The Nashville, TN waterfront along the Cumberland River, with the Music City Star commuter rail stop visible in the foreground. (Photo credit: André Natta via Flickr)
In the years since the great recession of 2008, growth and opportunity have been increasing, but the benefits have been uneven. Earnings for an average worker have fallen in many cities, even in cities like Nashville, which grew at a 25 percent rate from 2010-2015. This is a space where economic development organizations, tasked with promoting regional growth, can step in and focus specifically on inclusive growth across jurisdictions. And transit-oriented development can and should play an important role in helping more residents benefit from new growth and connect to opportunities.
The problem then is how precisely to promote more inclusive growth that benefits a wide range of residents. Brookings has come up with five key questions that economic development organizations can ask themselves.
- What is our function?
- Who is excluded from the benefits of growth?
- What are the barriers that have led to their exclusion?
- What is the cost of exclusion?
- What is our role?
These are good questions to ask generally and they connect well to a handful of the useful documents located in the TOD resources library. Promoting Opportunity through eTOD: Barriers to Success, by Enterprise Community Partners, discusses four detailed solutions for promoting TOD for low- and moderate-income families.
A second document entitled Building Capacity, supported by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, combines issue briefs on 16 different topics related to transit and related development opportunities, and could be helpful in determining how to create more inclusive communities with transit.
Recent TOD news
Here are a few things that have been happening this week with TOD projects across the country.
- A Look at the Details of Nashville’s $5 Billion Transit Plan Headed to the Ballot in 2018 (Streetsblog USA)
- Infrastructure for Leander TOD Could Cost $78m (Community Impact Newspapers)
- Longmont Planning for RTD Transit HUB, Development (Mass Transit Magazine)
- Public Transit Good for Business, Even in the Sunbelt (LSE US Centre)
- Fairfax County Envisions 2,000 Units for Huntington Metro (Washington Business Journal)