Although some residents believing that a new train station opening in their neighborhood drives up housing costs, a new preliminary study released Monday suggests otherwise.
Kurt Andrew Cole, who has lived in Exposition Park for 11 years, said he has seen rent increases since the Expo Line opened about five years ago. Cole said he thinks the Expo Line is the cause for the rise of rent.
"In our neighborhood, they tripled [rent], the pricing has tripled," he said.
Lifelong Exposition Park resident Kaytie Jeffries agrees.
"A lot of the pricing has gone up, I know that," she said. "It makes it even more impossible to live in LA."
But the preliminary study by Gene Burinski, a Ph.D. candidate at USC, showed that there is no direct correlation between the opening of new metro stations and gentrification.
Gentrification generally refers to the upgrading of low-income neighborhoods that eventually results in pricing out current residents.
"There does not seem to be any evidence of railway stations impacting mobility rates. So, it seems that if there are changes happening in the neighborhood, it's likely not a result necessarily of the train station," Burinski said.
The study, he said, was conducted by compiling individual tax data from 1994-2012 of residents living within a half-mile radius of a rail station. The individual's information was broken down and assessed by income. The study tracked individuals who moved in and out of the area after the arrival of a new train station.
Burinksi followed several income levels, from extreme poverty to upper income and found that low-income households had a greater influence on who left a neighborhood. The data shows the result of movement but not the cause, he said.
"Displacement and historic gentrification is a pretty complex problem that depends on a lot of moving parts and I think that very often we try to oversimplify it and politicize it," Burinski said.
Most areas where train stations were built were most likely going to be gentrified anyways due to other factors, Burinski said. He stressed the preliminary nature of his study and warned against drawing too many conclusions. Instead, he said he hopes that his study adds to the discussion on gentrification.
"So that's perhaps our evidence, the evidence that we find in our paper is also suggestive that it's a bit more nuanced than perhaps we thought before," he said.