Light rail was supposed to cause a development boom in the Hiawatha corridor, but a new study shows that the Blue Line has had little effect on land use near rail platforms in its first six years.
Sarah West, an economics professor at Macalester College, and Needham Hurst, a graduate student at Harvard, found that the Blue Line, which began carrying passengers between the Mall of America and downtown Minneapolis in 2004, caused almost no increase in the likelihood of new development up to 2010. Their new paper is coming out in Regional Science and Urban Economics.
"The effects of light rail, at least through 2010 in Minneapolis, are very small, and are limited to industrial and single-family parcels," West said in an interview.
Using U.S. census data not released until 2012, as well as Metropolitan Council land use surveys and city of Minneapolis data, the study looked at parcels near light rail platforms and calculated the likelihood of land use change, then compared that with the likelihood of land use change for parcels throughout Minneapolis.
They found "no effect" along the corridor compared with the 1997-2000 period before construction started on the rail line, and found that parcels within a half-mile of rail platforms were only 1.39 percent more likely than parcels citywide to be developed after the line started operating, compared with the years the rail line was under construction.
The paper also finds that light rail failed to insulate the corridor from the effects of the Great Recession.
"If the light rail has a catalyst effect, we would still expect for there to be relatively less of a hit taken within the corridor, and we don't find that," West said.
West and Hurst are careful to point out that their paper does not address development since 2010 — "casual observation of activity along the line in 2012 and 2013 suggests that substantial changes are taking place now that market outlooks have improved," they wrote — and that the effects of light rail can take a long time to manifest themselves.