Stakeholder Deliberation on Developing Affordable Housing Strategies: Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Transit-Oriented Developments

Jyothi Chava,Peter Newman

doi:10.3390/su8101024

Abstract

Transit-oriented developments (TODs) are commanding high land and rental values due to improved accessibility and economic opportunities. Owing to the increase in land and rental values, the highly desirable TODs are gradually becoming inaccessible to the poor, creating social exclusion and housing inequities within the TODs. To address this consequence, the study proposes a three-level stakeholder deliberation framework (inform, involve, and collaborate) towards developing inclusive housing strategies for equitable and sustainable TODs. The framework is applied to the context of the Yeshwanthpur industrial area, Bengaluru, India. The first level of deliberation, ‘information’, foregrounds the need for affordable housing strategies for stakeholders. In the second level of deliberation, the stakeholders involved identify the major challenges in incorporating affordable housing into TODs. In the third level of deliberation, stakeholders collaborate to contemplate strategies to combat each challenge. The results show that mandatory inclusionary zoning, special-purpose planning vehicles, land banking entities, innovative financing tools, and local area level plans in collaboration with the community, emerged as potentially feasible strategies to create inclusive housing outcomes in the TOD case study area.

Highlights

Transit—and its associated transit-oriented developments (TODs)—are emerging as sustainable solutions to address various transportation and rapid urbanization issues facing cities [1,2]
A recent study conducted in Bengaluru illustrates that housing units in the new TODs cost 68% more than the houses located in the suburbs
A framework for stakeholder deliberation has been outlined which can be applied to any TOD, where inequities are emerging, to ensure there are inclusionary housing processes to enable the TOD to be inclusive and, more fully sustainable

Summary

Introduction

TODs present significant market opportunities—absent in the car-dependent urban fabric [1]—but these can only be realised if cities provide the necessary planning structures, in terms of zoning, land assembly, and other regulatory enablers. These enablers, combined with TOD amenities and high-quality public transit accessibility, are generating demand for transit neighbourhoods, and inevitably increasing land and rental values. In the absence of inclusive affordable housing strategies, the high land and rental values of TODs induce displacement or exclusion of the poor from the coveted TOD areas [6,7,8,9,10]. The phenomenon of the exclusion of the poor and their replacement by the affluent due to housing inequities, is referred to as gentrification [8,11,12,13]

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion