Government
3 Missed Chances to Pay for New York's Subway Expansions
It's time to cover the costs of transit investments by capturing the rising value of adjacent land.
With transit funding so hard to come by, some city agencies have turned to a concept called "value capture." The basic idea is that a city should reap some benefit from the fact that public transit investments often make adjacent land more valuable to private developers. Through various strategies — selling development rights in the area, for instance, or collecting new taxes on the land — the city can "capture" this new value and put it back into the transit system.
It's a feedback loop that looks a little like this: