Leveraging the Investment in Transit to Achieve Community and Economic Vitality
DRCOG Sustainable Communities Initiative: Outcomes Assessment & Knowledge Sharing (OAKS) · Final report to the Denver Regional Council of Governments, June 2015 · Funded by HUD
Principal authors: Carrie Makarewicz, who also led the Autumn 2014 Planning Project Studio; and Rocky Piro, FAICP, and Melanie Sloan (Consultants). GIS analysis: Austin Troy. Additional contributors: Benoy Jacob and Randy Harrison (Buechner Institute for Governance) and Jeremy Németh.
Abstract
Leveraging the Investment in Transit to Achieve Community and Economic Vitality is an action plan for advancing transit-oriented development and complete communities along RTD’s FasTracks rail system. It was commissioned through the Denver Regional Council of Governments’ Sustainable Communities Initiative, a three-year project funded by HUD as part of the federal Sustainable Communities Partnership with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the EPA. Its premise: for the region’s $7 billion voter-approved investment in rail to succeed, much has to happen at and around the stations themselves.
The report draws on three analyses. We evaluated the 46 station areas on the four FasTracks lines then operating (Central, Southwest, Southeast, and West) using field work, assessor data, zoning maps, Census data, local plans, and GIS. We conducted 65 candid interviews with developers, financiers, nonprofits, planners, and officials about what was working, what was not, and what still needed to happen. And we completed case studies of three peer regions: Dallas, Portland, and San Diego.
No two station areas were at the same point in becoming transit communities. Housing was in short supply and prices were rising; housing and jobs were out of balance, forcing long commutes; bicycle and pedestrian facilities needed major funding; and station areas lacked services such as child care and shopping. The peer regions faced many of the same issues and offered models for collaboration, real estate acquisition, and marketing transit-oriented development as an economic strategy.
The report makes 19 evidence-based recommendations across housing, accessibility, jobs and economic development, site development, and cross-cutting themes, among them a regional approach to housing, expanded housing funding and real estate acquisition, first- and last-mile connections, parking management, streamlined development review, infrastructure funding for transit communities, and ongoing monitoring. The Gold Corridor Housing Strategy was produced through the same Sustainable Communities Initiative work.
