Social Equity Toolkit

Cities across the globe struggle to grow and change while still maintaining affordable housing and lifestyles, particularly within the context of transit-oriented development.

Investing in transit creates a conundrum for cities. As people with higher incomes seek out the convenience and amenities of transit-oriented urban neighborhoods, existing residents are displaced, communities are broken down, small businesses are disrupted by larger enterprises, and the new value created in the neighborhood is distributed unevenly. 

Increasingly faced with this reality, governments and advocacy organizations have designed a variety of policies and programs to protect residents and businesses against displacement. However, too often, a project’s equity implications and pertinent interventions are afterthoughts, with practitioners considering them too late in the transit development process to make an appreciable impact on communities. 

In these reports, we present Social Equity Toolkits that map anti-displacement measures onto a series of timelines, aligning to key milestones in the transit development process. This temporal format provides transportation industry practitioners, community-based organizations, and developers with practical guidance regarding when to implement each intervention to maximize impact and ensure the preservation of community culture.