Transit-Oriented Developers Undeterred By Lower Ridership, Safety Concerns On LA Metro

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, has made billions of dollars of investments in new rail lines across the city and county — investments that will connect residents to Los Angeles International Airport and smooth connections through Downtown for those crisscrossing the city center on their travels.

These investments have come at a time when ridership numbers here, as in other major cities, have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels and questions and concerns about rider safety are at the forefront of discussions about the network’s future.

Heightened concerns about security on trains have been the focus of recent media coverage on the county’s growing public transportation network. Though development professionals who spoke with Bisnow acknowledged that this issue is on their radar, they were steadfast in their commitment to building transit-oriented development.

Development in Los Angeles takes a long time, they said, and it seems developers looking into the future of their projects are, at least for now, anticipating a future where these issues are behind them. 

“We see transit-oriented development as the present and the future, as a path to quality of life for our tenants and customers,” Lendlease Executive General Manager of West Coast Development Arden Hearing said. “Really, it's the only path to meeting our shared sustainability needs and goals. Adding another lane to the 405 [Freeway] is not a long-term solution.” 

In 2021, Lendlease and its partner, the Australian retirement fund Aware Super, bought a 156K SF site on La Cienega, across the street from the La Cienega/Jefferson E Line station. The property is in an opportunity zone and it’s Lendlease’s first LA development site. The company plans to build a mixed-use project with 260 residential units, 250K SF of office space, street-level retail and parking.

Hearing says he rides the train and has seen firsthand some things “that I wouldn't want my teenage daughter to experience,” but he also knows Metro and city officials are well aware of these issues and he has faith that they will be solved. Lendlease’s project is not yet built, meaning there's more time for these issues to be addressed.

Metro is certainly aware of falling ridership numbers — a trend that has plagued many transit authorities in major cities around the country. Experts who spoke to Bisnow cautioned against creating a causal link between ridership loss and safety concerns, noting that while lower ridership can create an environment where people feel less comfortable on transit, there are likely a number of reasons why people chose not to ride transit.

Ridership has rebounded a bit. In 2022, Metro saw 255 million boardings across rail and buses in 2022, a 12% increase from 2021’s 227 million boardings, Metro data shows.

“As we saw Angelenos return to their pre-pandemic lives last year, Metro is working diligently to restore the level of service for those who depend on transit to get where they need to be to see riders come back on our county’s buses and rail lines as a result,” Glendale City Council Member and Metro Board Chair Ara J. Najarian said in a statement. But even 2022’s ridership numbers are a roughly 30% decrease from 2019, when the system saw approximately 371 million total boardings. 

Metro has also been focused for years on ensuring that riders feel safe, though discussions of what “safe” means for different riders of Metro have led to exploring an array of solutions. 

The organization hired 48 additional security officers and extended a contract with the Los Angeles Police Department to patrol transit. The agency has also dispatched 300 “transit ambassadors” to ride Metro, acting as a kind of guide for transit riders and a way for Metro to get a feel for what’s happening on its network of buses and trains. The agency is exploring creating its own police force as well. 

Bisnow reached out to Metro to see whether they had seen a decrease in interest from development partners in projects near train and bus hubs, but it did not respond in time for publication. 

Asked if the current conditions have changed anything about how Lendlease is planning to integrate connections to transit into its project, Hearing said they have not.

“Development is a long game,” said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs whose focus is on the relationship between public transportation and land use. Especially in Los Angeles, developers spend years before shovels hit the ground, and then maybe wait a few or many years before they expect to sell the property.

While the negative focus on Metro safety concerns and ridership “is not something you can totally disregard, it's also something that you can, at least somewhat reasonably, expect to get better over the course of the time that you have owned that building,” Manville said.

Transit-oriented development as a term can be squishy, but within Los Angeles proper, there is a program called Transit-Oriented Communities that incentivizes developers to build housing near transit by allowing them to add more density to their residential projects in exchange for including affordable housing units as well. 

The project has been popular with developers: According to city planning data, it was responsible for 7,285 units proposed in 2022, or 30% of all units proposed that year; in 2021, 9,015 units were proposed using the TOC program, roughly 33% of all units proposed that year. The program, which was created through 2016’s Measure JJJ, was originally set to expire in 2026 but the Department of City Planning is exploring a number of avenues to extend that.

“TOC has been broadly successful in terms of generating deeply affordable housing, as well as housing in general, in areas near high quality transit, which aligns with the city’s core objectives,” a planning spokesperson told Bisnow in an email.

The TOC program’s nonaffordable units tend to carry rents near the top of the market, as is the case with most new development in Los Angeles. Manville said this is also true for TOC projects because the market-rate rents must make up for the subsidized rents in the affordable units. As such, most of the people who live in these projects are not likely relying on transit, which makes it easy to believe that problems of low ridership and safety concerns on public transportation don’t really affect the people who live in these projects and don’t likely deter them from renting there, Manville said. 

In a fully affordable project, though, the likelihood of residents using public transit is higher. Metro has a strategic development plan in place now that encourages joint development of affordable projects on Metro-owned land. One such project is being developed by Little Tokyo Service Center over the Vermont/Santa Monica subway station. Under construction now, it will bring nearly 200 units of housing for low-income households and permanent supportive housing to a six-story building atop the station. 

Little Tokyo Service Center Director of Real Estate Debbie Chen said for most of their residents, public transportation is a necessity, not an amenity. 

“It makes more sense to build affordable housing next to these major public transit stations,” Chen said.

Lower ridership and the recent negative attention to conditions on trains have not changed interest levels of partners or investors in their projects, Chen said, though she suspects a big part of that has to do with the organization’s established interest in transit-close projects. LTSC is based in Little Tokyo, which has a station on the Metro L Line that is in the process of being replaced by a new subterranean station on the Metro Regional Connector subway. 

Issues on Metro are also unlikely to affect renter interest, as the city and region have a well-documented and acute shortage of units within financial reach of the lower-income renters who would qualify to live in LTSC’s projects. 

Public transit-oriented projects are also likely to remain a priority for the community-based affordable housing developer in part because of the interest from market-rate developers that seems to follow major investments like new light rail lines, Chen said. 

“Oftentimes we see a lot of displacement, we see [rent] prices in the market go up in response to or even in expectation of new rail coming in,” Chen said. As part of their goal of helping to preserve communities, LTSC has sought transit-close sites to counteract this effect. 

“If anything, we're doubling down on transit-oriented development,” Chen said.