Water some dry ground and it should be no surprise if a few mornings or months hence you find more stuff growing there.
The same thing holds true for the manmade environment, except that the water that makes stuff grow is usually investments in transportation infrastructure. Build a big highway, and you get more shopping centers and subdivisions. Build a new subway, and you get more office towers. Build a new airport, and you get more warehouses and convention centers.
This cause and effect relationship between transportation and development is pretty easy to see and accepted when it comes to highways and airports, but with mass transit there is more skepticism, perhaps rightly. In our highway-and-car oriented environment, a city can no longer be sure that constructing a streetcar line will produce a streetcar suburb, even though that was historically true.
Which is why a recent master’s thesis by Juliette Michaelson, a Masters Candidate at Columbia University, is so interesting. Michaelson examined the possible effects of a relatively small $69 million investment in 1996 by New Jersey transit in a small piece of track that connected two separate rail lines and allowed commuters in Northern New Jersey to have that beloved thing, a “one-seat ride” into midtown Manhattan.
What Michaelson did was examine property values in the areas around the transit lines that were affected by the new link, called Midtown Direct. She found that property values close to the train line had more than doubled in the last decade — which was about twice the rate as land a bit further out. While cause and effect are never for sure in dealing with human actions, it seems probable that the disproportionate increase near the transit lines was due to the new Midtown Direct service. If so, it was a pretty amazing return on public investment. The state invests a mere $69 million, and property values, and thus taxes, are boosted many times that. Eventually, you will probably see the built environment around these lines change physically, and well as financially, to include more apartments and offices as the “water” of the transportation investments take seed.
What are the implications of Michaelson’s research for other regions? Here’s my guess. In some metropolitan regions, like New York or now Washington DC, constructing transit changes the pattern of growth on the ground pretty easily. For example in Arlington, Va., with some appropriate zoning around the Metro stops, you got denser, less car dependent development. But in a low-density and under-used city like Des Moines, which I recently visited, watering the plant may take more time, and more water.
You can read more about Michaelson’s research in the bi-weekly newsletter of Regional Plan Association, which I edit as a Senior Fellow there. Tom Wright, the executive vice president of Regional Plan Association, gives his take on Michaelson’s research as well as on the continued and troubling gap between the planning and transportation professions.