Finding walkable housing near transit

Will combining transit accessibility and neighborhood walkability be the next big thing in real estate?

As the Center for Transit-Oriented Development's report "Capturing the Value of Transit" pointed out, "Americans are increasingly prioritizing the advantages provided by neighborhoods near transit, including economic savings to households, reduced carbon emissions, healthier lifestyles, fewer traffic accidents, and reduced suburban sprawl."

Combine that with the growing awareness of the value of walkability generated by the website WalkScore.com and you have a whole new way to identify the best places to live.

Maps of transit routes have been around for ages. Walk Score's maps allow people to instantly judge the walkability of a neighborhood. Now comes a website that allows people looking to buy homes to narrow their search to those houses near transit with a specific walkability score.

Estately.com moves beyond the standard neighborhood real estate search with parameters for numbers of bedrooms and price ranges. Among the ways users can refine their search is to specify how close the property is to transit -- from 500 feet to 2 miles. You also can specify which rail lines or specific bus routes you wish to be near.

According to Walk Score's blog, Estately.com is the only site so far to master this technology. But Walk Score hopes to move that progress along. This year they launched their first "Transit Time Maps."

These maps tell you how far you can travel from a given point in 45 minutes on public transit. This is a prototype and it only works in the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., but it shows what can be done with modern transit mapping info.

(Reconnecting America CEO Shelley Poticha — Walk Score 92 — is a member of the Walk Score advisory board.)

As the CTOD report noted, "Demographic trends are changing the nature of the housing market, with a growing number of smaller households without children, which are less likely to need or want a large, single-family home. Tastes are also changing, with a growing number of households desiring the type of lifestyle usually associated with dense urban places, such as easy access to retail, services and entertainment. Growing concerns about the environment and rising gas prices are also working to make urban neighborhoods with good transit connections more desirable and valuable."

Now all we need is someone to put it all together: Search for a home in a walkable neighborhood within 45 minutes by public transit from work.