Rail transit’s association with gentrification has been a presence in the public discourse for some time and Los Angeles is no different. There is a prevailing public perception that Los Angeles' recent boom in rail transit development causes an influx of high income residents and an outflow of low income residents near rail stations. The authors' research asks whether the presence of rail transit increases the outflow lower-income neighborhood residents. The authors use a unique dataset of tax filers in Los Angeles County to address this question. This database tracks the income and location of households across 21 years at a fine spatial scale. This analysis aggregates household data to provide station-area population out mobility rates for 35 rail station neighborhoods and 35 paired control neighborhoods along two Los Angeles Metro transit lines. Their sample consists of 15 stations along the Red/Purple subway line and 20 station along the Gold light rail line that opened between 1993 and 2013. The authors measure effects on four income brackets: below 30% of Area Median Income (AMI) (<$15,000 in 2013), 30-50% of AMI, 50-80% of AMI and above 80% of AMI (>$40,000 in 2013).

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There is growing interest in California to locate affordable housing in transitoriented development (TOD). This approach is offered as a solution to providing desperately needed affordable housing while also supporting the state’s interest to grow more compactly and reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled. Other reasons offered for this approach include providing low-income residents increased access to job opportunities, lowering overall household transportation costs, and mitigating potential gentrification and displacement affects associated with TOD projects. While producing additional affordable units is vitally important unto itself, the assumptions regarding environmental sustainability benefits that underlie the linkage of affordable housing and TODs are not as straightforward as one would hope.

This policy brief examines findings of a study on driving impacts and policy approaches for affordable housing in TODs.

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This project brief summarizes findings from a project aimed at addressing the question of "Is new rail transit associated with displacement of low-income residents in near-rail neighborhoods?" To address this question, the researchers used annual data on household locations and incomes from 1994 to 2012 to examine neighborhood income distributions and the pattern of residential moves by income in Los Angeles rail transit neighborhoods. The Los Angeles metropolitan area presents an ideal study area for analyzing transit-oriented development (TOD) and potential displacement. Since 1990, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) has opened 93 new rail-transit stations. An additional 17 are under construction.

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Rail transit and neighborhood compositional changes are becoming clearly linked in the public mind. Examples where rail transit has been associated, at least anecdotally, with neighborhood gentrification abound. In Washington, D.C., the Green and Yellow lines are associated with neighborhood transition north and east of downtown. In Los Angeles, the Gold, Expo, and Red/Purple lines have been associated with gentrification concerns (Zuk & Chapple, 2015a), and similar concerns have been raised regarding the soon-to-open Crenshaw Line. On balance, these same concerns are present in most large metropolitan areas that are building or expanding rail transit.

Gentrification is a process of neighborhood change characterized by increasing housing prices and changing demographic and socioeconomic composition of the neighborhood. These components of gentrification are often mutually reinforcing: changing composition can further increase housing prices and vice versa. Prior studies have raised the concern that rail transit expansion catalyzes or exacerbates gentrification (Zuk et al., 2017; Rayle, 2015).

This report seeks to shed light on this latter concern. It begins with a brief summary of the evidence from prior studies on both rail-related housing price increases and changing composition. It then introduces a newly available data source, which the authors use to examine the relationship between new rail transit station opening and neighborhood income composition. This report aims to determine whether a rail station opening in Los Angeles County is associated with the share and income composition of residents who move in and out of neighborhoods near that rail station. Specifically, the researchers address the following questions regarding gentrification and its tie to rail transit stations: (1) Who moves into rail-station neighborhoods and when? (2) Are higher income households growing as a share of station area population relative to lower-income households? (3) Do rail stations cause this phenomenon or is this happening regardless of the transit investment?

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As the construction and usage of rail transit proliferates in cities across the world, concerns abound about impacts on surrounding neighborhoods – including gentrification and displacement. Los Angeles County has seen a massive rail transit buildout—from zero to 93 stations along six lines—in 25 years. This boom has led to a prevailing perception that Los Angeles’ rail transit development causes an influx of high-income residents and an outflow of low-income residents near rail stations.

This policy brief summarizes research that tests this perception by answering the following questions related to rail transit and household moves: Do rail transit stations affect residential move rates in surrounding neighborhoods? And, if so, then are lower income or long-term residents disproportionally displaced from the neighborhood?

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This paper studies the intersection of policies promoting affordable housing, transit-oriented developments (TODs), and the reduction of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in metropolitan areas. In particular, this paper focuses on the following questions: 1. Does locating affordable units in TODs increase or decrease VMT and thus emissions? 2. Is affordable housing in TODs still affordable in the long-term, i.e., beyond the expiration of the first minimum affordability period? 3. Do the benefits of affordable housing near transit outweigh the frequently higher costs of development in TODs? 4. What policy recommendations emerge from the analysis?

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