This research project investigates how public investments in rail transit impact levels of income segregation in urban America. The investigators analyze how public investments like rail transit affects land values, residential location decisions, and neighborhood changes in ways that influence metropolitan-wide patterns of segregation, with special emphasis given to the movements of lower-income residents. The project enhances a basic understanding of fundamental theories regarding residential sorting. It helps fill an important gap in the current state of knowledge of gentrification processes by modeling where potentially displaced residents move. The project identifies motivating factors that influence decisions to stay or leave a neighborhood impacted by new transit development through community-engaged scholarship that focuses on the perspectives of residents, connecting residents, researchers, key stakeholders, and decision-makers. Given widespread investments in rail transit, project results provide information and perspectives that can be used to address social and public policy issues in many communities across the United States and elsewhere. The project also promotes technical literacy and education by engaging students and community partners in an applied, mixed-methods geography course where they examine the issue, participate in surveying residents, perform basic analyses on the collected data, and map and measure segregation trends following the implementation of a new rail transit line.
Much of the recent scholarship examining relationships among rail transit investments, displacement, and gentrification has emphasized how property values and aggregate-level neighborhood outcomes are impacted by transit. This research project focuses on the movement of lower-income residents in response to transit investments by addressing the following research questions:
- Are lower-income residents more likely to move out of neighborhoods following the placement of new transit stations than other residents?
- Do lower-income residents relocate to neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic composition?
- What are the motivating factors that affect relocation decisions both into and out of transit neighborhoods?
- Where and for which income groups do residential economic segregation trends change following the establishment of a new transit system?
To gather quantitative data about residential movements and to understand the rationale behind these locational decisions, the investigators employ a mix of multi-scalar methods. They analyze an individual-level, longitudinal dataset collected as part of the Panel Study on Income Dynamics to trace residential movements of individuals in and out of transit neighborhoods throughout the United States since 1970. They also conduct a complementary qualitative analysis in neighborhoods along a new transit line in Charlotte, North Carolina, which involves interviews with key individuals at both the city and community scales as well as surveys and focus groups with neighborhood residents in proximity to stations of the new line.
