Rail Transit Stations and Neighborhood Turnover : The Case of Los Angeles

Households move in and out of neighborhoods every year and this mobility is a natural part of U.S. urban life. How do shocks from large public investments, such as new rail transit systems, affect neighborhood mobility rates? Do they increase or decrease in/out-flows? How do flows vary by socioeconomic status and do they imply processes of gentrification and/or displacement? While a large global interdisciplinary literature has considered impacts of rail transit investments on mobility rates, gentrification, and displacement, studies have faced methodological challenges, definitional variations, and data limitations. As a result, studies have found mixed support for transit-induced gentrification and/or displacement. This paper improves on past work by measuring residential mobility impacts using a large longitudinal dataset of tax filers from 1993-2015 in Los Angeles County, the most populous in the United States and home to its largest transit expansion since 1990. Using a quasi-experimental panel difference-in-difference methodology, the study uses tax filer location to compare inflow and outflow rates before and after rail stations open in rail neighborhoods and similar non-rail control neighborhoods. Findings indicate high baseline mobility rates and slight support for the displacement hypotheses when new stations open. Findings are heterogeneous by timing, transit corridor, and income group in line with the current literature