Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

 Jenny Schuetz

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Genevieve Giuliano

Eun Jin Shin

University of Southern California

            Despite its reputation as a car-oriented city, the Los Angeles metropolitan area has made substantial investments in developing rail transit since 1990.  In cities with older “legacy” rail systems, the built environment has developed over time around fixed transit infrastructure, creating land use patterns oriented towards long-standing rail stations.  By contrast, rail stations in Los Angeles were added to an already dense built environment, with auto oriented zoning and established land use patterns.  Prior research has found widely mixed results of transit investment on transit ridership, land values, housing prices, population and housing density, employment composition and population characteristics.  However, no research to date has explicitly examined the extent to which local land use regulations either constrain or enhance development near stations.

             In this paper we ask whether redevelopment is occurring around Los Angeles’ rail stations, and whether zoning and related public policies are facilitating or constraining transit-oriented development.  We conduct case studies of six Metro rail stations in the Los Angeles region, documenting the existing built environment, key components of zoning and land use planning, and the extent and type of new development in the immediate vicinity of stations after they opened.  The stations were chosen to provide different neighborhood environments and illustrate varying types of zoning and development outcomes.  Data on zoning comes from the planning departments of Los Angeles and Pasadena.  We measure redevelopment by examining parcel-level changes in land use type, building age and housing unit counts from various administrative data sources.   

             Results illustrate that redevelopment around transit stations involves complex interactions between physical environment, economic conditions and public interventions.  Three of the six station areas have seen substantial increases in housing stock and some new commercial space within several blocks of the stations.  All three of these areas have relatively TOD-friendly zoning, moderately dense existing environments and strong real estate markets, and benefitted from active local government efforts to encourage development.  The other three stations have had few if any changes in the building stock.  In two of these cases, incompatible zoning may constrain development near stations, while two areas have had relatively soft real estate markets since the stations opened.  Besides strong real estate markets and compatible zoning, political support from neighborhood residents affects the probability of redevelopment.