How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood?

If part of your financial independence strategy is pursuing geoarbitrage or if you anticipate moving after achieving FI, where you move matters.  Walkable neighborhoods have experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years. 

More and more people are realizing the detrimental effects of car dependency on their bank accounts, stress levels, and overall health.

But is your neighborhood walkable?  What exactly does “walkable” mean and how can you find out?  I’ve got you covered. 

It’s easy to think of walkability as simply the ability to walk down your street or walk your dog around the block.  But do you even have sidewalks on your street?  Many don’t, forcing you to walk in the road and become more vulnerable to distracted drivers. 

But walkability in a broader sense means the ability to walk to things, like grocery stores and libraries.  The more you can do the things required to live your life without a car, the more walkable your neighborhood is. 

And according to the AARP,

• People who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are 47 percent more likely to be active at least 39 minutes a day.
• A well-constructed walkway for a typical 50-foot-wide residential property might cost a builder $2,000, but it can return 15 times that investment in resale value.
• In a scenario where two houses are nearly identical, the one with a five-foot-wide sidewalk and two street trees not only sells for $4,000 to $34,000 more but it also sells in less time.
• Retail properties with a Walk Score ranking of 80 out of 100 were valued 54 percent higher than properties with a Walk Score of 20 and had an increase in net operating income of 42 percent for more walkable properties.

 

The folks at WalkScore.com mentioned above have been the leader in this space and use a methodology they developed with leading academics to score neighborhoods.  Their brief description:

For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5 minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30 minute walk.

Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.

They give each zip code a score based on the above, an here’s how they describe their scores:

They also give bikescores and transit scores as well and have metholdologies listed for those.  As you know, I’m particularly interested in bikescores since I tend to do that a bit…. 

Have a whack at it, check your current walkability score or the score of a place you’re considering moving to.  Or just use it to compare to your friends and talk smack. 

Mine is in the “very walkable” category and I’m pretty happy with that.  I won’t list my actual score for fear of being discovered 😉 

 

More Geeky

Another tool to assess walkability that works completely differently is the ArcGIS.com Walkability Index Map. 

With this tool you don’t have to plug in a zip code or address to use it, you can just browse anywhere on a map.  That’s a valuable thing as it allows you to hone in on walkable places near a particular area or perhaps in a certain state that you might not know of. 

This tool uses professional GIS software and is a little less intuitive to use, so I’ll guide you through. 

After going to the site you should see a map of America with lots of orange polygons on it.  On the left click the little black triangle just to the left of the world WalkabilityIndex to expand the table of contents and data layers.  

The primary data layer and most valuable is the one already turned on – the National Walkability Index.  It’s described as: 

The walkability index is based on measures of the built environment that affect the probability of whether people walk as a mode of transportation: street intersection density, proximity to transit stops, and diversity of land uses. 

So as you can see the methodology is different than WalkScore’s, which is good in my book as you can compare and contrast. 

The ArcGIS Map also has layers for: 

• Street intersection density
• Proximity to transit stops (this one is very handy)
• Employment Mix (The mix of employment types in a block group such as retail, office, or industrial) 
• Employment & Housing Mix (places where businesses reside near housing)
• Four other layers that get super-nerdy and rank Census blocks by the density of streets (D3b), transit (D4a), employment (D2b), and housing (D2a) 

If you like maps as much as I do you can really spend some quality time nerding out with this tool.

 

Transit

A third resource I’d like to highlight is the report from the University of Minnesota titled “Access  Across America: Transit 2017”.  These reports are done annually but the 2018 version has not yet been released.  They score urban areas based on accessibility to jobs by transit, with detailed breakdowns by time of travel.  Their methodology:

Rankings are determined by a weighted average of accessibility, giving a higher weight to closer jobs. Jobs reachable within ten minutes are weighted most heavily, and jobs are given decreasing weight as travel time increases up to 60 minutes.

The top ten cities based on their scoring are:

1. New York
2. San Francisco
3. Chicago
4. Washington
5. Boston
6. Los Angeles
7. Philadelphia
8. Seattle
9. San Jose
10. Denver 

Be sure to check out the full report as it’s chock full of awesome maps to hep you hone in on areas with great transit access.  Here’s the map of D.C.:

 

Like Personal Finance, It’s Personal

I realize the desire for a walkable environment isn’t for everyone.  The more walkable a neighborhood is, the more likely it will be dense and urbanized.  Also it will likely be noisier and provide less privacy.

My best friend simply says “I’m just not a city person” even though he grew up in Baltimore like I did.  He enjoys living way out in the boonies now and has always been a car guy anyway, so he doesn’t mind having to depend on his car to do everything.

Me?  I lean towards the walkability side of things but no longer desire to live in a high-density, full urban environment.  I grew up in a dense city, been there done that and have the scars to prove it.  I like a mix where I can walk or ride my bike to most things but still have some degree of privacy and quietness.  Thankfully I’ve found that balance with my current location and it rocks. 

I save tons of money and gain tons of fitness by using my bike for most errands, yet I don’t have endless ambulance sirens and car horn noise all day. 

These awesome mapping tools and reports can help you find very specific locations that meet the level of walkability, bikeability, or access to transit that you desire.  

I’ve done lots of other geographic-based posts showing various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective.  Be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page that has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.

I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy.

Ok Readers, Time To Compare – What is your neighborhoods Walkability Score?  Comment below!