UC Berkeley

Cities across the U.S. face affordability and sustainability challenges, and significant changes are necessary to support the diverse, climate-friendly, and affordable living environments their residents need. Coordinated and equitable land use and transportation planning is a critical tool for improving equity and sustainability and for increasing housing availability in U.S. cities. However, implementing coordinated and equitable planning is not straightforward and the outcomes of such processes are not easy to determine. This dissertation examines how Seattle’s planning processes have impacted housing and transportation outcomes.

Seattle began planning for its current era of residential growth in the 1990s through its Urban Villages program, which was adopted through an extended participatory process. The first chapter critically examines this participatory planning program to shed light on its differential outcomes relative to neighborhood characteristics. A quantitative analysis that overlays historical planning and zoning maps with local demographic characteristics shows how a democratic, participatory, and comprehensive planning process in fact led to housing exclusion to varying degrees, as residents lobbied to prevent change in their neighborhoods. This case and its legacy serve as a cautionary tale, showing how inequitable outcomes can arise from in-principle desirable participatory local planning.

The second chapter makes use of a proprietary household-level dataset alongside data from the U.S. Census and the City of Seattle to better understand how the city’s 2019 inclusionary zoning policy, which allowed for increased density alongside affordability requirements and was focused around Seattle’s Urban Villages and adjacent areas, impacted housing development and residential mobility outcomes. Inclusionary zoning is found to be associated with an increase in the development of housing units. It is also associated an increase in the residential move-out rate for households in the neighborhood, particularly for households living in neighborhoods with a greater proportion of white residents and in neighborhoods considered to be at lower risk of displacement. The households moving out of areas with inclusionary zoning are more likely to move “up” to a neighborhood with a higher median household income; however, these results do not distinguish by individual household income and may be driven primarily by moves of more affluent households.

The third chapter examines transit ridership in relation to Seattle’s Urban Villages. Seattle’s land use planning programs and related transit service improvements are found to be associated with a greater likelihood of using public transit in general, and the bus in particular. This relationship holds both prior to and during the pandemic, for different trip types, and when accounting for self-selection. The findings provide encouraging evidence that coordinated transit service improvements in higher-density housing areas can influence travel behavior to support transit ridership.

Taken together, the results from the three analyses are important for our understanding of the impacts of participatory processes, zoning changes, and coordinated land use and transportation improvements, with particular implications for planning in high-cost cities in the U.S. The findings show that participation is important in local planning, but the outcomes and legacy of processes need to be examined alongside their decision-making process. In cases like Seattle, inclusionary zoning with density bonuses can result in additional development. Coordinated land use and transit planning can encourage transit usage, even by residents who did not prioritize transit access in their choice of residential location, and notably also during the pandemic time period. This dissertation contributes new findings and perspectives in addressing longstanding questions around participatory processes and inclusionary zoning, and it provides updated evidence for the investigation of the impacts of the built environment on travel behavior.