Title:  Transportation, Gentrification, and Urban Mobility: The Inequality Effects of Place-Based Policies

Co-Authors: Clare Balboni, Gharad Bryan, Bilal Siddiqi

Abstract: Roads, rail, and other public transport in a city are “place-based,” in that they are built in specific neighborhoods. Do such investments benefit the poor? If people are mobile within a city, then any such place-based investment can lead to neighborhood changes, such as rent increases, which change who can afford to live near these investments and hence who benefits from them. Using original panel data (tracked on two dimensions: (i) following households if they move, and (ii) surveying all new residents of buildings) we collected in Dar es Salaam, we study the distributional effects of Dar es Salaam’s nascent BRT system.