Transit-Induced Gentrification: Who Will Stay, and Who Will Go?

Abstract

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has been promoted by planners and policy advocates as a solution to a variety of urban problems, including automobile traffic congestion, air pollution, and urban poverty. Since the enhanced accessibility offered by transit proximity is often capitalized into land and housing prices, many express concern that new transit investments will result in the displacement of the low-income populations likely to benefit most from transit access, a phenomenon which we term transit-induced gentrification. Whereas policy advocates have proposed a variety of interventions designed to ensure that affordable housing for low-income households is produced and preserved in areas proximate to transit stations, little is known about the effectiveness of these policy proposals. This article relies on an integrated land use/transportation model to analyze how TOD-based affordable housing policies influence the intraurban location of low-income households. We find that affordability restrictions targeted to new dwellings constructed in TODs are effective tools for promoting housing affordability and improving low-income households’ access to transit while simultaneously reducing the extent of transit-induced gentrification.

Keywords:

• Public transit
• affordable housing
• transit-oriented development

Acknowledgments:

The authors would like to acknowledge the participants of the Transit, Transit-Oriented Development, and Urban Form Symposia held in Washington, DC and Paris, France for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Whereas we call attention to the oft-cited aims of TOD policy, in terms of the problems it is often meant to address, this article does not directly tackle the effectiveness of TOD in addressing broader social and environmental problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution, or urban poverty. Our article specifically addresses income sorting near transit (transit-induced gentrification), which has implications for but is not meant to serve as a proxy for these and a variety of other urban problems.

2. The literature on gentrification is large, and scholars have operationalized gentrification using various measures of changes in housing market activity and household status. In two recent examples of studies that have examined transit-induced gentrification, as we define it, Lin (2002) examines changes in residential property values near transit, and Grube-Cavers and Patterson (2015) rely on survival analysis methods to examine the influence of transit proximity on the occurrence of gentrification, where gentrification is defined in terms of a variety of housing market and household indicators.