You Can't Get There From Here: August Answers To Questions on Transit, Organizational Silos, and Displacement

Jake Wegmann from the University of Texas asks: Do you think that there is any realistic prospect in the US for transit becoming relevant to the daily lives of the middle class in the vast majority of places where it isn’t already?

I think the short answer is “no” in most places. The relatively low-density land-use patterns are extremely entrenched and investment in both transit infrastructure and transit service isn’t good enough. By “transit infrastructure,” I don’t only. Mean putting rails down but investment that improves the mundane, day-to-day experience of riding transit, like good bus shelters, good sidewalks leading to transit stations, and streets you can actually cross without getting killed.

However, I’d make a couple of exceptions. First, if people are traveling into a dense area where parking is expensive and difficult, they’re take transit. Second, there’s a success story in Seattle, which has aggressively pursued transit and land-use changes in tandem and now has surprisingly, about the same level of transit ridership as Oakland or some suburbs of Boston, Chicago, and D.C. Finally is the possibility – and I emphasize possibility – of pairing ride-hailing with transit in the suburbs, as Arlington, Texas, has tried to do.

Jake actually asked a much longer question:

I am old enough to remember all of the optimism about transit in the US in the 1990s. TOD! New light rail lines in Sunbelt cities that never had them before! But it’s been 30+ years, and I don’t think the vision has really panned out. There are so many examples, but one that comes to mind is the Denver region’s massive light rail/commuter rail buildout. After all that effort and all those billions of dollars spent, my understanding is that per-capita transit ridership in Greater Denver is less now than it was before the region had built its first LRT. Nationwide transit ridership (not per-capita, but in raw numbers) had its 21st century peak in 2014, I believe, long before it got crushed by COVID. Canada, where I grew up, also mostly has low-density suburbs like we do, but its transit ridership is much higher--I think it may be something like 3X higher per capita. Are we holding onto the dream of widespread transit use too tightly in the US? We just seem incapable of making any real sustained progress. Do you have any optimism that transit will ever play an important role here beyond the big 6 “legacy” transit cities (Bos, NYC, Philly, DC, Chi, SF)? Or should we focus more on building up urbanism where it exists, promote biking/micromobility, take the isolated transit victories where we can (things seem to be going well in Seattle), but let go of the dream of Houston or LA or Phoenix becoming places where the importance of transit is widely understood and accepted?

Are middle-class folks going to make transit their preferred choice of moving around in places in the U.S. where this is not already the case? I’d say no – not because most people would prefer to drive (driving is increasingly frustrating everywhere) but because transit is inconvenient in a lot of different ways. For suburbanites, transit service is usually infrequent and getting to the bus or train stop on foot is a harsh experience at best and perilous at worst. (One thing most transit advocates don’t write about is how difficult it can to cross a “stroad” – which you have to do at least once if you are traveling both ways by transit.)

Of course, there are two major exceptions I have come to see as as the result of personal experience in both Houston and San Diego. One is when the destination is extremely dense and parking is difficult or expensive. The other is special events, which often has the same conditions.

In Houston, I used to ride the Red Line light rail into the Texas Medical Center, which is not only the largest medical center in the world but also one of the densest activity centers in the United States. (There are 100,000 employees in a one-square-mile area.) Although midday travel involved encountering the typical homeless riders, rush hour was always jammed. (Many commuters would take Houston’s excellent express bus system to downtown, then transfer to the Red Line.)

In San Diego, I often ride the Blue Line from downtown, where I live, to the UC San Diego campus. This line, which opened in 2021, is the most successful new transit line in the country, and that’s because it feeds extremely dense locations in the La Jolla area – specifically, a VA hospital, the main UCSD campus, and the UCSD health campus. The demographics on this line are dramatically different from the demographics on other transit lines in San Diego. Yes, there are a lot of students. But there are also a lot of middle-class folks going to work or to medical appointments.

The same goes for special events – sports, entertainment, conventions. The destination conditions are the same as these dense activity centers, so middle-class folks take transit for at least part of the trip. I saw that in Houston, where people crowded the Red Line to go to events at NRG Stadium (just past the Texas Medical Center), and I see it every day in my neighborhood near Santa Fe Depot in San Diego, where suburban middle-class folks who wouldn’t think of riding a bus come streaming off the commuter rail line to go to Petco Park.

The one new success story that I can think of other than the legacy Big 6 that Jake mentioned is Seattle – not historically a transit stronghold but doing pretty well today. Seattle has invested a lot not only in light rail and bus rapid transit lines but also in infill development, in part because of the strength of Washington’s growth management act, which has essentially pushed a lot of new development to the north-south spine of the region and into the city. (Seattle is the only non-sprawling large American city to add population since the pandemic.) The results are significant: Transit ridership was 20% of the population before the pandemic and is now 15%, which is about the same as Oakland, which has run off of both BART and AC Transit for 50 years. Seattle’s also about got the same level of transit ridership as Alexandria and Berkeley (though a bit less than Arlington, Virginia). The Seattle lesson is that transit ridership is about land use as well as service.

The more typical situation – if you can make it work – is Arlington, Texas, the largest city in the nation without a bus transit system. Arlington has tried to fill the gap by providing rail-hailing service to DART stations. This probably works for people doing long-haul trips where ride-hailing would be very expensive but the truth of the matter is that for day-to-day travel going pretty short distances, middle-class folks are going to use ride-hailing as the primary alternative to driving.

So the bottom line in answer to the long question: I don’t think you give up on metro areas completely. I think you give up on places within the metro areas where transit isn’t a viable alternative and focus on those areas (like central Houston) where transit can thrive even in an auto-oriented metro.

Gary Mitchell, the Kendig Keast zoning guru from Houston, asks:

I know there is some degree of collaboration between the American Planning Association and Urban Land Institute worlds (joint research, publications/guides, etc.). But are we too siloed in how we approach land use and development “planning” in this country as summed up by this AI response: “The American Planning Association (APA) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) interact as complementary national authorities in the built environment, where the APA represents public-sector and community-focused urban planners, and the ULI represents private real estate development, investment, and market-driven land use professionals”? Or, from your wide-ranging experience, are the public- and private-sector mindsets and approaches interacting about as well as they can within our U.S. framework? Exhibit A: the current housing situation that has been decades in the making.

Well, both planners and developers shape the built environment, but obviously they come at it from different perspectives. And the organizations have different perspectives too. The APA is the basic professional association for planners, while ULI is more of an elite, “belong-by-choice” organization – the place where, as my old Houston friend Ann Taylor used to say, “Developers go to wear their white hats.” I would say a better analogy is APA and the National Assocation of Home Builders, or ULI and the Congress for the New Urbanism, also an elite, “belong-by-choice” organization (though one more narrowly focused on a particular type of development).

Planners and developers obviously play different roles in shaping the built environment and come at the process form different perspectives. Historically – especially here in California – there has been a somewhat antagonistic relationship between the two groups: developers saw planners are getting in the way, while planners saw developers are exploitative. (This has changed since the housing crisis became the predominant issue in California and elsewhere: A new generation of planners is more sympathetic to developers because they see the problem as too little development, not too much.)

Beyond that, however, the two organizations serve different roles.

On the one hand, the APA is the basic professional association: Everybody belongs to it, it runs the certification and continuing education programs, and it has to represent everybody in the profession, which – as it the case with so many membership associations – often leads to a “lowest-common-denominator” approach.

On the other hand, ULI is more of a “belong-by-choice” organization. As my Houston friend Ann Taylor, who used to be the ULI executive director there used to say, “ULI is where developers go to wear their white hats.” Not everybody belongs and not everybody wants to belong. ULI holds itself up as a kind of elite, cutting-edge-best-practices organization, which is obviously different from an everybody-belongs-membership organization.

So they are fundamentally different.

A better analogy to APA in the development world is the National Association of Home Builders, which is, admittedly, primarily geared toward single-family homebuilders. But it’s the same kind of organization: a big-tent place (which admittedly is moving toward the multifamily world more and more).

Meanwhile, a better analogy – though far from a perfect one – for ULI might be the Congress for the New Urbanism, which also views itself as a kind of an elite, cutting-edge-best-practices outfit. The big difference there is that CNU advocates for a particular kind of development, while ULI views itself as the champion of the best development no matter what the kind.

Does this mean APA and ULI can’t work together? Of course not. But this is more likely to occur at the local level, where a local APA section and a local ULI chapter has common membership and is focused on specific local issues. I’ve seen that in many places.

The one thing that drives me crazy is their conferences tend to overlap and I never know which one to go to. The spring ULI conference often conflicts with the APA’s National Planning Conference, while the fall ULI conference often conflicts with the California APA conference. One year the two fall conferences were in the Bay Area at the same time, which simplified things. But even when they don’t directly conflict, it’s hard to go to both of them.

Los Angeles planner Marco Anderson asks:

Thinking about the challenges in downtown LA just east of the River and other communities: Is there anyway to improve streetscapes, active transportation and parks without causing gentrification and/or displacement?

This is actually a live question in a research project I am currently working on – the question beign, not how to do prevent displacement, but how do you invest in neighborhoods in a way that makes live better for the people who already live there. I think the answer is you can do it, but we have to look at this more broadly than, “What anti-displacement strategies should we put into place?” If that’s your only perspective, you fall into the trap of thinking that investment itself is bad, and that just consigns the non-gentrified neighborhood to a future no better than the past.

I think this is one of the biggest struggles – ideological, political, economic – in urban planning today. What’s the goal? To improve the lives of people who live in low-income neighborhoods? Or to protect the exact way of life they have now, no matter what their current circumstances are?

I think the answer has to be the first, not the second. Otherwise the goal becomes to repel investment altogether.

The first step in understanding this is, to me, separating out the gentrification question between investment and displacement. At least at the residential level, it’s displacement that’s the bad thing, not investment per se.

Some researchers, including Nick Marantz of UC Irvine, argue that the whole displacement issue is overstated. Low-income people tend to move around a lot no matter what, for a variety of (unfortunate and economically driven) reasons. The amount of additional displacement due to gentrification may not be that much.

In addition, Marantz and Jake Wegmann (who asked the first question this month!) have argued that investment in new development in a low-income neighborhood is far preferable to investment in upgrading existing housing, because that may be less likely to cause displacement.

And then there is the difference between gentrification in the sense of taking a neighborhood more upscale and gentrification in the sense of changing its demographics. These are interrelated I know, but here’s one story from the historically Hispanic East End of Houston (which I’ll get back to in a minute): One time I was facilitating a focus group of longtime Hispanic homeowners, who admittedly were getting a lot of pressure from aggressive developers to sell out. They viewed their new white neighbors with amusement – but not hostility: “We think they’re crazy. They walk their dogs at 10 o’clock at night! We would never go out at 10 o’clock at night. But we’re glad they do it because it makes the neighborhood safer.”

But to me, almost as big an issue is the question of commercial gentrification and displacement. Yes, maybe you can stay in your house. But can you afford to buy – or do you want to buy – a six-dollar latte or 20-dollar avocado toast? To me, this is a a tough one.

That’s why I admire developers who try to straddle this problem, such as my friends at Concept Neighborhood, which has been developing and redeveloping several parcels in that same East End neighborhood in Houston. The Concept Neighborhood folks are very aware that they are going to gentrify the neighborhood and they get some pushback as a result. But they’re also scaling their commercial rents so that businesses that cater to the locals can stay – for example, they brought in an 800-square-foot bodega and they take a share of the revenue rather than a fixed rent.

Obviously, not every developer in a gentrifying neighborhood is going to take that approach. But I think that when you have major public improvements that might drive gentrification – such as parks and bike trails along the L.A. River – maybe you can combine those with commercial activities on public land that cater to the local residents, not to the gentrifiers.