transportation and land use, like, these two thingshave to happen together. That's an example of where the land usesand the provision of housing isn't keeping up with the provision ofjobs. And in California, part of that conversation is really abouttheir tax structure. But yeah, I think in every place we have thatmismatch, that spatial mismatch that we need to solve and I'drather solve it with land use and real estate than providing lotsof additional transportation infrastructure that's costly tomaintain, costly to access and keeps people further apart.
Eve: [00:16:13] Yeah, I mean I read an articlerecently in Strong Towns, I think it was a an old one, but aboutthe parking requirements for a retail space, which sort of drivesthat space to become a little bit of a strip mall. And obviouslythe more parking a small retail space has to provide, the more theyseek cheaper solutions, which, again probably further out of thecity. All of those decisions, all the parking requirements, all thedecisions that are sort of burdened on land use just make theproblem exponentially worse. If you waive those parkingrequirements for a small business so that they could locate in theheart of a small main street, then they'd be within walkingdistance of a lot of people and...
Harriet: [00:17:03] I think that's right, and Ithink that parking, the parking requirements, which, you know, oneof my heroes is Don Shoup, you know, who's written a wonderful bookcalled The High Cost of Free Parking, you know, and hisresearchers, the students and graduate students at UCLA havebasically identified that there are six to nine parking spaces foreach and every automobile in the US, which is horrifying to, kindof, contemplate and that, you know, at any given moment thatparking isn't being used, right? You know, and when retailersprovide parking, what they want is, you know, parking for, youknow, Black Friday. You know, they want the peak of the peakparking, which means that any other time, it's mostly not beingused.
Harriet: [00:17:56] So I think smart cities,you know, are lowering parking requirements, requiring sharedparking, you know, so that the time of day usage can be shared. Soan office building and an apartment building, you know, might beable to share parking or a movie theater and, you know, and anoffice might be able to share parking. And there also de-couplingthe parking. So, if I don't want to have to pay as part of myapartment rent for a parking space because I can get by without acar, I don't want to have to have that parking included. And Idon't want to have to buy a house or a condo where that isnecessarily included either. I'd like to be able to purchase thosethings separately only if I need them.
Harriet: [00:18:40] So all those things thatcities are doing to de-couple parking and to be smarter about itmeans that they're producing less parking going forward. And almosteveryone who's looking at the future of travel is also thinkingthat we will have less individual car ownership in the future andalso less need for parking. Because right now, you know, not onlyis parking wasteful, but we don't drive cars that much. You know,our average in the US is 5 percent of the time, on average, thecars are being driven along, 95 percent of the time they're notbeing driven. If you're in some other business, yeah, you'd say,oh, my gosh, that's not an asset utilization that's very good. Ishould be trying to be more efficient. So, I think that's also thefuture.
Eve: [00:19:30] And then, of course, as parkingrequirements are reduced, you're freeing up land. Much needed landfor affordable housing and other things like that, that are closein to jobs. So, they're really big issues. So, yeah. So, what'syour background and what path led you to all of this?
Harriet: [00:19:51] So, I studied civilengineering in school, but I've been, you know, I've beenessentially pretending to be a planner for more than 20 years,really. And I have to say I was probably a reluctant planner. Iadmired planners very much but, you know, I wasn't necessarilytrained in it.
Harriet: [00:20:10] And my first job, my firstofficial planning job was actually to be the secretary of planningfor the state of Maryland. I worked with an organization you mightknow, the Urban Land Institute.
Eve: [00:20:22] Oh, yes.
Harriet: [00:20:23] When I was at theEnvironmental Protection Agency to help create a nationalsmart-growth movement, because, from my perspective sitting at EPA,we were kind of swabbing the deck of the Titanic to worry aboutwhat was smaller and smaller amounts of pollution coming out oftailpipes and smokestacks and utterly ignoring the changing use ofthe land. That more and more land was being converted to roads anddriveways and parking lots and making watersheds impervious andcausing lots of runoff, and even though automobiles were gettingmore efficient in terms of fuel and economy and pollution, thatpeople were driving more every year. So, and EPA was doingabsolutely nothing to address those issues. So, from a pollutionperspective, I thought if we could figure out a way to have morecompact developments, so in the course of doing that I actuallybecame completely impassioned about the idea of returning to ahistorical development pattern that was six thousand years old, youknow, the walkable neighborhood, and that so many people wouldbenefit. If we had more walkable neighborhoods, it wouldn't be ararity and an expensive amenity that only a few could afford but ifwe had it for everyone we'd be healthier, our transportation wouldbe a lot more affordable, it wouldn't be nearly so expensive toserve people from a government perspective, and maintaininginfrastructure, we'd save farmland and forests, we would reducepollution and greenhouse gases. I mean, there were just tons ofreasons from so many stakeholders' perspectives why it was better,that it really did grow into a movement.
Harriet: [00:22:02] And so, ever since, I'vebeen doing something having to do with this. I mean, the good news,the bad news is that there are so many reasons why we have thedevelopment pattern that we do in the US than in other parts of theworld, that any one change, any one job can't fix it all. There arehundreds of jobs, hundreds of things that would need to change andhave begun to change to make a difference. So that there are lotsof jobs that I could be in and I'd play a role in that change andhave held a lot of those different jobs, whether it's doingdisaster recovery at the federal level or sitting on the board ofour transit agency or being the head of planning for a state or fora city, and now at an advocacy organization that really focuses onall the different stakeholders in transportation.
Eve: [00:22:52] Yeah, no, I agree with you andI'm doing my little bit at Small Change and trying to supportprojects that make a difference in the same way. You know, I'vebeen fortunate with this podcast to, to interview really amazingpeople tackling these issues in so many different ways it'sabsolutely astounding. So, do you think we'd better off than wewere when you started thinking about this decades ago?
Harriet: [00:23:16] I think we are. I thinkthat, as you mentioned, the comeback in cities, the increase inwalking and biking in a lot of our cities, the increase in transituse, you know, relatively speaking I would say we've hit the peakand declined and obviously transit is on life support at the momentwith this particular global pandemic. But transit of the value-addfor real estate has also been amazing. You know, I find itwonderful that there's now something like walk scores that peoplelook at when they're deciding where to site an office or where tobuy a house or rent an apartment - to look at what's the stuffwithin walking distance?, how convenient is my neighborhood goingto be? So, yeah, I think that we're definitely making progress.
Harriet: [00:24:02] We have a, we have a longway to go to make it normative in the US for these choices to beubiquitous and everyday. But I think every crisis that we've had,whether it was the Great Recession or what we're in the middle ofnow, point to some of the benefits of proximity and I think we'llsee more of that when we come out of the health part of this crisisand start really looking at the impacts on the economy. And my hopeis that we can do more to provide that infrastructure that willmake it safe and comfortable for people to use the transportationchoices that should be available to them - the walking, the biking,the micro-mobility, the transit - that we'll continue to thinkabout trying to put the things that people need closer to them. AndI think telework is going to be a much bigger part of our futureemployment picture and that also means that on any given day in anyostensibly residential neighborhood, there's gonna be an officebuilding's worth of workers, you know, in that neighborhood needingcoffee, needing a place to meet people for lunch, you know, needinga place to get out of the house and do some work and hopefully thatwill encourage more mixed use in even those currently residentialonly neighborhoods.
Eve: [00:25:24] Yeah, so a real loosening up ofzoning as well that can really help make better cities foreveryone, right?
Harriet: [00:25:31] Yeah, absolutely.
Eve: [00:25:32] So I have a question for youand that's what's next for NUMO?
Harriet: [00:25:37] Well, NUMO is definitelylooking at both responding during this crisis, but also looking atwhat's coming. You know, a lot of the micro-mobility that haveentered market in the last couple of years, you know, have broughtsome new choices to residents, but they have come in as pure marketplayers when in fact micro-mobility might be a great thing foremployers who can't fill certain types of jobs to be offering tothose workers. It might be that cities are interested in usingmicro mobility to help people better access transit or to be asubstitute when transit isn't running for whatever reason andreally think of more integration of these new choices with theexisting public transportation system. So I think thoseopportunities are there. Those have not been the business modelthat a lot of these new entrants have been using. But we're workingwith some folks right now to talk about how employers, hospitalemployers, grocery employers are really interested in helping theirworkers get to their place of work and that having dedicated fleetsof micro-mobility vehicles, whether those are e-bikes or e-scootersor e-mopeds. Those might be really great choices for them and Ithink they'll find that that's true, not just in the crisis, butafter. And I think that's also true for transit agencies. You know,if we could integrate the payments across different types oftransportation, you pay once and you can take, you know, you canhave a number of choices for how you get from the place where youare to the place you want to be, even if those trips involve ane-bike and then a train and then a scooter at the other end. Ifthose were all part of a seamless transportation experience, a lotmore people would be doing it and you could bundle trips in a waythat really create value and incentives for the rider for theperson needing the transportation.
Eve: [00:27:45] So this is sort of a perfectstorm for transportation and technology and maybe this horriblepandemic will kind of move a little forward more quickly and we'llsee something good come out of it.
Harriet: [00:27:56] Yeah, and I think the datathat all of these new options are generating is a whole notherthing that we haven't been getting from, you know, we don't knownearly as much about any individual car movements as we know abouttransit and about these technology-enabled micro-mobility devices.So that tells us a lot about who's traveling where and when andwhere there are big gaps where people don't have access andhow that access, you know, that access this crisis has reallyhighlighted how really important that is. Whether it's two grocerystores or to hospitals or to critical places of work. So that's,that's the thing I think we're gonna be focusing on.
Eve: [00:28:41] Well, thank you very much fortalking with me today. I can't wait to see what comes next.
Harriet: [00:28:45] Thank you so much. It'sreally been a pleasure. I'm really happy to have done it.
[00:28:52] OK, thank you. Bye.
[00:28:56] That was Harriet Tregoning, the director of NUMO, theNew Urban Mobility Alliance. While she calls herself a reluctantplanner, planning has been the full frontal focus of her career asshe has tugged and wrestled with issues of how to make our countrybetter, more sustainable and more equitable.
Eve: [00:29:20] Harriet believes goodtransportation policy is good land use policy. We can't fix uptransportation woes without addressing the root of the problem.Development patterns that have allowed auto-mobility to be thesubstitute for proximity. I'm right there with her.
Eve: [00:29:44] You can find out more aboutimpact real estate investing and access the show notes for today'sepisode at my website evepicker.com. While you're there, sign upfor my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in realestate while building better cities.
Eve: [00:30:01] Thank you so much for spendingyour time with me today. And thank you, Harriet, for sharing yourthoughts. We'll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Pickersigning off to go make some change.
