Huge cranes loom over downtown Los Angeles, and the streets are filled with the sounds of construction as gleaming new mixed-use buildings, luxury apartments, and office towers take shape. It would seem to be a sure sign of a city on the rise—except that those streets are also filled with people sleeping on the sidewalks, some in brightly colored tents, some sprawled on the pavement.

What has happened to cause so many homeless people—more than 34,000—to become part of the streetscape in this happening city? Why is it that, in a period of strong economic growth, LA and so many other U.S. cities are trying to cope with a homelessness crisis some have called the worst since the Great Depression? This is true especially for “thriving” hot-market cities, where a combination of skyrocketing housing costs, slow income growth, and a lack of housing options has increasingly led people seeking shelter to make use of common spaces like parks and public squares.

As cities create plans to deal with the urgent day-to-day needs of trying to shelter people and provide emergency health care and law-enforcement services, planners are also collaborating with their colleagues in housing and social services on logical longer-term approaches. Last fall, at the Big City Planning Directors Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts—hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the American Planning Association—many planning directors said rising homelessness has complicated agendas and budgets, particularly in cities where economic inequality has deepened in recent years. They were eager to learn what other cities were doing to address this issue.

The answer to that question is as complicated as the crisis itself. While some cities are investing heavily to expand the number of traditional shelter beds they provide, others are trying new approaches, from converting motels in Los Angeles to building tiny home communities in Seattle to encouraging unusual public-private partnerships in New York City. No city has found the perfect solution, but some are making significant—and instructive—progress.

How Did We Get Here?

During a one-night count carried out across the nation in January 2017, 553,742 people in the U.S. were experiencing homelessness, according to the United States. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of those, about a third were families including children. More than 40,000 of the people counted were unaccompanied children and young adults, and another 40,000 were veterans. Thirty-five percent of the total number of people counted were “unsheltered,” meaning they were living outside with no access to emergency shelters, transitional housing, or safe havens (USDHUD 2017).

Overall, homelessness is declining—it has gone down 13 percent since 2010—but last January’s point-in-time count revealed something significant: For the first time in seven years, the number of people counted rose compared to the prior year, by 0.7 percent. And according to HUD, nearly all of that increase occurred in cities.

Everyone experiencing homelessness has their own story of how they ended up on the street, whether due to poverty, job loss, eviction, gentrification, domestic violence, drug addiction, medical bills, or any number of other reasons. Race—and inequities in the way services are provided—is also a factor, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness; African-Americans, for example, make up 13 percent of the general population but more than 40 percent of the homeless population.

A generation or two ago, fewer people ended up homeless—in part because cities offered more diversity in low-cost housing. Common options then included rooming houses, “granny flats” or in-law units, homes where families could legally “double up,” and single-room-occupancy (SRO) apartments. These options generally disappeared with urban renewal, neighborhood redevelopment that brought higher-priced housing, and zoning that favored occupancy limits.

“One of the things that led to a dramatic increase in homelessness in the 1980s was cities getting rid of things like SRO housing,” says Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress. Mallach, a former city planner who has written policy reports for the Lincoln Institute on vacant properties (Mallach 2018) and legacy cities (Mallach 2013), says some places are beginning to consider reinstating that type of housing. In Los Angeles, for example, a nonprofit called SRO Housing Corporation has created dwellings for more than 2,000 formerly homeless people and has 400 homes under development.

Mallach cautions that even “affordable housing” is often unaffordable in booming cities, because the rent is typically based on a percentage of area median income (AMI). As incomes increase, so do the rents that are pegged to them. The main reason people become homeless today, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, is because they cannot find housing they can afford (figure 1).

In 2017, 8 of the 10 states with the highest median housing costs also had the highest rates of homelessness, according to San Francisco–based data analysis company The DataFace (figure 2). Since the Great Recession, trends contributing to a lack of affordable housing have included rising costs for land, construction, and maintenance; tighter financing for home builders; and a surge of interest in urban living, resulting in construction of mostly higher-end housing in city cores.

At the same time, new construction has not kept pace with job growth. Analyzing federal data on building permits and employment, a July 2017 report by Apartment List found that only 10 of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas had produced enough new housing to support an influx of workers (Salviati 2017). San Francisco, for example, built just one new home for every 6.8 new jobs from 2010 to 2015. Especially in tech hubs, new job creation has stoked a demand for housing, and rent prices have lit up with the lack of supply. San Jose, which had the largest undersupply of new construction among the 50 largest metro areas, also had the most rent growth: 57 percent, according to the report.

Federal Constraints, Local Innovations

This confluence of factors has created a startling reality: According to a recent report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, eight million Americans pay more than half their income on rent, a larger percentage of the growing rental population is extremely low-income renters, and the nation has a shortage of 7.2 million affordable rental units (NLIHC 2018).

HUD funding for homeless services reached record levels last year. HUD’s housing programs serve over one million people each year, and HUD provides housing subsidies to about 4.7 million very low-income households, which represents about 80 percent of its total budget. But changes are afoot: The President’s proposed FY19 budget included $8.8 billion in HUD cuts, though the Senate and House appropriations committees both rejected the cuts and voted for increased funding over 2018. Final votes could be delayed until after the November elections, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC–based nonpartisan research and policy institute focused on reducing poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, the 2017 federal tax bill significantly reduced the value of the low-income housing tax credit, a source of long-term funding for affordable housing. According to analysis published in the New York Times, that could mean nearly 235,000 fewer apartments built over the next decade (Dougherty 2018).

With so much uncertainty at the federal level, cities are finding—and financing—their own ways forward. Increasingly, that means moving beyond stopgap measures to provide more permanent affordable housing, said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. These longer-term policies, he said, should ensure investment of public dollars to “fix the larger affordable housing problem.”

“Housing first” is a strategy that essentially bypasses shelters and seeks to place people directly into affordable housing with support services. Research has found housing first to effectively alleviate homelessness for families experiencing temporary lack of shelter, for chronically homeless individuals, and for those with substance abuse and mental health issues. Although this approach can cost more, advocates say that by creating permanent housing, cities ultimately spend less on shelters and emergency services.

Los Angeles Bets on Motels and Municipal Bonds

A surge in homelessness in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities with severe affordable housing shortages was almost entirely responsible for last year’s national uptick in the number of homeless individuals, said HUD officials. In 2017, LA gained 42,470 new residents and hit the four million population mark; its homeless population spiked 20 percent to 34,189, with a total of 55,188 in Los Angeles County, according to HUD (USDHUD 2017). A one-night count in January 2018 conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed the city’s homeless count had declined 6 percent, to 31,285, with 22,887 of those people unsheltered. While HUD requires cities to count their total homeless population every other year, LA—second only to New York in the size of its homeless population—elects to conduct an annual tally.

In April 2018, the LA City Council declared an emergency shelter crisis, clearing the way for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to fund $20 million for new emergency shelters. His 2018–2019 budget, approved by the city council in May, will invest more than $442 million in permanent housing, temporary shelters, services, and facilities. Garcetti’s A Bridge Home plan is setting up temporary shelters on city parking lots or vacant city-leased lots across LA. Tents, trailers, and other structures will temporarily shelter as many as 100 individuals at each site—potentially 6,000 people per year who are awaiting permanent housing.

Beyond emergency shelters, the city is using funds from Measure HHH, a ballot initiative that three-quarters of LA voters passed in November 2016, committing the city to raising $1.2 billion in bonds for construction of 10,000 units of permanently affordable housing in the next decade. The city will spend more than $238 million of HHH funding this year to build 1,500 new homes at 24 project sites. In April, the city council approved two additional programs to support the effort to increase the city’s affordable housing base: one that streamlines the development process for projects that include supportive affordable housing, and another that allows LA’s 10,000 motel rooms, many of them old and in poor shape, to be converted into affordable housing with supportive services. Finally, in one of the more creative approaches to both homelessness and land use, the city has launched a pilot program that offers financial support to homeowners in some single-family neighborhoods who agree to build or upgrade small dwellings in their backyards for the purpose of housing people who don’t have homes.

Seattle Finds a Big Solution in Tiny Homes

Seattle’s homeless crisis made national headlines earlier this year when the city got into a scuffle with Amazon over a corporate head tax that would have funded social services and outreach. But the extent of homelessness in the Emerald City isn’t news to anyone who has been paying attention, especially city leaders. A January 2017 count documented 8,522 homeless people, 45 percent of whom were living unsheltered on the streets.

“The affordable housing crisis is feeding the homeless issue such that we can’t keep up,” said George Scarola, Seattle’s strategic advisor for homelessness response, at a standing-room-only session at the Urban Land Institute annual meeting in Los Angeles last year. In 2015, former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness and called for building 1,000 tiny homes to replace tent cities. Since then, eight tiny-home villages have been built throughout the city as temporary shelters until permanent affordable housing becomes available. This approach is also being used in cities including Detroit, Dallas, and Syracuse.

Each tiny house in Seattle is built by volunteers and costs between $2,200 and $2,500. The houses are paid for by donations and by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), a local nonprofit that oversees the villages and owns and operates about 2,000 units of affordable housing in the region. The city or LIHI owns the land for seven of the villages, which each have about 35 tiny homes. A local church owns the land for the remaining village, which has 14 tiny homes that LIHI also manages. LIHI said some 1,000 people are served over the course of a year by the 250 tiny homes it manages. The organization has two more villages in the pipeline.

The 8-by-12-foot homes are insulated and have heat, electricity, and locks. Because they measure under 120 square feet, they are not considered dwelling units under the International Building Code and are not required to go through the city’s permitting process. Many residents are single men and women or couples, though some villages provide two homes for families with children. Residents share common on-site bathroom, kitchen, and laundry facilities. They pay for utilities and pitch in with chores. LIHI employs case managers paid for by the city, while daily operations are self-managed by the residents.

“For folks who have been homeless for 10 years, it’s an easier transition” than an apartment, said Scarola at the ULI meeting. “People take pride in keeping these homes neat and in being part of the community.” Though the tiny home villages serve as temporary housing for only a fraction of the city’s homeless population, they’re serving an important role, he said. “More permanent supportive housing is better than ‘two hots and a cot,’” meaning a shelter’s two hot meals and a bed, Scarola said. “Overnight shelters are expensive, particularly if you’re serving the same people over 10 years.”

What cities need, Scarola said, is affordable housing that is “smaller, built faster, with many more units.” In 2017, the city invested over $68 million in rental assistance programs, bridge shelter, and low-income housing and in 2018 planned to increase that amount to $78 million. During her election campaign last fall, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan promised 1,000 additional tiny houses at an estimated cost of $10 million. Last December, after being elected, she announced city investments on a much larger scale: $100 million for affordable housing construction and preservation and home buyer assistance. These funds will help build 896 apartments in 9 new buildings, preserve 535 apartments in 4 buildings, and construct 26 new homes for low- to moderate-income families. Three of the new affordable-housing projects will provide 195 units of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless people and people with chronic mental illness.

As for that corporate head tax: the Seattle City Council voted 7–2 to repeal it less than a month after approving it unanimously. The tax had promised to produce $47.5 million annually for the next five years to help address the homeless crisis.

Lessons from the City That Never Sleeps

New York is the nation’s most populous and densest city, with 8.6 million residents in 5 boroughs encompassing about 300 square miles. It also has the nation’s largest homeless population—approximately 76,500, an all-time high, according to the January 2017 HUD count. Most homeless New Yorkers aren’t as “visible” on the street as they are in other cities because of the city’s “right to shelter” law, a policy that grew out of court rulings in the 1970s. New York, Washington, DC, and Boston are among the few cities in the United States that are required to provide temporary housing for homeless people. As a result, New York City sheltered 95 percent of people needing homes in 2017, while Los Angeles sheltered only 25 percent, according to HUD (USDHUD 2017).

In January 2017 and January 2018, the city counted approximately 60,000 residents in municipal shelters and 3,000-plus residents who were unsheltered. (The HUD figure is higher because it includes people served in shelters operated by religious and nonprofit agencies, as well as other government agencies.) Families comprise 70 percent of the municipal shelter population.

The city tries to place people close to their support networks, in the communities they call home, to improve the odds of quickly stabilizing lives. It also provides dedicated facilities for families, men, women, unaccompanied youth, and LGBTQ residents. In 2017, New York City spent $1.7 billion in city, state, and federal money to aid its homeless population.

In New York, rising homelessness and dwindling affordable housing have been on twin trajectories for the past two decades. From 1994 to 2012, while the city swelled by more than a million new residents, it lost 150,000 rent-stabilized apartments, putting low-income residents at particular peril in the competition for housing. The city’s homeless population also more than doubled during that time, increasing 115 percent. Between 2000 and 2014, the city’s median rent increased by 19 percent and household income decreased by 6.3 percent in real dollars. Two-thirds of households now rent, and in June 2018, median rent was more than twice the national average—$2,900, according to Zillow.

“The way you get homelessness is the gap between rent and incomes,” confirmed Steve Banks, commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA), who oversees the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS). After two decades of rising homelessness, he said, the number of people housed in DHS shelters is now stable and beginning to decline as the city makes headway in “keeping people in their homes and moving homeless people out of the shelter system and into more permanent housing.”

According to Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City, a 2017 municipal report, new policies have indeed led to measurable progress on this front (CNY 2017a). In December 2015, HUD announced the city had ended chronic homelessness among veterans. From 2016 to August 2018, an outreach program secured transitional and permanent housing for 1,815 street homeless people. The city has opened 15 new shelters as part of a plan to close old shelters in poor condition and build 90 new ones. At the same time, the overall number of shelter facilities has been reduced by 25 percent, from 647 to 492, as new shelter options have been developed and more people are housed. Since 2014, 94,300 people have moved from the shelter system into more permanent housing, and 161,000 households have been prevented from falling into homelessness through approaches such as an enhanced rent voucher program, free anti-eviction legal services, and more supportive housing. During that same span, the city financed the creation and preservation of over 109,700 affordable homes.

Enacting Solutions in NYC

New York City is successfully using strategies such as helping nonprofit organizations buy affordable rental housing to prevent displacement, rezoning land for residential use and greater height and density, taxing unused land at a higher rate, and investing in modular micro-apartment buildings. Deputy Commissioner for Development Molly Park, who oversees the Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) division, offered a word of caution. Homelessness is “a very nuanced situation,” she said. “We can’t draw a direct correlation between homelessness and these new affordable housing programs.”

Still, New York has much to offer other cities struggling with these complex issues.

Housing New York

The guiding plan developed during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term, Housing New York, defines priorities that include creating pathways to permanent housing for homeless residents, identifying more affordable housing for a growing senior population (another 400,000 are projected to reach senior status by 2040), and providing more accessible housing for people with disabilities. The mayor’s housing plan called for adding or preserving 200,000 affordable units by 2024, but the city’s accelerated pace put it on course to meet that goal by 2022, two years ahead of schedule; in October 2017, de Blasio released Housing New York 2.0, an updated plan to preserve and create an additional 100,000 units of affordable housing by 2026, or 300,000 units total at a rate of 25,000 per year (CNY 2017b).

“We have a robust system in place and we’re ramping up,” said Park of HPD. From 2014 to January 2018, the city spent $3.3 billion in direct subsidies to preserve or create a total of 87,557 affordable homes, she said. Most of this housing includes some level of construction, from light-touch rehabilitation such as replacing a boiler or roof to building new units, she said. The vast majority of homes are multifamily rentals, with some home ownership, including small buildings for between one and four families. Though publicly financed and regulated, all are owned and operated by private nonprofits, development firms, or private multifamily project owners, such as co-op tenant associations.

Some of these projects preserve existing affordable housing that was created in the 1950s and 1960s under the Mitchell-Lama Residential Program, in which the city built 70,000 rental and co-operative apartments for lower- and middle-income tenants. The program’s affordability tax credits expired, however, and nearly half of the units have exited the program, mostly because rising property values made market-rate rents more attractive than the program’s tax breaks. The city has committed $250 million to preserving 15,000 Mitchell-Lama co-ops and is working with owners to make repairs and restructure debt.

Affordable-Housing Hybrids

Housing New York 2.0 earmarked 15,000 affordable units for homeless people, and 8,948 homes have so far been created for people coming out of the shelter system. These efforts include some highly innovative models. In the Bronx, Landing Road Residence provides affordable apartments subsidized by two floors devoted to a 200-person shelter. With city support, the Bowery Residents Committee developed, owns, and operates the $62.8 million building, which provides 111 studios for formerly homeless people and 24 affordable one- and two-bedroom apartments available by lottery to the community. In the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, the city, the New York Public Library, community organizations, and an affordable housing developer are codeveloping The Eliza, which will include 175 deeply affordable apartments, a new library branch, and a universal prekindergarten facility. Apartments will be reserved for individuals and families with a range of low-income levels, including formerly homeless people.

The city is also partnering with local nonprofits and affordable housing developers to convert temporary shelter apartments into permanently affordable housing. Since 2000, New York had used “cluster apartments” as a stopgap shelter measure, at its peak paying market rates to rent 3,600 apartments in low-income neighborhoods. In 2016, the city began phasing out cluster apartments and instead placed people in commercial hotels, where it cost the city as much as $530,000 per night to shelter 7,800 people, according to a 2017 city comptroller report. The city is now helping to buy and renovate about a third of the remaining cluster apartments and converting them to permanent housing for formerly homeless and low-income New Yorkers, taking ownership by eminent domain if necessary.

“We’re trying to make sure we’re building for very low-income families who are not in homeless shelters but are at risk of becoming homeless,” said Park. In 2017, nearly half of all new homes produced were for people with incomes at 50 percent of AMI or below, she said. “I see that as a homeless preservation tool.”

An affordable housing lottery system now accepts 700 applications for every available unit, according to Matthew Creegan of HPD’s press office. That number is a big improvement over the 1,000 applications per unit HPD received a couple years ago, he said: “Outreach, education, and the growing number of new units built have reduced the need.”

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing

To ensure that every borough would have affordable housing opportunities, the city created a new mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) program that is activated when an area is upzoned to increase commercial use and density. A voluntary inclusionary housing policy in effect since 1987 had allowed developers a density bonus of additional height for new construction, substantial rehabilitation, or preservation of permanently affordable housing. The new MIH policy, adopted by the city council in March 2016, requires developers who want to increase floor area in rezoned areas or areas requiring special permits to provide typically 25 to 30 percent of units as affordable, for a range of income levels. Developers also have limited options to create affordable housing off-site at another location, or to pay “in lieu” fees into a housing fund.

The policy aims to increase neighborhood economic diversity by ensuring that any new housing built would also include units affordable for a range of income levels, from 40 percent to 115 percent of AMI, which in 2017 was about $93,000 for a family of three. After setting aside the requisite affordable units, the rest can be rented at neighborhood market rates.

“The mandatory inclusionary housing policy has made a difference,” said Park. By 2018, the MIH policy had created 4,000 new permanently affordable apartments, in addition to those created by neighborhood rezoning. The MIH policy is somewhat controversial, as the 51 city council members can determine level of affordability on a project-by-project basis and have the legal ability to oppose projects. At least a couple of city councilors have exercised this right, for example, by blocking building approvals on the basis of opposition to additional building height. Some major developers also have been hesitant to risk upzoning or applying for special permits that would trigger the MIH requirement. But revisions to the policy, including the introduction of fast-track approvals, have put things back on track.

Rezoning for New Affordable Housing

“We’re employing whatever land we have for housing,” said Purnima Kapur, until recently the executive director of the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP). “It becomes a balance: with limited subsidies and land available, we’re always looking for opportunities, and that typically happens with higher density.”

The city is rezoning industrial areas near established neighborhoods that have infrastructure such as sewers and “areas in which urban renewal razed affordable multifamily buildings, such as East New York, where we can up-zone and allow for bigger apartment buildings,” said Kapur. DCP is leading an integrated community planning approach with various city agencies to plan for elements such as schools, transportation, workforce training facilities, and open space. “We’re looking at a framework that would continue to allow for industrial uses as well as new mixed uses including housing,” she said. A lot of waterfront was traditionally mixed-use, “and with new tech and creative firms wanting to relocate there, we’re envisioning more housing for live-work and commercial uses.”

New neighborhood plans that allow for upzoning for mid- and higher-density are underway in East New York, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, among other neighborhoods, said Kapur. Two Brooklyn neighborhoods under consideration include Gowanus, an old waterfront area now enlivened by a hip mix of art and culture groups and maker industries, and Brownsville, where 900 affordable homes will be developed on multiple city sites for households including extremely low-income, formerly homeless, and low-income senior residents. The mixed-use projects feature amenities such as a cultural center, senior center, supermarket, and rooftop greenhouse.

In its search for more land, the city is trying to unlock the potential of vacant lots long considered too small or irregular for traditional housing stock to be developed with innovative smaller homes, said Kapur. It is planning affordable housing for seniors on parking lots at existing Mitchell-Lama and HUD-regulated complexes. In highly transit-accessible areas, the city is enabling the development of mixed-income buildings for small households, including studios and units with shared cooking spaces, and is relaxing some zoning restrictions on apartment size. The city is also looking at reclassifying residentially zoned vacant lots to increase the owners’ tax bills and incentivize them to develop the sites for housing.

With support from a $1.65 million Enterprise grant, the city is also helping expand community land trusts (CLTs) citywide with nonprofit organizations, so community members can own and manage development on parcels of land. The grant helped to create the first citywide land trust, called the Interboro CLT, and to educate neighborhood organizations on how they can implement CLTs in their own communities.

Modular Housing

To reduce the cost and speed up construction of affordable homes and to respond to changing demographics, Housing New York 2.0 called for capitalizing on advances in technology and innovative design to expand modular building and micro-units. HPD has launched a program encouraging advanced modular construction with updated design guidelines. Housing New York 2.0 referenced New York’s first micro-unit apartment building, Carmel Place in Kips Bay, Manhattan. Opened in 2016, the building has 55 micro units, including 8 reserved for homeless veterans and 14 affordable units that drew 60,000 lottery applicants. The 260- and 360-square-foot apartments were built with prefabricated modules transported from a Brooklyn warehouse and ‘stacked’ on a traditionally constructed foundation with ground-floor utilities. The city is piloting additional modular construction through the Build-It-Back program and has built nearly 100 single-family modular homes that cost 25 percent less than conventional construction. In May, HPD issued a competitive RFP for 100 percent affordable multifamily housing projects in East Bay, Brooklyn, that would use modular construction to further test whether the benefits of this approach are achievable at scale.

Housing for the Future

As cities across the country seek solutions to the homeless crisis and the severe shortage of affordable housing, New York City has many lessons to offer. The city has now seen several strong years of housing production that includes affordable housing, notes Kapur. But to address a root cause of homelessness, she said, the city must sustain this pace over time to keep up with demand for housing and reduce upward pressure on rents. This requires planning ahead for the capacity for future growth.

Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons for these booming cities is captured in Kapur’s reflection on the necessity of committing to long-term policy shifts and investments. “We continue to look ahead” to a city with 9 million by 2040, said Kapur, “so we’re focused on the near and distant future. We realize we need to do this on an ongoing basis. It’s not a five-year plan.”

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Photograph: Low Income Housing Institute

References

Benedict, Kizley. 2018. “Estimating the Number of Homeless in America: Statistics Show That America’s Homeless Problem Is Getting Worse.” The DataFace. January 21. http://thedataface.com/2018/01/public-health/american-homelessness.

CNY (City of New York). 2017a. “Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Office of the Commissioner of the Department of Social Services (February). https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/turning-the-tide-on-homelessness.pdf.

CNY (City of New York). 2017b. “Housing New York 2.0.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development (November). https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/hny-2.pdf.

CNY (City of New York). 2018. “One NYC 2018: Progress Report.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the First Deputy Mayor (April). https://onenyc.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/OneNYC_Progress_2018-2.pdf.

Dougherty, Conor. 2018. “New Tax Law Likely to Curtail Affordable Rent.” New York Times, January 19, A1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/economy/tax-housing.html.

Mallach, Alan. 2018. The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/empty-house-next-door.

Mallach, Alan. 2013. Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/regenerating-americas-legacy-cities.

NLIHC (National Low Income Housing Coalition). 2018. “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes.” Washington, DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition (March). http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/OOR_2018.pdf.

Salviati, Chris. 2017. “Housing Shortage: Where Is the Undersupply of New Construction Worst?” Apartment List. July 26. https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/housing-shortage-undersupply-of-new-construction/.

USDHUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). 2017. “The 2017 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Community Planning and Development (December). https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-Part-1.pdf.

Hoy, un vendedor indígena boliviano de productos agrícolas se desliza en el aire en un teleférico para llegar al mercado de La Paz. Una estudiante de Bogotá, Colombia, sabe que llegará a tiempo a clase porque la red de autobuses de tránsito rápido (BTR) de la ciudad nunca queda atrapada en un embotellamiento. El propietario de un auto en San Pablo, Brasil, deja las llaves en casa porque la prohibición de la ciudad acerca de la circulación de autos en el centro en hora pico hoy se aplica al número de su placa. Una familia joven de clase media vive cómodamente sin un auto en el centro de Santiago, Chile, gracias a las nuevas aceras y carriles para bicicletas para hacer viajes en el vecindario y a una combinación despejada y segura de metro y BTR para recorrer el resto de la ciudad. Y un jornalero en las favelas de Río de Janeiro puede depender de una camioneta compartida que funciona en el vecindario cuando el sistema oficial de autobuses de la ciudad no lo hace.

Estas escenas de vida en las grandes ciudades de América Latina son frecuentes. Las líneas de autobuses de tránsito rápido (BTR) atraviesan a toda velocidad el corazón de 54 ciudades en la región. Los teleféricos conectan vecindarios en laderas escarpadas con el resto de la ciudad en un puñado de ciudades. Los peatones y ciclistas de todas las clases sociales tienen cada vez más lugar para transitar las ajetreadas calles urbanas. Abundan las opciones informales de tránsito, aunque su seguridad y fiabilidad son muy variables, como también varía la tolerancia de los funcionarios públicos. Se están construyendo sistemas de metro, aunque sea lentamente. La posesión de autos sigue siendo muy inferior a la de los promedios en el mundo desarrollado. 

En conjunto, América Latina se ha ganado la reputación de innovador global en tránsito urbano. Las ciudades de la región han obtenido 9 de los 16 Premios al Transporte Sustentable que otorga el Instituto de Políticas para el Transporte y el Desarrollo (ITDP), y suelen ser finalistas en los premios Cities4Mobility de C40.

Se han alcanzado algunos logros impresionantes. Las asociaciones público-privadas (APP) ahora son de rigor en toda la región: el gobierno nacional financia la infraestructura y supervisa los planes a largo plazo, mientras que las firmas privadas licitan para operar los recorridos. El Banco Mundial estima que América Latina invirtió 361 300 millones de dólares en infraestructura energética y de transporte en más de mil APP en la última década, y Brasil, Colombia y México son los participantes principales. Mientras tanto, Brasil y Colombia han implementado la recuperación de plusvalías de la tierra para financiar la expansión de redes de BTR y la construcción de nuevas vías de tren (Smolka, 2013).

Sin embargo, en medio del auge latinoamericano del transporte, también hubo caídas. El exceso de personas en el sistema TransMilenio, de Bogotá, la red de BTR más extensa de la región, ha ocasionado disturbios periódicos. Río apostó su legado olímpico a mejorar la movilidad con la construcción de un BTR en toda la ciudad y tres teleféricos para las comunidades de las favelas, pero la corrupción endémica y la planificación vertical llevaron a promesas sin cumplir. El entusiasmo por implementar nuevas bandas de tránsito en lugares como Quito, Ecuador, tiene el costo de que los operadores informales atienden a los residentes urbanos más pobres.

“América Latina está innovando, pero aún no sabemos si dicha innovación lleva a un círculo virtuoso para generar recursos en la ciudad”, dijo Clarisse Linke, directora de la oficina de ITDP en Brasil. “Beneficiamos a los pobres para que no deban viajar 50 kilómetros de ida al trabajo y otros tantos de regreso?”.

Estas preguntas son el meollo de la paradoja sobre la innovación en transporte de América Latina. Es cierto que la región inventó formas creativas para alejar a las personas de los atestados centros urbanos, pero ¿puede atender la necesidad más amplia de reducir la tremenda desigualdad? Cuando se trata de ese nivel de innovación, el jurado de los premios aún no se decide.

El auge de los BTR

La innovación en transporte ha prosperado en las ciudades de América Latina por dos motivos principales: la veloz urbanización y la extrema desigualdad. A pesar de las mejoras de las últimas décadas, según las mediciones del coeficiente de Gini, 8 de los 20 países con mayor desigualdad del mundo se encuentran en América Latina. Y los demógrafos consideran que la región es la más urbanizada del mundo. El 80 por ciento de la población reside en ciudades, y el índice es más elevado en Argentina, Brasil y Chile. Estas ciudades rebosantes emergieron durante un auge económico de posguerra que disparó una migración masiva de zonas rurales a urbanas. Cuando los campesinos, agricultores y aborígenes bajaron de los Andes o dejaron el interior árido del noreste de Brasil, no encontraron disponibilidad de viviendas dentro de la ciudad. En cambio, fueron apartados a los extremos o a laderas escarpadas, inadecuadas para la construcción.

Así, los mares de gente pobre alrededor de islas de opulencia se convirtieron en la norma socioeconómica de la región (Gutman y Patel, 2018). Los recién llegados a la ciudad suelen encontrar empleos ubicados en el centro, como criados, conserjes, empleados de construcción o cocineros. Esto crea una necesidad de mover grandes cantidades de trabajadores de bajos ingresos a distancias relativamente grandes, en lugares donde puedan costear su vivienda.

Han surgido muchas opciones emprendedoras para suplir esta demanda. Algunas camionetas o taxis compartidos, conocidos como colectivos (en español) o kombis (en portugués) empezaron a seguir ciertas rutas para atender a los nuevos barrios a los cuales los rebasados gobiernos municipales no podían llegar o ignoraban de forma intencional. Surgieron flotas de autobuses operados por el sector privado, que ofrecían un servicio frecuente, pero descoordinado, por lo que las empresas competían entre sí y los conductores corrían a contrarreloj y dejaban huecos, se duplicaban y generaban condiciones poco seguras.

A fines de 1960 y principios de los 70, el sector público, que no poseía fondos, utilizó sus recursos limitados para invertir en redes ferroviarias solo en las ciudades más grandes. Los metros de Ciudad de México, San Pablo y Santiago son excelentes ejemplos de esta época. Si bien reciben a millones de pasajeros por día, no se comparan con las amplias redes ferroviarias de otras megaciudades de tamaño similar, como Londres y Tokio.

Así, llegaron los autobuses de tránsito rápido. Si bien la idea se le adjudica a Peter Midgley, un urbanista británico y consultor retirado del Banco Mundial que pensó en los primeros carriles exclusivos para autobuses en ciudades de Francia y Bélgica a fines de los 60, fue en Curitiba, Brasil, donde nació el primer sistema de BTR. La línea de 20 kilómetros que se inauguró en 1974 presentaba no solo carriles exclusivos para autobuses, sino también estaciones cerradas, pago previo al abordaje y abordaje desde todas las puertas, características que hacen al metro rápido y conveniente.

El arquitecto Jaime Lerner, alcalde de Curitiba en ese momento, se hizo famoso por sus intervenciones en diseño urbano en la ciudad del sur de Brasil, y contó con fondos federales para hacer una línea de metro. Pero se dio cuenta de que la ciudad podía producir un sistema de autobuses dedicado mucho más extenso por el mismo precio que una línea de metro mucho más corta. Las paradas de autobús parecían verdaderas estaciones de metro, y la zonificación admitió edificios más altos en las bandas principales cerca de las estaciones; así, Curitiba adquirió la mayoría de los beneficios de una línea de metro con un presupuesto limitado. 

El enfoque básico atrajo a las ciudades de América Latina. “No teníamos ni los recursos ni el tiempo para implementar transportes con rieles”, dijo Linke. “Fue una situación urgente, porque nuestras ciudades ya estaban muy pobladas, y necesitábamos más cobertura de transporte”.

El modelo evolucionó en Bogotá con el alcalde Enrique Peñalosa, quien regresó a su puesto después de una pausa de 14 años. La ciudad, con 8 millones de habitantes, está notablemente ausente en la lista de metrópolis latinoamericanas con sistemas de metro, porque Peñalosa, al igual que Lerner, se dedicó a invertir mucho en los BTR a fines de los 90. El sistema TransMilenio de Bogotá creció y se convirtió en una de las redes de BTR más extensas del mundo. Posee 210 kilómetros de recorridos y más de 2 millones de pasajeros al día, y compite con muchas redes subterráneas.

Curitiba y Bogotá representan parte de la era dorada del BTR en América Latina, porque demostraron, al menos por un tiempo, que podían transportar una cantidad impresionante de residentes a una fracción del costo de los transportes por riel. Así, surgió una tendencia mundial. Mientras tanto, otras ciudades, como Santiago, San Pablo, Río, Ciudad de México y Quito, se movilizaron para implementar líneas de BTR como complemento a los trenes, principalmente para llenar huecos, en vez de construir redes de rieles. 

De a poco, el BTR se convirtió en sinónimo de América Latina en los entornos de transporte y políticas. Algunos think tanks (laboratorios de ideas), como la Institución Brookings, ofrecían seminarios sobre lo que el transporte público de EE.UU. podría aprender del auge del BTR en América Latina. El Instituto de Recursos Mundiales (WRI) abogó por el BTR como una innovación latinoamericana e identificó a la región como el lugar con mayor cantidad de pasajeros de BTR (casi 20 millones de personas por día).

No tan especial

Si bien continúa el fervor mundial por los BTR, el flagrante fanatismo se vio moderado por más y más críticas, y el TransMilenio de Bogotá fue el mayor receptor. El nivel de aprobación del sistema se desplomó de un 90 por ciento a alrededor de un 20 por ciento, y la superpoblación crónica es la mayor queja. Al igual que el sistema de tránsito masivo de Tokio, conocido por la excesiva cantidad de gente, TransMilenio fue diseñado para 6 personas por metro cuadrado, en comparación con el estándar de diseño en Suecia, que es de 2 por metro cuadrado, o el promedio de la ciudad de Nueva York, que es de 2,7. Esto significa que los pasajeros están tan apretujados que tal vez no puedan bajar en su parada. Y, por lo general, el sistema lleva hasta 8 o 9 personas por metro cuadrado, por lo que, en la hora pico, puede llevar hasta 45 minutos encontrar un autobús con espacio para subir. 

Mientras la ciudad continúa con sus esfuerzos por mejorar el TransMilenio, y en su último anuncio prometió USD 8 millones para agrandar 49 de las 138 estaciones para que quepan más pasajeros, los defectos del sistema han logrado que más bogotanos utilicen modos de transporte alternativos. Confían cada vez más en autos privados y taxis, lo que ha producido la sexta peor congestión de tráfico del planeta, según la Global Traffic Scorecard de INRIX de 2017. Y, después de 60 años, al fin Bogotá se plantea invertir en una línea de metro. 

“Hoy celebramos que llegamos a un punto de no retorno con el Metro de Bogotá”, dijo Peñalosa en septiembre del año pasado, cuando el presidente Juan Manuel Santos aprobó la financiación nacional del proyecto. Los funcionarios de transporte determinaron que era preferible un sistema de metro de 30 kilómetros, impulsado por energía hidroeléctrica renovable, a construir más BTR, que se ha demorado en convertir los sucios autobuses diésel en vehículos eléctricos limpios.

Algunos aún prefieren los beneficios del BTR en cuestión de costos. Juan Pablo Bocajero, economista de transporte colombiano de la Universidad de los Andes, estima que la ciudad pierde USD 800 millones al año (0,5 por ciento de su PIB) en congestiones de tránsito. “Si tuviera que decidir entre un metro de 30 kilómetros y un BTR de 200 kilómetros, probablemente elegiría el BTR”, indicó a The World, de Radio Pública Internacional, en 2015. Pero incluso los mayores defensores del TransMilenio, como Dário Hidalgo, antiguo director general adjunto del sistema, quien hoy coordina el Observatorio del Centro BTR de Excelencia de WRI, han apoyado públicamente al metro de Bogotá.

El debate de BTR contra metro también se dio en Brasil. Allí, tanto Porto Alegre como Curitiba consideraron establecer líneas de metro al recibir una gran inyección de capital de la campaña pública de gastos en infraestructura del gobierno federal, que, en gran parte, llegó por parte del Mundial de 2014 a las ciudades anfitrionas. Si bien en papel ambas optaron por un metro, en pos de una mayor capacidad y el potencial de lograr una nueva inauguración, por sobre la eficacia costo/beneficio del BTR, la crisis económica y política de Brasil de los últimos años ha llevado a que ambas ciudades suspendan los proyectos. Curitiba ha solicitado permiso al gobierno federal para redireccionar la subvención federal de unos USD 500 millones y devolverla al sistema distintivo de BTR de la ciudad.

Sin embargo, la inversión en transporte no es una competencia de suma cero, según destaca Daniel Rodríguez, académico de la Universidad de California, Berkeley y miembro del Instituto Lincoln, en una cita a las investigaciones sobre las zonas metropolitanas de EE.UU. (Levine, 2013). En general, el gasto en distintas formas de transporte tiende a un auge y caída en todas ellas, mientras que el gasto en una sola posee un efecto neutral o complementario a las otras.

Teleféricos

Una innovación más reciente refleja cierta voluntad por invertir en vecindarios más pobres, marcados por la topografía única de las ciudades latinoamericanas, donde los asentamientos informales suelen ubicarse en laderas. Del mismo modo en que Curitiba inspiró un auge de los BTR, un teleférico inaugurado en Medellín en 2004 inspiró a un puñado de otras ciudades en la región. Con un costo de entre USD 5 y 10 millones por kilómetro, son favorables en comparación con el transporte por ferrocarril, que no necesariamente podría atravesar el terreno formidable sobre los valles de Medellín o entre El Alto y La Paz, a gran altitud. Los teleféricos han conquistado los tiempos de viaje en zonas complicadas, donde antes solo se podía transitar en motocicleta, a pie y con vehículos pequeños. Pero hay excepciones notables: los dos teleféricos de Río estuvieron cerrados durante más de dos años, después de que las investigaciones de corrupción demostraron que las empresas de construcción conspiraban con los funcionarios públicos para cobrar de más por los proyectos, por decenas de millones de dólares.

Mientras el sector público debate los méritos del BTR, las flotas de autobuses privados siguen atendiendo a todas las ciudades de América Latina, y los gobiernos locales han intentado, a veces con éxito y a veces no, controlar las redes caóticas y superpuestas de autobuses. En 2007, Transantiago, de Santiago, con subsidios públicos y administración privada, introdujo tarjetas inteligentes, desechó viejos camiones modificados e implementó nuevos autobuses, y puso todo el sistema bajo el control de una sola agencia. Pero los pasajeros estaban frustrados porque la reforma radical (que se consideraba la más ambiciosa en el sector del transporte en un país en vías de desarrollo) se les impuso con demasiada rapidez. Si bien el sistema de Santiago era más fiable que las redes de muchas ciudades de América Latina, en 2017 el think tank Espacio Público lo llamó la peor decisión de políticas públicas desde que Chile volvió a la democracia, en gran parte debido a los millones que el gobierno paga en subsidios a los operadores privados para mantener el sistema en funcionamiento.

Rodríguez afirma que las deficiencias del BTR de Santiago surgieron, en parte, de una falta inicial de subsidios públicos hacia las empresas privadas de autobuses. “Esto significó que los operadores intentaban llevar a tantos pasajeros como podían”, dijo. Además, la ciudad eliminó muchos recorridos existentes y no informó a los pasajeros sobre estos cambios (McCarthy, 2007). 

Estas decisiones cuestionables de políticas públicas podrían haber contribuido al aumento en los índices de posesión de autos en la región (Roque y Masoumi, 2016). Aun así, un estudio reciente concluye que los índices de posesión de autos están por debajo de los promedios en países más ricos, que van desde 71 por cada 1000 residentes en Ecuador hasta 314 por cada 1000 residentes en Argentina. Estos números relativamente bajos significan que una gran cantidad de votantes prefiere que aumenten los carriles para autobuses, a costa de los carriles para autos privados.

Pero el índice de crecimiento anual para la posesión de autos (que llega al 6,1 por ciento en Chile) superó por mucho al rango de 1 a 2 por ciento de los países desarrollados. Estos números indican que, a pesar de los avances en América Latina en el transporte masivo, la clase alta y aquella que está subiendo de nivel todavía optan por autos privados, a pesar de las congestiones de tráfico (hay 9 ciudades latinoamericanas que figuran en la lista de las 100 ciudades con peor tráfico de INRIX, más que Asia y África juntas).

Al otro extremo del espectro económico, la proliferación de los BTR podría tener otras consecuencias. “El BTR es lo más jugoso de la década en lo que respecta al transporte, y está reemplazando, en algunos casos con problemas, a los sistemas de transporte existentes que son problemáticos a su propio modo”, dijo Daniel Chatman, académico de la Universidad de California, Berkeley, quien estudió el impacto de los nuevos recorridos de BTR en varias ciudades, entre ellas Quito y Barranquilla, Colombia.

Las investigaciones preliminares sugieren que el BTR en bandas de gran volumen tiende a ser más útil para quienes trabajan en entornos tradicionales de oficina, porque los llevan de zonas residenciales formales y densas a centros de empleo. Esto puede dejar de lado a los pobres, porque los planificadores de tránsito recortan los recorridos secundarios que pasan por las partes más pobres de la ciudad con el objetivo de formalizar la red existente de transporte, aunque esta no alcance para el 30 por ciento de los residentes de la región que viven en zonas formales.

“El BTR termina por atender al patrón de tráfico dominante en una ciudad y no necesariamente lidia con otros patrones que no pertenecen al sistema principal”, dijo Chatman.

La capacidad de los BTR de transportar a personas a grandes distancias también ayudó a empeorar la segregación socioespacial. Después de crear acceso al suelo en las periferias urbanas, los funcionarios de la vivienda y desarrolladores del sector privado de Brasil, Colombia y México se dedicaron a construir viviendas de interés social incluso más lejos del centro de la ciudad, para aprovechar los precios más bajos del suelo. 

“Ahora sabemos que fue un error que llevó a la exclusión social, tarifas más elevadas y carga de viaje”, dijo Rodríguez, de la Universidad de California, Berkeley. 

La estructura espacial predominante de las ciudades de América Latina, por la cual la mayoría de los residentes de bajos ingresos se ubican en las periferias, significa que los proyectos de BTR han beneficiado muchísimo a los residentes con ingresos medios. Esto se comprueba en Bogotá (Combs, 2017) y Lima (Scholl et al., 2017), donde el BTR atiende a concentraciones de residentes de ingresos medios, y los conecta con los centros de empleo formal. Según Linke, los residentes de viviendas de interés social en Brasil gastan más del 50 por ciento de sus ingresos en vivienda y transporte, mientras que los ocupantes de viviendas más céntricas gastan un 39 por ciento.

Transporte urbano en América Latina

En mayo de 2017, el Instituto Lincoln y el departamento de planificación regional y de ciudades de la Universidad de California, Berkeley ofrecieron un simposio sobre transporte urbano en América Latina. Este se concentró en la influencia de los planes innovadores de tránsito en inmuebles, desarrollo urbano y la vida de los residentes de ciudades. El objetivo del simposio era examinar la última evidencia y debatir formas de aplicar los últimos conocimientos a las políticas públicas.

Los artículos del simposio plantean un panorama complejo de experiencias e impactos. Las investigaciones no fueron concluyentes acerca de si las inversiones en BTR pueden tener distintas consecuencias en los mercados inmobiliarios, aunque la mayoría de los estudios se concentraron en unas pocas ciudades de Colombia, Ecuador y México. Los teleféricos se estudiaron de forma empírica solo en Medellín, donde se notó un aumento en la actividad inmobiliaria. Ambos tipos de transporte han aumentado la actividad de los permisos para construcción y la densidad de población. Las tendencias del uso del suelo han virado de residencial a comercial en Bogotá y Quito, pero no así en León, Monterrey, Guadalajara y Puebla. Las incoherencias en relación con las consecuencias estimadas apuntan a las diferencias en las condiciones locales. Los mercados territoriales urbanos están condicionados por varias influencias, desde instituciones de planificación y actividad de desarrollo hasta la disponibilidad del suelo. Estas influencias pueden tener un impacto sobre el precio del suelo y entorpecer la generalización de las consecuencias en los precios dentro de las bandas, entre ellas y a lo largo del tiempo.

Las oportunidades para realizar más investigaciones son muchas, como estudios sobre la importancia de estas innovaciones según los modos de transporte urbano establecidos, cómo apuntar los beneficios hacia los residentes más pobres y cómo coordinar mejor con el desarrollo territorial.

El costo alto y la incomodidad también reflejan la falta de coordinación entre viviendas y planificación del tránsito. Como resultado, las viviendas se suelen ubicar sin pensar en el acceso al transporte, según destaca Enrique Silva, director asociado del Programa para América Latina y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln. El fracaso de los BTR para llegar a comunidades menos favorecidas es el resultado de decisiones diferenciadas sobre “cómo planifican los recorridos y cuán accesibles son las paradas para las personas”, dijo. Los planificadores decidieron trabajar en recorridos principales existentes y decidieron no extender ni considerar recorridos que penetraban con mayor eficacia en barrios pobres, explicó Silva.

Sin embargo, los avances en América Latina son impresionantes, y en las últimas décadas se ha demostrado que es posible moverse dentro de las ciudades en la región. Pero, hasta que la región no reduzca la gran grieta entre los ricos y los pobres, una división que se manifiesta en dónde puede vivir la gente, el transporte de alta velocidad a lo sumo puede mitigar una herida más profunda.

Gregory Scruggs posee una certificación del Instituto Americano de Planificadores Certificados (AICP, por su sigla en inglés) y escribe sobre ciudades y cultura en América. Es corresponsal de la Fundación Thomson Reuters, y sus trabajos fueron publicados en The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic CityLab y The Guardian. 

Fotografía: Gwen Kash

Referencias

BRTData. www.brtdata.org.

Combs, Tabitha. 2017. “Improving Equity in the Distribution of Public Transit Benefits.” Artículo presentado para el Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America (Simposio de innovación en transporte y suelo urbano en América Latina), Berkeley, CA, mayo de 2017.

Gutman, Jeffrey y Nirav Patel. 2018. Addressing Spatial Inequality in Latin American Cities. Washington, DC: Institución Brookings. www.brookings.edu/research/addressing-spatial-inequity-in-latin-american-cities.

Levine, Jonathan. 2013. “Is Bus Versus Rail Investment a Zero-Sum Game? The Misuse of the Opportunity-Cost Concept.” Journal of the American Planning Association 79:1, 5–15. DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2013.785285.

Linke, Clarisse y Luc Nadal. 2017. “Housing, Transport and Access: A Case for Transit-Oriented Low-Income Housing in Rio de Janeiro.” Artículo presentado para el Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America (Simposio de innovación en transporte y suelo urbano en América Latina), Berkeley, CA, mayo de 2017.

McCarthy, Julie. 2007. “In Chile, Commuters Sue City over Transit System.” Emisión en All Things Considered, Radio Pública Nacional, 8 de octubre de 2007. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15100976.

Rodríguez, Daniel A., Erik Vergel-Tovar y William F. Camargo. 2016. “Land Development Impacts of BRT in a Sample of Stops in Quito and Bogotá.” Transport Policy 51: 4–14. DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2015.10.002.

Roque, Daniela y Houshmand E. Masoumi. 2016. “An Analysis of Car Ownership in Latin American Cities: A Perspective for Future Research.” Periodica Polytechnica Transportation Engineering 44(1): 5–12. DOI: 10.3311/PPtr.8307.

Scholl, Lynn, Daniel R. Oviedo, Marco Innao y Lauramaria Pedraza. 2017. “BRT Systems and Social Inclusion: Impacts on Access to Jobs—The Case of Lima, Peru.” Artículo presentado para el Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America (Simposio de innovación en transporte y suelo urbano en América Latina), Berkeley, CA, mayo de 2017.

Smolka, Martim O. 2013. Implementing Value Capture in Latin America: Policies and Tools for Urban Development. Enfoque en políticas de suelo. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Velandia Naranjo, Durfari Janive. 2017. “The Impact of Bus Rapid Transit System on Land Prices in Mexico City.” Artículo presentado para el Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America (Simposio de innovación en transporte y suelo urbano en América Latina), Berkeley, CA, mayo de 2017.

Vergel-Tovar, Erik. 2017. “The Impacts of Bus Rapid Transit on Land Use and Real Estate Activity in Bogotá, Colombia.” Artículo presentado para el Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America (Simposio de innovación en transporte y suelo urbano en América Latina), Berkeley, CA, mayo de 2017.

Today an indigenous Bolivian produce vendor glides through the air on an aerial cable car to reach the market in La Paz. A student in Bogotá, Colombia, knows she will arrive on time for class because the city’s bus rapid transit (BRT) network never gets stuck in traffic. A car owner in São Paulo, Brazil, leaves the keys at home because the city’s ban on rush hour driving in the city center applies to his license plate number that day. A young middle-class family lives comfortably without a car in downtown Santiago, Chile, thanks to new sidewalks and bike lanes for neighborhood trips and a clean, safe combination of subway and BRT to navigate the rest of the city. And a day laborer in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas can count on a shared van that serves his neighborhood when the city’s official bus system does not.

These slices of life in Latin America’s big cities are not unusual. Bus rapid transit (BRT) lines zip through the heart of 54 cities in the region. Aerial cable cars connect steep hillside neighborhoods with the rest of town in over a half-dozen cities. Pedestrians and cyclists of all social classes are increasingly finding their way on busy urban streets. Informal transit options abound, although their safety and reliability vary widely, as does tolerance from public officials. Subway systems are being built out, albeit slowly. Car ownership remains well below averages in the developed world.

Altogether, Latin America has earned a reputation as a global innovator in urban transit. Latin American cities have garnered 9 of the 16 annual Sustainable Transport Awards given by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and they regularly place as finalists in the C40 Cities4Mobility Awards.

There have been some impressive successes. Public-private partnerships (P3s) are now de rigueur across the region: national governments are funding infrastructure and overseeing long-term plans while private firms bid to operate routes. The World Bank estimates that Latin America invested $361.3 billion for energy and transport infrastructure in more than a thousand P3s over the last decade, with the lion’s share in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Meanwhile, Brazil and Colombia have deployed land value capture in order to finance the expansion of BRT networks and the construction of new rail lines (Smolka 2013).

Amid the Latin American transport boom, however, there have also been busts. Overcrowding on Bogotá’s TransMilenio system, the region’s largest BRT network, has led to periodic riots. Rio staked its Olympic legacy on enhanced mobility with a citywide build-out of BRT and three aerial cable cars to serve favela communities, but endemic corruption and top-down planning resulted in unkept promises. The zeal to implement new transit corridors in places like Quito, Ecuador, has come at the expense of informal operators serving the poorest urban dwellers.

“Latin America is innovating, but we still don’t know if that innovation brings a virtuous cycle to generate resources for the city,” said Clarisse Linke, director of ITDP’s Brazil office. “Are we benefitting the poor so they don’t have to travel 50 kilometers each way to work?”

Such questions are at the heart of Latin America’s transportation innovation paradox. The region may have invented creative ways to move people around crowded urban centers, but can it deliver on a broader need to reduce crushing inequality? When it comes to that level of innovation, the awards jury is still undecided.

BRT Boom

Transportation innovation has flourished in Latin American cities, primarily due to two factors: rapid urbanization and extreme inequality. Despite improvements in recent decades, 8 of the 20 least equal countries in the world, as measured by the Gini index, are in Latin America. And demographers consider the region the most urban in the world. Eighty percent of its population resides in cities, and rates are even higher in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Those teeming cities emerged during a postwar economic boom that sparked massive rural-to-urban migration. As peasants, farmers, and indigenous people came down from the Andes or left the arid hinterlands of northeastern Brazil, they did not encounter a ready supply of inner-city housing. Instead, they were shunted to the edges of cities or onto steep hillsides unsuitable for construction.

Seas of poor people surrounding islands of affluence became the socioeconomic norm in the region (Gutman and Patel 2018). New arrivals to a city often find centrally located jobs as maids, janitors, construction workers, or cooks. This creates a need to move large numbers of low-wage workers relatively long distances, to where they can afford to live.

Plenty of enterprising options have sprung up to meet the demand. Shared vans or taxis, known as colectivos (Spanish) or kombis (Portuguese), began plying routes to serve new neighborhoods that overburdened municipal governments couldn’t reach or intentionally neglected. Privately operated bus fleets popped up, offering frequent but uncoordinated service that saw companies competing against each other and drivers competing against the clock in ways that left gaps, duplication, and unsafe conditions.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the cash-strapped public sector used its limited resources to invest in rail networks in only the biggest cities. Subways in Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago are prime examples from this period. Although they serve millions of passengers daily, they don’t compare well to the comprehensive rail networks of similarly sized megacities like London and Tokyo.

Enter bus rapid transit. While the idea is credited to British urban planner Peter Midgley, a retired World Bank consultant who devised the first dedicated bus lanes in French and Belgian cities in the late 1960s, it was Curitiba, Brazil, that evolved the first BRT system. The 20-kilometer line that opened in 1974 featured not just dedicated bus lanes, but also enclosed stations, pre-boarding payment, and all-door boarding—features that make subways swift and convenient.

Curitiba’s then mayor, architect Jaime Lerner, who became famous for his urban design interventions in the southern Brazilian city, had federal funding for a metro line. But he realized that the city could produce a much longer dedicated bus system for the same price as a much shorter subway line. With bus stops that had the look and feel of subway stations, and zoning that allowed taller buildings on major corridors near the stations, Curitiba gained most of the benefits of a subway line with a limited budget.

That basic approach appealed to Latin American cities. “We didn’t have the resources or the time to implement rail-based transport,” said Linke. “It was an urgent situation because our cities were already heavily populated, and we needed more transit coverage.”

The model evolved in Bogotá under Mayor Enrique Peñalosa—who is back in office after a 14-year hiatus. The city of 8 million is conspicuously absent from the list of Latin American metropolises with subway systems, because Peñalosa, like Lerner, invested heavily in BRT instead in the late 1990s. Bogotá’s TransMilenio system grew to become one of the largest BRT networks in the world. With 210 kilometers of routes and over 2 million passengers daily, the TransMilenio rivals many underground networks.

Curitiba and Bogotá represent something of the golden era for Latin American BRT, as these two cities proved, at least for a time, that they could transport a critical mass of residents for a fraction of the cost of heavy rail, sparking a worldwide trend. Meanwhile, cities like Santiago, São Paulo, Rio, Mexico City, and Quito moved to implement BRT lines as a complement to trains, mostly filling in gaps rather than building out rail networks.

BRT, in turn, became identified with Latin America in transportation and policy circles. Think tanks like the Brookings Institute held seminars on what US public transportation could learn from the Latin American BRT boom. The World Resources Institute (WRI) championed BRT as a Latin American innovation and identified Latin America as home to the bulk of the world’s BRT passengers, nearly 20 million people daily.

Middle of the Road

While the global fervor around BRT continues, unabashed boosterism has been tempered by growing criticism, and Bogotá’s TransMilenio has been the main lightning rod. The system’s approval rating has plummeted from 90 percent to around 20 percent, with chronic overcrowding the main complaint. Like Tokyo’s infamously overcrowded mass transit system, TransMilenio is designed for 6 people per square meter—compared to Sweden’s transit design standard of 2 per square meter or New York City’s average of 2.7 per square meter. This means passengers are squeezed so tightly they may not be able to disembark at their stop. And the system routinely carries as many as 8 or 9 people per square meter, so at peak times it can take 45 minutes just to find a bus with room to board.

While the city continues its efforts to shore up TransMilenio, most recently announcing $8 million to enlarge 49 of 138 stations so they can accommodate more passengers, the system’s flaws have driven more Bogotanos to alternate modes of transportation. The increased reliance on private cars and taxis has produced the sixth-worst traffic congestion on the planet, according to the INRIX 2017 Global Traffic Scorecard. And after 60 years, Bogotá is finally poised to invest in a metro line.

“Today we celebrate that we reached a point of no return with the Bogotá Metro,” said Peñalosa last September when Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos approved national funding for the project. Transportation officials determined that a 30-kilometer subway system powered by renewable hydroelectric energy was preferable to more BRT, which has been slow to convert to clean electric buses from dirty diesels.

Some still favor the cost benefits of BRT. Colombian transportation economist Juan Pablo Bocajero at the University of the Andes estimates that the city loses $800 million annually (0.5 percent of its GDP) to traffic congestion. “If I had to decide between a 30-kilometer subway and a 200-kilometer BRT, I would probably choose the BRT,” he told Public Radio International’s The World in 2015. But even TransMilenio diehards like the system’s former deputy general manager, Dário Hidalgo, who now coordinates WRI’s Observatory of the BRT Center for Excellence, have publicly supported the Bogotá metro.

The BRT versus metro debate also played out in Brazil, where both Porto Alegre and Curitiba considered subway lines after receiving a huge injection of capital from the federal government’s public infrastructure spending campaign, much of it funneled into 2014 World Cup host cities. While on paper both opted for a subway, favoring higher capacity and ribbon-cutting potential over the cost-benefit efficiency of BRT, Brazil’s political and economic crisis over the last few years has led both cities to suspend their projects. Curitiba has petitioned the federal government for permission to redirect its roughly $500 million federal grant back into the city’s flagship BRT system.

Nonetheless, transit investment is not a zero-sum competition, notes Daniel Rodriguez, a University of California, Berkeley scholar and Lincoln Institute fellow, citing research on US metropolitan areas (Levine 2013). Overall, spending on different modes of transit tends to rise and fall together, and spending on one mode has a neutral or complementary effect on another.

Aerial Cable Cars

A more recent innovation reflects a willingness to invest in poorer neighborhoods shaped by the unique topography of Latin American cities, where informal settlements often cling to hillsides. As Curitiba inspired a BRT boom, the aerial cable car inaugurated in Medellín in 2004 likewise inspired a half-dozen other Latin American cities. At a cost of $5 to 10 million per kilometer, it compares favorably with rail transport that couldn’t necessarily navigate the formidable terrain above Medellín’s valleys or between high-altitude El Alto and La Paz. Cable cars have slashed travel times in complicated areas previously navigable only by motorbikes, pedestrians, and small vehicles. But there are notable exceptions: Rio’s two cable car lines have been shuttered for over two years after corruption probes discovered that construction firms colluded with public officials to overcharge for the projects by tens of millions of dollars.

While the public sector debates the merits of BRT, private bus fleets continue to serve every Latin American city, and local governments have tried with mixed success to rein in the chaotic overlapping networks of buses. In 2007, Santiago’s publicly subsidized, privately run Transantiago introduced smart cards, scrapped old modified trucks in favor of new buses, and brought the entire system under the authority of one agency. But commuters felt frustrated that the radical reform—considered the most ambitious in the transport sector of a developing country—was imposed on them too rapidly. Although Santiago’s system was more reliable than many Latin American cities’ overall transport networks, in 2017 the think tank Espacio Público called it the worst public policy decision since Chile’s return to democracy, in large part because of the billions of subsidies the government pays to private bus operators to keep the system running.

The inadequacies of Santiago’s BRT stemmed in part from an initial lack of public subsidies for the private bus companies, according to Rodriguez. “This translated into operators attempting to carry as many passengers as possible,” he said. The city also eliminated many existing routes and failed to inform riders of the changes (McCarthy 2007).

Such questionable public policy decisions could be a contributing factor to Latin America’s rising car ownership rates (Roque and Masoumi 2016). Still, a recent study showed car ownership rates below the averages in wealthier countries, from a low of 71 per 1,000 residents in Ecuador to a high of 314 per 1,000 residents in Argentina. Those relatively low numbers mean that a large constituency favors an increase in bus lanes at the expense of private car lanes.

But the annual growth rate of car ownership—up to 6.1 percent in Chile—far outpaced the 1 to 2 percent range in developed nations. These figures suggest that despite Latin America’s advances in mass transit, the upper class and upwardly mobile are still opting for private automobiles, regardless of traffic congestion. (Nine Latin American cities feature in the INRIX 100 cities with the worst traffic, more than in Asia and Africa combined.)

On the other end of the economic spectrum, the proliferation of BRT may be having other consequences. “BRT is the flavor of the decade in transportation and it is supplanting, in some cases problematically so, existing transport systems that are problematic in their own right,” said University of California, Berkeley scholar Daniel Chatman, who has studied the impact of new BRT routes in several cities, including Quito and Barranquilla, Colombia.

Preliminary research suggests that BRT in high-volume corridors tends to best serve those working in traditional office settings, moving them from dense, formal residential areas to job centers. That can leave the poor behind as ancillary routes through poorer parts of the city are cut off by transit planners aiming to formalize the existing transportation network, even though it underserves the 30 percent of the region’s residents who live in informal housing.

“BRT ends up serving the dominant traffic pattern in a city and doesn’t necessarily deal as well with other travel patterns that are not part of this main trunk system,” Chatman said.

BRT’s ability to move people over long distances has also facilitated worsening socio-spatial segregation. After creating access to land on the urban periphery, housing officials and private-sector developers in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico moved to build social housing ever farther from the city center in order to take advantage of lower land prices.

“We now know this was a mistake, leading to social exclusion, higher fares, and travel burden,” said University of California, Berkeley’s Rodriguez.

The prevailing spatial structure of Latin American cities, with low-income residents located predominantly in the outskirts, means that BRT projects have largely benefitted middle-income residents. This is true in Bogotá (Combs 2017) and Lima (Scholl et al. 2017), where BRT serves concentrations of middle-income residents, connecting them to formal employment clusters. Residents of social housing in Brazil pay over 50 percent of their income on housing and transportation combined, while occupants of more centrally located housing pay 39 percent, according to Linke.

Urban Transportation in Latin America

In May 2017, the Lincoln Institute and the University of California, Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning hosted a symposium on urban transportation in Latin America. It focused on the influence of innovative transit schemes on real estate, urban development, and the lives of city residents. The aim of the symposium was to examine the evidence to date and discuss ways to apply recent scholarship to public policy.

Symposium papers paint a complex picture of experiences and impacts. Research was inconclusive about whether BRT investments can have distinct impacts on real estate markets, although most of the studies have focused on just a few cities in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Aerial cable cars have been empirically studied only in Medellín, which showed increased real estate activity. Both types of transport have led to increased building permit activity and population density. Land use trends shifted from residential to commercial in Bogotá and Quito but not in León, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. Inconsistencies regarding estimated impacts point to differences in local conditions. Urban land markets are subject to a variety of forces—from planning institutions and development activity to the availability of land—that are likely to influence the price of land, making it difficult to generalize price impacts within corridors, across corridors, and over time. 

Opportunities for further research abound, including studies of the importance of these innovations relative to established urban transportation modes, how to target the benefits towards the poorest residents, and how to better coordinate with land development.

The high cost and inconvenience also reflect poor coordination between housing and transit planning. As a result, housing is often located without consideration for transit access, notes Enrique Silva, associate director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean. BRT’s failure to reach more underserved communities is the result of discrete choices of “how you plan your routes and how accessible the stops are to people,” he said. Planners decided to work on existing major routes and decided not to extend or consider routes that penetrated more effectively into poor neighborhoods, Silva explained.

Latin America’s advances are nevertheless impressive, and moving around cities in the region has improved demonstrably in recent decades. But until the region reduces the vast gulf between rich and poor—a division that manifests itself in where people can live—high-speed transit can serve at best as a salve on a deeper wound.

Gregory Scruggs, AICP, writes about cities and culture in the Americas. He is a correspondent with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic CityLab, and The Guardian.

Photograph: Gwen Kash

References

BRTData. www.brtdata.org.

Combs, Tabitha. 2017. “Improving Equity in the Distribution of Public Transit Benefits.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Gutman, Jeffrey, and Nirav Patel. 2018. Addressing Spatial Inequality in Latin American Cities. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. www.brookings.edu/research/addressing-spatial-inequity-in-latin-american-cities.

Levine, Jonathan. 2013. “Is Bus Versus Rail Investment a Zero-Sum Game? The Misuse of the Opportunity-Cost Concept.” Journal of the American Planning Association 79:1, 5–15. DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2013.785285.

Linke, Clarisse, and Luc Nadal. 2017. “Housing, Transport and Access: A Case for Transit-Oriented Low-Income Housing in Rio de Janeiro.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

McCarthy, Julie. 2007. “In Chile, Commuters Sue City over Transit System.” Broadcast on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, October 8, 2007. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15100976.

Rodriguez, Daniel A., Erik Vergel-Tovar, and William F. Camargo. 2016. “Land Development Impacts of BRT in a Sample of Stops in Quito and Bogotá.” Transport Policy 51: 4–14. DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2015.10.002.

Roque, Daniela, and Houshmand E. Masoumi. 2016. “An Analysis of Car Ownership in Latin American Cities: A Perspective for Future Research.” Periodica Polytechnica Transportation Engineering 44(1): 5–12. DOI: 10.3311/PPtr.8307.

Scholl, Lynn, Daniel R. Oviedo, Marco Innao, and Lauramaria Pedraza. 2017. “BRT Systems and Social Inclusion: Impacts on Access to Jobs—The Case of Lima, Peru.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Smolka, Martim O. 2013. Implementing Value Capture in Latin America: Policies and Tools for Urban Development. Policy Focus Report. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Velandia Naranjo, Durfari Janive. 2017. “The Impact of Bus Rapid Transit System on Land Prices in Mexico City.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.

Vergel-Tovar, Erik. 2017. “The Impacts of Bus Rapid Transit on Land Use and Real Estate Activity in Bogotá, Colombia.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Transportation Innovations and Urban Land in Latin America, Berkeley, CA, May 2017.