John Lorinc is a freelance journalist specializing in cities, climate, and technology. He can be reached at lorinc@rogers.com.

Earlier this year, a city in east Los Angeles County took a run at one of the thorniest dilemmas linked to transit-oriented development: How to ensure that rapid transit investment doesn’t elbow aside low-income residents and small businesses.

Well in advance of plans by Metro, the county’s transit agency, to open a station next to a large mall in Commerce, the city’s planning commission adopted an anti-displacement plan. The recommendations — gleaned from three listening sessions over the past year, as well as detailed demographic and land-use analysis — acknowledge that almost three in five of Commerce’s 12,000 residents who pay more than 30% of their income on housing live within half a mile of the planned station. Construction is due to begin in four years.

These options include rent stabilization ordinances, a tenant protection and eviction defense fund, and measures to protect small local businesses, as well as stepped-up efforts to secure county and state funding to accelerate affordable housing. Commerce’s plan also includes a host of investments meant to take advantage of the new transit station, including more bike lanes, trees, pedestrian amenities, and so on.

Commerce’s eyes-wide-open response to the proposed stop isn’t a variation on anti-development politics. Rather, the newly adopted Displacement Avoidance Plan can be traced back to some ground-breaking analysis carried out a dozen years ago by a pair of scholars who set out to understand the full impact of the growing transit investment proposed through programs such as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

Planner Karen Chapple, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, published pioneering research on displacement that is informing policy in cities like Commerce. (Their 2019 book, “Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends,” was published by MIT Press.)

In the early 2010s, says Chapple, “neighborhood groups began suing about displacement.” They alleged that the proposed development around transit would force low-income residents to move further afield, thus adding to congestion, emissions, and sprawl. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), she says, didn’t know how to measure those impacts — a gap that Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris set out to fill by deeply analyzing state land use and demographic data.

Today, agencies must develop anti-displacement strategies — including those geared at preventing commercial gentrification — to accompany new higher density development around rail and light rail stations.

“For the Strategic Growth Council, which is the Governor’s body for kind of coordinating all this smart growth across California, you don’t get your [Transformative Climate Communities] grant unless you have committed to studying and adopting an anti-displacement policy,” explains Chapple, currently director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. She lauds the state for connecting the dots between transit-oriented development (TOD), its actual impact on vulnerable communities, funding for affordable housing, and municipal policies that mitigate the economic fallout, such as rent caps.

Of course, individual agencies have a wide range of anti-displacement tools at their disposal. But these are not all created equally. A 2021 CARB white paper ranked such policies in terms of effectiveness and identified several with high potential for preventing displacement. These included the production of new housing, preservation of unsubsidized affordable housing, rental and foreclosure assistance, tenant right-to-counsel provisions, and the implementation of just cause eviction protections.

Measures found to have low impact included community benefits agreements, housing rehabilitation funding, and land value capture tax policies. (CARB has published its own displacement guidance tool kit for municipalities applying for grants under the Sustainable Transportation Equity Program.)

Local government responses can vary, in some cases because the transit won’t be built for years. Pico Rivera, just southeast of downtown LA, is slated to receive a regional rail stop, a bus rapid transit corridor, and a light-rail station — what Javier Hernandez, director of innovation and communication, describes as “a trifecta of high-quality transit.”

Currently, the municipality is exploring ways to accommodate thousands of new mixed-use units in commercial-industrial areas to avoid disrupting established neighborhoods in the predominantly Latino city. (These units would exceed Pico Rivera’s latest housing element allocation of 1,200 units.)

Two-thirds of Pico Rivera’s single-family homes are owner-occupied, many with intergenerational families and low turnover, says Hernandez. The bulk of the planned transit-oriented housing will be in the downtown area near the transit hub.

“We’re hoping that providing that scale, we can maintain relative levels of affordability without significant government intervention,” Hernandez adds.

In Walnut Creek east of Oakland, the city’s latest specific plans and housing element calls for a significant amount of new housing in the downtown area on rezoned parcels that qualify as TOD, according to city manager Dan Buckshi. “This number represents a 150% increase over the prior allocation,” he says.

Concord, in the eastern part of the Bay Area, has long had a pair of BART stations, one of which has become the focus of most of the city’s newest TOD initiatives. Yet this development hasn’t been driving neighborhood change, says Mindy Gentry, community development director. Instead, she points to rising real estate prices during the pandemic, with the resulting shift to working from home and generally rising incomes.

“A degree of displacement has occurred in the city [and] our Community Development Block Grant allocation went down slightly, which I think is another marker indicating that we do have some displacement going on [due to] higher incomes,” she says. “What we’ve heard anecdotally is a lot of people from Concord have been moving further eastward. From a policy perspective, last year, the city adopted rent stabilization and just cause for eviction ordinances.”

In the long term, Gentry adds, there will be housing projects on BART-owned land near one of the stations, as well as on the Concord Naval Weapons Station, which was closed and declared surplus by the Navy in 2006. The city’s Naval Weapons Station Base Reuse Plan includes more than 12,000 new housing units, of which 25% would be affordable to low- and very low-income residents.

Chapple notes that California’s inclusionary zoning policies have led, in recent years, to significant contributions to affordable housing trust funds that cities can use to finance housing element allocations. “Those targets also help them meet any kind of anti-displacement requirement,” she argues.

For some cities, questions about TOD-related displacement have been eclipsed by other concerns. Ryan Smoot, city manager for Bellflower in southeastern LA, points to an ongoing dispute between Metro and his municipality over the location of a proposed light rail maintenance yard for the Southeast Gateway line. The city is in the process of rezoning the 22-acre site, currently a paintball venue, to allow for housing development in the future. The 1,600 units that could be built on the site would exceed the city’s current housing element requirement. Last year, the maintenance yard and rail line it intends to serve received state environmental certification and $231 million in funding.)

“We know Bellflower residents have identified a need for housing they can afford as something that’s important to them,” says Smoot. “They have not identified public transit — and especially a maintenance facility — as something that’s very important to them. That’s a huge opportunity lost if we lose [that site], so it’s not necessarily direct displacement, but certainly an impact of the transit that is diminishing housing, or at least the opportunity for housing in the future.” (Negotiations are ongoing.)

Efforts by local municipalities to incorporate displacement policies in their TOD plans continue to play out against the ongoing political debate over transit and housing construction in general, with state legislators pushing for intensified TOD and some cities pushing back against what they deem to be state overreach. Some cities are grappling with unintended consequences, such as a reduction in bus ridership linked to gentrification and rising rents.

Others pose questions about what’s meant by the term itself. Some housing advocates argue that individual municipalities with existing or planned stations shouldn’t shoulder responsibility for TOD-linked displacement because those affected may choose to relocate further away for all sorts of reasons. They also note that landlords can’t legally give preferential treatment to local people who may have been forced from their homes by rising land values or rents.

The solution, they contend, is to increase housing supply broadly to drive down prices. If people don’t want to live a quarter mile from a transit stop, they should be able to find an affordable apartment that’s a little further away.

Activists, legislators, and city officials trying to sort out solutions are also now keenly aware that deep cuts by the Trump Administration and the Republican-led Congress to Section 8 vouchers, transit funding, and other housing programs run by Housing and Urban Development could make debates over TOD that much more complicated. Many are worried about the negative impacts the administration will have on housing writ large.

Chapple, however, is pleased that anti-displacement policy is increasingly informed by the nuanced analysis that she and Loukaitou-Sideris created when they took a deep dive into years of state-wide demographic, economic, and land-use data.

“Displacement can happen across any income group,” she observes, “and it can happen with benefits or with losses. The policy issue is, is the diversity of the neighborhood that you had before sustained as the new transit improvement comes in?”