Rail Transit, Residential Mobility, and Income Segregation

This research project will investigate how public investments in rail transit impact levels of income segregation in urban America. The investigators will analyze how a public investment 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 will enhance basic understanding of fundamental theories regarding residential sorting. It will help fill an important gap in the current state of knowledge of gentrification processes by modeling where potentially displaced residents move. The project will help identify 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 local residents and that connects residents, researchers, and key stakeholders and decision makers. Given widespread investments in rail transit, project results will provide information and perspectives that can be used to address social and public policy issues in many communitiesacross the United States and elsewhere. The project also will promote technical literacy and education by engaging students and community partners in an applied, mixed-methods geography course where they will 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 land values and aggregate-level neighborhood outcomes are impacted by transit. This research project will focus on the movement of lower-income residents in response to transit investments by addressing the following research questions: (1) Are lower-income residents more likely to move out of neighborhoods following the placement of new transit stations than other residents? (2) Do lower-income residents relocate to neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic composition? (3) What are the motivating factors that affect relocation decisions both into and out of transit neighborhoods? (4) 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 will employ a mix of multi-scalar methods. They will 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 will conduct a complementary qualitative analysis in neighborhoods along a new transit line in Charlotte, North Carolina, that will involve 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.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.