By Ben Christopher, CalMatters
The northern tip of the Vermont Square neighborhood in South Los Angeles gentrified in many of the usual ways over the last decade.
Median incomes shot up. The neighborhood’s share of Black residents declined. On the list of fastest growing home prices across the region, Vermont Square cracked the top ten. Along Western Avenue, new apartment buildings popped up as visible markers of change.
But there is a less obvious, if no less profound, marker: Fewer people began riding the bus.
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Between 2012 and 2017, public transit ridership fell in this Census designated tract — a roughly half-square mile neighborhood spanning Western — by 24%. In that same period, the neighborhood-wide rent increased by an average of $468 per month.
That, according to UCLA researchers, is probably not a coincidence. A study published late last year compared changes in transit ridership numbers to rental market trends in neighborhoods across Los Angeles and Orange counties. It found that in neighborhoods well-served by buses and trains, transit ridership tended to fall in places where the rents were rising.
At the south end of Chinatown, average rents went up $379 and transit use fell by 21%. In a sliver of Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley, rent was up $305, ridership was down 28%. Across the region, a neighborhood-wide rental hike of an extra $230 per month predicted a 22% decline in bus and train boardings.
The most likely explanation, according to the researchers, is that as dense urban neighborhoods grow more costly, lower- and moderate-income renters, the very people most likely to ride the bus, are pushed out and replaced by a more affluent set who, on the whole, tend to favor getting around by car.
The findings suggest gentrification isn’t just bad for residents displaced by rising rents and scarce affordable units: It’s also bad for the transit systems those displaced residents rely upon.
Twin crises: Housing and transit
California’s public bus and rail agencies are in a decade-long slump. For that, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
COVID-19 steered commuters away from crowded buses and train cars and ridership numbers have yet to fully recover. Federal rescue funding passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021 propped up these systems for a time but has now mostly dried up. Inflation, supply chain snags and now tariffs have made the cost of maintaining aging, legacy infrastructure even costlier. Even before the pandemic-era tumult, the advent of rideshare apps and a steady nationwide rise in car ownership rates resulted in a slow and steady decline of transit ridership.
The UCLA study points to yet another culprit behind the state’s public transit woes: California’s housing affordability crisis.
“The basic premise of the paper is, ‘Can rising rents help explain why you’re losing transit ridership?’ And it seems to be that they can, because they reduce the likelihood that very high transit riders will live near transit stops,” said urban planning professor Michael Manville, lead author of the paper.
Manville and his fellow researchers weren’t able to track where displaced transit riders wound up. But given the relatively few number of transit-friendly neighborhoods in the Los Angeles and Orange County metro area, it’s likely most settled in neighborhoods with fewer public transportation options. Some may have felt compelled to lease or buy a car, at considerable expense to their own finances and to the environment. For others, unwilling or unable to incur that expense, being priced out of a neighborhood with steady bus and rail service might simply mean having fewer travel options.
That latter outcome might be more likely these days. The study uses data collected before the pandemic. Now, with higher interest rates, higher ride-share costs and higher auto prices — which could sail higher still if high tariffs remain in place — “you might actually see people not being able to switch to driving as much,” said Manville. Instead, displaced renters may simply be forced to move and rely on “transit in neighborhoods where the transit isn’t as good.”
Fewer transportation options have been found to put a person at risk of higher unemployment, poorer health and more pronounced social isolation.
The findings in and around the L.A. Basin are consistent with a general trend across California and North America, in which higher rents and prices push lower income residents further and further out of many dense, urban job centers. This “suburbanization of poverty” has changed who has access to public transit in cities as different and far apart as Toronto, Canada and Durham, North Carolina.
The desperate unaffordability of housing in California has a way of making virtually every other statewide problem worse. Higher rents swell the state’s population of homeless. Higher home prices widen economic inequality and put wealth accumulation out of reach for millions. Shortages of housing in urban cores push people further away from their jobs, snarling traffic and pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The story of Vermont Square, and hundreds of other similar neighborhoods across the region, shows that California’s housing crisis is also making its transit crisis harder to solve.
Will California beef up housing near transit?
That double-whammy is top of mind for many legislators in Sacramento this year. San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat and prominent author of bills to boost housing production and support public transit agencies, is pushing legislation this year that is supposed to do both. Senate Bill 79 would allow for dense apartment construction around major public transit stops, including on land owned by transit agencies.
“If we’re going to make big public investments in public transportation, which of course I support and I know many of us support, we need to make sure that people can actually live near those stations and ride on those trains or those high-quality bus lines,” Wiener said at a legislative hearing late last month.
The bill has survived three committee hearings, but only barely, overcoming the opposition of two committee chairs. Supported by advocates for denser housing development and public transportation, it is fiercely opposed by construction labor unions, an array of city governments, anti-density activists and some advocates who argue the state should prioritize new housing set aside for low-income residents over market rate development.
The committee chairs who oppose the bill said they support more housing construction but think legislation like Wiener’s should come with more terms and conditions for private developers.
In an opposition letter written to a Senate committee last month, a coalition of anti-poverty and environmental justice groups led by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation wrote that California law should “ensure that the existing low-income households and people of color who disproportionately use transit daily benefit from transit-oriented development.”
By allowing for more dense housing around transit stops without explicit affordability requirements the bill “risks accelerating displacement of these core transit users,” the letter reads.
The bill now awaits a vote before the entire Senate. The vote is expected next week.
The debate represents a broader rift within the California Democratic Party between those who believe the best way to alleviate gentrification is to build additional housing to accommodate an influx of new, higher earning residents and those who see market-rate development as, at best, a poor substitute for affordable housing and, at worst, something that makes the problem worse.
Manville said he has not been following the legislative debate closely, but argued that building more housing near transit stops is likely to boost ridership in two ways.
First, he said, incoming residents will be more likely to take the bus or train. Higher income gentrifiers may not ride transit as much as the lower income residents, but at least from a pollution and climate perspective, “one reduced trip by a high-income person eliminates so many more miles of driving than a trip by a low-income person, because rich people drive more.”
Second, and more importantly, building more apartment units diverts some of the feverish competition for existing units and eases pressure on rents. Slowing rent hikes will make it “easier for lower income people to stay in that neighborhood and continue to ride,” he said.