Light Rail Infrastructure and Population Displacement
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Keywords: Light Rail, Population Displacement
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Zurikanen Iddrisu,
Jean-Claude Thill,
Behnam Nikparvar,
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Abstract
Large public investments in transportation infrastructure have always been touted by political leaders for their economic and social development benefits. Federal funding mechanisms rank projects higher on the basis of their economic development benefits. On the other hand, economic development often materializes in the form of a combination of land development and property development. This tends to change the urban fabric to a significant extent. In this paper, we study the impacts the building of Charlotte’s first light rail line may have had on the displacement of populations as part of this process. The study is conducted at a fine geographic scale over a 15-year period that broadly overlaps with the building of the rail line in two phases. We use a proprietary historical database of households and track the change of residences on an annual basis. The paper addresses the data cleaning and manipulation steps applied to the raw data using various geospatial and data validation techniques. The rest of the paper conducts a spatio-temporal analysis of displacement patterns, contrasting neighborhoods accessible to the rail line against and others. This study sheds light onto processes of transit-induced gentrification, urban transformation, and population displacement.
Light Rail Infrastructure and Population Displacement
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Paper Abstract