Developing Affordable Housing Guidelines Near Rail Transit in Los Angeles

Los Angeles County has over 100 rail transit stations open or scheduled to open in the next decade. Two questions are central to sound land use planning near stations, but have not been effectively analyzed together. First, will development near rail stations support Los Angeles' goals for more affordable housing? Second, as residents move into transit-oriented developments, will those new residents use transit more and drive less, supporting California's greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction goals? This project will compare the effect of different station-area development typologies on both housing affordability and GHG emissions. Our objective is to inform planning and housing policy in the City of Los Angeles and in the broader Los Angeles metropolitan area. The project will build a small number of development scenarios for station areas. Each scenario will be a possible development future for a station area, including specifications for the number of new units, the unit size, the split between rental and owner-occupied dwellings, density levels, and the mix of housing and employment-generating (e.g. retail, commercial, service) land uses. As a separate but linked step, the project will use the most recent travel diary data for the Los Angeles region, the 2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS), to estimate relationships between household income and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in neighborhoods with and without rail transit. Those data will be used to forecast how driving can be expected to change for households of different income levels if they move from neighborhoods without rail transit to places served by rail transit, or vice versa. The project will develop forecasts of the impact of each scenario's station area development future on both the stock of affordable housing and on VMT changes. Those station-area scenarios and impacts will be aggregated into system-wide portfolios. The result will be an analysis of both VMT reduction and housing affordability derived from scenarios that can be easily related to development plans.

• Record URL:
  https://www.metrans.org/research/developing-affordable-housing-guidelines-near-rail-transit-los-angeles

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $99983
• Contract Numbers:

  65A0533

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Project Managers:

  Chursenoff, David

• Performing Organizations:

  National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research

  University of Southern California
  650 Childs Way, RGL 107
  Los Angeles, CA  United States  90089-0626
• Principal Investigators:

  Bostic, Raphael

• Start Date: 20150815
• Expected Completion Date: 20161231
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• Source Data: RiP Project 39748

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Greenhouse gases; Guidelines; Housing; Land use planning; Rail transit stations; Traffic data; Travel diaries; Vehicle miles of travel
• Uncontrolled Terms: Affordable housing
• Geographic Terms: Los Angeles (California)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01572359
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research
• Contract Numbers: 65A0533
• Files: UTC, RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Aug 6 2015 1:00AM