Besides Oxfam you can also do a little every day to relieve hunger, improve women's health, provide health care for children, reduce illiteracy, save the rainforests, and rescue animals. It's about the least you could do.

A colleague and I recently had a chat about transit and fair housing. The non-profit organization I work for was founded through the organizing efforts Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Al Raby during the Chicago freedom movement (how cool is that?!). And, our mission is to overcome discrimination in the housing market through a variety of methods. My particular focus is community relations and public policy.

So anyway, we were discussing the issue of how transit plays a role in eliminating barriers to fair housing choice. Housing integration is a goal of our agency. We advocate for open and inclusive communities for people of all protected classes especially race, national origin, and people with children. However, some practical realities sometimes make affirmative moves difficult. For instance, making a move from the south side of Chicago to the northwest suburbs means that one must leave behind social networks that have helped make life easier. On the other hand, it provides many more potential opportunities for employment and education. And, it's safer.

But, transit development could help maintain social networks. If the CTA lines extended farther into the suburbs, it would decrease the time needed to get from one point to another. It would also be helpful to have more rings of rail lines (just as we have rings of highways) at some interval of length that made sense according to population density. I've made the argument previously that Chicago needs a western arc line. It would also be helpful for the commuter trains (Metra) to provide an arc that connected the suburban lines from the northwest to the southwest. Better coordination between transit agencies would be helpful as well. Currently there are 3 different agencies -- the CTA (busses and rail in Chicago), Metra (rail in the suburbs and city), and PACE (busses in the suburbs). They don't coordinate well even when the timetables say they do. The delays at the point where one connects to another are always at least fifteen minutes and sometimes as long as an hour or more.

What I'm getting at here is that transit has the opportunity to compress space. It brings spaces closer together because people can get from one place to another quicker and cheaper. Ideally, if it were very efficient it could make integration efforts easier. And, it could make ameliorate the disparities that result from segregation. That is partly why I am such an advocate for mass transit. And, I just wanted to pass along that argument for others to use. Plus, I was supposed to talk about fair housing this week.

It just might be that the Denver MSA is rapidly becoming the model for urban and regional planning practice. This article describes a policy the mayor is proposing to include low and moderate-income rental housing near the stations that will be built along the new FasTracks mass transit system.

Contrast this with the rent curve for the El in Chicago. Rents nearer to the lines are typically higher than those over the quarter mile distance planners usually use to determine the catchment area for mass transit.

It will be exciting to watch this as it develops.