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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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).
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.
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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