The Transit Oriented Communities Program and the Structural Limits of Market-Mediated Housing Policy in Los Angeles

Abstract

This thesis examines how the political coalitions governing Los Angeles have shaped the city's housing policy, tracing the structural shift from publicly financed housing to market-mediated intervention. Drawing on Clarence Stone's regime politics, Harvey Molotch's growth machine theory, and Brenner & Theodore's concept of actually existing neoliberalism, I argue that a pro-growth coalition of real estate interests, media figures, and homeowner associations systematically dismantled the city's capacity for direct public housing production over the course of the twentieth century. Without this capacity, the city turned to incentive zoning policy, adopting the Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) program in 2017, which offers density bonuses and streamlined approvals to developers who include affordable units in projects near major transit stops. Using logistic regression models on a block-group-level dataset that merges parcel records, TOC project approvals, and American Community Survey data, I test whether TOC development follows the geographic logic of the growth machine. The results indicate that TOC projects are primarily driven by transit tier incentives and market conditions, concentrating in areas with high home values and large renter populations rather than in the block groups with the most severe housing cost burdens. Cost burden is negatively associated with TOC development, and a selection bias test shows that the TOC zones themselves are drawn in areas where market conditions already favor development. While the program has generated meaningful affordable housing production, it cannot direct development to where need is greatest, producing housing where the growth machine finds it profitable to build. These findings demonstrate that the disjunction between TOC's output and the geography of housing need is not a design flaw but a structural consequence of the political history that produced the program, with implications for any city relying on incentive-based tools in the absence of public institutional capacity for housing production.