As communities across the US face housing shortages and high housing costs, more state and local leaders are turning to transit-oriented development (also known as TOD) as a solution.
Transit-oriented development is a valuable tool that helps communities concentrate homes, offices, public services, and recreation in walkable, mixed-use areas with access to frequent, reliable, and fast public transportation.
At a time when half of US families can’t afford essential costs of living, transit-oriented development can help reduce everyday living expenses for everyone, with particularly meaningful cost savings for families with low and moderate incomes. When people can reliably use transit to get to and from work, school, and recreation, they can reduce their reliance on cars and lessen the burden of high gas, vehicle, and insurance prices.
Transit-oriented development also benefits communities overall. It can reduce pollution and traffic congestion, while increasing transit ridership and accommodating population growth.
Although more communities are embracing transit-oriented development, challenges remain.
Historically, federal, state, and local governments in the US have struggled to effectively coordinate land use with transportation investments. Although many US cities have expanded their rapid bus service in recent decades, most have failed to expand their rail systems to keep up with population growth. Exclusionary zoning policies also continue to block dense residential construction near transit. In many communities, buses or trains are too infrequent or slow to encourage people living near transit stops to use these services.
Nationally, 45 percent of housing units are located within a half mile of bus or rail transit. However, much of that service is unreliable. Only 10 percent of housing is within a half mile of frequent bus or rail service that arrives at least every 15 minutes in the middle of the day. Just 6 percent of housing is within a half mile of an urban rail station.
Select a state on the map below to see how much housing is concentrated near transit, what transit options are available and accessible in the largest urban areas located at least partly in the state, and how the number of homes near transit has changed over time.
Key Takeaways
In the US, many localities are taking steps toward increasing access to transit and encouraging transit-oriented development. But more could be done to expand residential construction near bus stops and rail stations.
In 2022, the number of housing units in the US within a half mile of any transit reached 67 million, representing 45 percent of all units. Across the US, only 16 states have the majority of their housing units concentrated within a half mile of any transit, with California leading the way.
Less than 20 percent of housing units in Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Wyoming are located near transit. And much of that transit is infrequent, making transit-oriented development difficult, since it depends on high-quality, reliable, and easy-to-use bus and rail services. Although the number of housing units near frequent transit increased by 20 percent between 2000 and 2022, that increase is less than the increase in housing stock overall (23 percent) during the same time period.
Nationwide, high-quality transit service—defined as buses and trains that arrive frequently and travel quickly—is closely associated with higher ridership. With the most extensive rail system in the nation and a growing network of improved bus lines, the New York urban area has by far the highest transit ridership. Between 1980 and 2022, the New York urban area added more than 2 million housing units in transit areas, the largest numeric change for any urban area in the nation.
Compared with all other states, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts have the highest shares of housing located near rail lines (at least 15 percent of units). Among large urban areas with at least 5 percent of housing units near rail, Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington; and San José, California, each had the greatest increase in the number of such units between 1980 and 2022, while the Cleveland urban area lost housing units near rail.
Still, since 2010, housing growth in transit areas has matched overall housing growth in the US. More recently, several states, including California and Colorado, have developed new land-use regulations that mandate cities reform their zoning codes to promote high-density, mixed-use communities near transit.
Changes are also happening at the local level. For example, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, combined investments in pedestrian infrastructure and parks with a zoning change to spur the construction of thousands of new homes in a previously industrial neighborhood with great access to transit. In the Seattle region, housing development has been disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods near transit thanks to a combination of zoning policy changes and financing tools that reduce property tax burdens on developments in these neighborhoods.
Other states and cities could consider making similar changes to their zoning codes to promote investment in transit-oriented development. The federal government could also play an important role in supporting transit-oriented development, by, for example, providing funds to communities to support land acquisition for housing near transit and by mandating that metropolitan planning organizations coordinate planning between transportation and housing.
ABOUT THE DATA
In this analysis, we explore housing and demographic data across all 50 states and Washington, DC, using decennial data from the US Census Bureau from 1980 to 2010. We also use five-year American Community Survey data for the periods of 2008–12 and 2020–24 (we use the midpoint, 2022, for these latter data).
We measure access to transit by leveraging data on the location of bus stops, urban rail stations (including subway, elevated rail, light rail, monorail, and streetcar lines), and intercity rail stations (including Amtrak, Brightline, and Alaska Railroad) in 2026 from Transit Explorer and the National Transportation Atlas Database. We then compare these locations with data at the census-tract level.
In this analysis, we define frequent transit as a train or bus service that arrives at least every 15 minutes during the midday. We define affordable housing as project-based units affordable for families with low and moderate incomes and subsidized by the federal government; the source for these data is the National Housing Preservation Database.
For each state, we provide data on urban areas with at least 30,000 residents that are located at least partly in that state. For example, the Philadelphia urban area is included for Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because the urban area extends across multiple states. The data presented is for the full urban area, not just for portions of the urban area in the relevant state.
We base all our analyses on present-day transit locations, meaning we calculate the number of housing units in years such as 1980 and 2000 in areas near stops and stations that exist in 2026. This is because we do not have access to data on bus service availability in previous decades. We cannot confirm that today’s transit service existed as such in all previous years in this analysis. In the visualization showing the number of housing units within a half mile of a given type of transit from 1980 to 2022, we display values rounded to the nearest 1,000. This tool’s outputs derive from areal interpolation, a geospatial analysis approach in which we assume that a tract’s characteristics (e.g., its housing units or population) are evenly distributed across the tract’s geography. This approach is imperfect, as housing units are often concentrated in some parts of tracts and not others; we do not parse out these differences in our analysis. Nevertheless, this is an effective and frequently used approach to leverage available data.
PROJECT CREDITS
This data tool was funded in part by a grant from Arnold Ventures. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts or the underlying methodology. Further information on the Urban Institute’s funding principles is available here. Read our terms of service here.
RESEARCH AND WRITING Yonah Freemark
DEVELOPMENT Mitchell Thorson and Lydia Nguyen
EDITING Dana Ferrante and Lauren Lastowka
ILLUSTRATION Alysheia Shaw-Dansby
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