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Preserving affordable housing near transit means more than simply saving a building—it means preserving opportunities for low-income families and seniors to access jobs and services. Next to housing, transportation is the second highest household cost for most Americans. Affordable housing located near transit allows families and seniors to live an affordable lifestyle and access employment, education, retail, and community opportunities. Reconnecting America and the National Housing Trust identified federally assisted affordable housing located in close proximity to existing or proposed public transportation in 8 cities: Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, New York City, Portland,St. Louis, and Seattle. We found that more than 100,000 federally assisted housing units sheltering more than 300,000 individuals in these cities are located in transit rich neighborhoods. Approximately 65,500 of these units- or 63 percent of total units near transit- are covered by federal rental…

This manual is intended to serve as a companion to MTC’s Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Policy and for Priority Development Areas under the Focusing Our Vision (FOCUS) program to assist jurisdictions with decisionmaking as they complete planning efforts around Bay Area transit hubs and corridors.

These case studies, funded through the support of the Surdna Foundation, present transit-oriented development (TOD) examples from diverse, low-income neighborhoods around transit, all built within the last 10 years. The goal of this survey is to provide examples that can help spur development around Philadelphia’s underutilized transit resources in similar types of neighborhoods. To that end, the examples in these case studies all overcame barriers to implementation using innovative, but replicable approaches. These examples are intended to allow the Philadelphia Neighborhood Development Collaborative and others to advocate for more involvement by the public sector, test some of the same mechanisms for financing and land assembly, and provide examples of successful TOD to developers and community members.

This study seeks to inform City of Hercules Council and Staff about connecting the City’s waterfront to a new developing town center. This study gives technical information on the possibility of using aerial ropeways (which includes aerial trams and gondolas) and discusses alternatives such as buses and streetcars.

This richly illustrated book is about streetcars and the tremendous private investment they help generate. There are case studies of the most robust new systems and the ways they’ve been used to leverage ambitious public goals like affordability and high-quality public space, and chapters on planning, financing and the more technical aspects of building a system, and also a history of streetcars as a public/private venture. The 2009 edition of the book is available for purchase here.

This colorful 24-page “picture book” lays out in easy-to-read format how shifting demographics and the changing real estate market have opened up an unprecedented window of opportunity for transit-oriented development.

This paper describes and evaluates tools and strategies that are being used to create mixed-income and affordable housing near transit in regions around the U.S. The first half of the paper explains how these various strategies are being used and the limitations and successes of each, and the second half discusses best practices and provides examples of each.

Low- and moderate-income families are finding that if they move farther from work in order to find affordable housing they end up spending at least as much as they save – or more – on the increased cost of transportation. This report details the “heavy load” of combined transportation and housing costs on working families in 28 metropolitan regions around the U.S.