Why Affordable Housing Is So Important for Development Near Transit

What happens when you build housing around transit, but it's not affordable to the people who ride transit the most?

Denver is finding out, as parcels near new light rail stations fill out with development. An estimated 29 percent of new housing in the region is within half a mile of rail stations, report Eleni Bardaka and John Hersey in a guest post for TransitCenter, but that doesn't mean the people living in those homes are riding transit very much.

Bardaka, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and Hershey, a TOD planner at the Denver Regional Transit District, surveyed more than 300 people who live within a 10-minute walk of Denver's new light rail stations. Comparing residents of new market-rate housing to low-income households, they found wildly different travel habits.

More than 90 percent of the market-rate households owned at least one car, while less than half of the low-income households did. And almost 70 percent of market-rate housing residents used a personal car for most of their trips, while 66 percent of low-income households primarily used transit.

If transit expansion isn't accompanied by affordable housing policies, they conclude, it's going to fail:

Denver isn't unique. Economic displacement has been identified as a factor in declining transit ridership in Portland, in a pattern that's suspected to apply in other cities with rising costs of living.

Funding to subsidize low-income housing isn't easy to come by, but Denver has been using a number of different financing tools to provide equitable transit-oriented development (eTOD is the shorthand). Complementary policies like reducing parking requirements also help, Bardaka and Hersey write:

Using a combination of those methods, Denver was able to deliver 65 new homes at its 38th & Blake Station affordable for households making 30 percent of area median income.