Executive Summary
Boston will reach more than 700,000 residents by 2030 (The City of Boston Housing 2030). The City’s primary strategy is to plan for this growth and help create 53,000 new units of housing at a variety of income levels across the City (City of Boston, 2015). Within this context, the 2017 City Planning and Urban Affairs Program at Boston University has been guided by the following overarching question: Is there room for equitable housing development in Boston’s transit-rich neighborhoods?
While Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), in theory, incorporate core principles of sustainability, equity challenges are usually exacerbated in Transit-Rich Neighborhoods (TRNs), where higher demand drives up rents and housing prices (Pollack, Bluestone, and Billingham, 2010).
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This research is not intended to set forth comprehensive policy or planning recommendations on where to prioritize housing initiatives, but rather to present the reader with equitable development opportunities for housing in selected areas of the City of Boston. Our study area comprises five corridors in three different transit modes: Blue Line (Maverick to Suffolk Downs), Orange Line (Forest Hills to Ruggles), Red Line (Broadway to Ashmont), Silver Line SL4 and SL5 to Dudley, and the Fairmount Line.
In that sense, this report provides a starting point for interested parties to determine where opportunities are and how to assess them, considering the need to involve collaborative processes that occur at the community level together with government agencies and other stakeholders. It is also important to note that each transit node and neighborhood is unique; however, some basic variables are essential for any equitable development capacity analysis.
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The goals of this study are:
• To identify common data elements that are useful in establishing a basic understanding of the existing physical and equity conditions in Boston’s transit-rich neighborhoods.
• To quantify current equitable development opportunities in Boston’s transit-rich neighborhoods by highlighting their differences and similarities.
• To help predict where equitable development may occur.
A key deliverable of this report is the development and application of a multi-criteria framework for assessing fair development opportunities around transit nodes. Also, the model developed is a supply-side analysis and does not predict market demand for new construction.
Our study area comprises five corridors in three different transit modes: Blue Line (Maverick to Suffolk Downs), Orange Line (Forest Hills to Ruggles), Red Line (Broadway to Ashmont), Silver Line SL4 and SL5 to Dudley, and the Fairmount Line.
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This research attempts to develop a framework to identify equitable development opportunities around 30 stations on Blue Line, Silver Line, Red Line, Fairmount-Indigo commuter rail line, and Orange line. The first step was to conduct a thorough literature review to identify a list of factors that can be used to guide the research. While each node and each transit line are unique, the idea is to compare differences and similarities regarding equitable development opportunities within and among those areas. In total, nine variables were determined to identify equitable development opportunities and space availability for all the 30 transit stations in Boston. Each team was then able to rank each location separately according to the spatial capacity and social profile, which gave a score ranging from 1 through 5, with 5 being the highest opportunity.
Then, using both scores (social and spatial opportunity), we created a bivariate matrix to rank all study areas. Those zones with the highest equitable development and space availability scores were prioritized for the next phase.
