Effects of Mass Rapid Transit on Gentrification

The developments of gentrification have sprawled globally over the past five decades, beginning with sporadic small-scale developments in inner-city areas to large-scale investments in outlying urban areas and even to rural areas. This research aimed at empirically exploring the effects of mass rapid transit (MRT) systems on the process of gentrification in an eastern city and examining the effect differences between inner-city areas and outlying urban areas. This work began with developing hypotheses and selecting variables in view of the neo-classical and Marxism''s theories, which focused on gentries’ preferences and capital flows respectively. In the neo-classical approach, this study re-interpreted the monocentric AMM (Alonso-Mills-Muth) model and used the variables of population migration and college graduates to measure gentrification. Besides, this study applied the rent gap theory of the Marxism’s conceptions and adopted the varibables of newly-built floors and house prices to measure gentrification. And then the regression analyses of panel data between 1996 and 2014 in Taipei City, Taiwan were conducted to verify the effects of MRT on gentrification quantitatively. The empirical results reveal that gentrification developments were positively related to the opening of MRT stations; the effects of MRT on house prices in the inner-city areas were more significant than those in the outlying urban areas; and, the effects of MRT on education level and newly-built floors in the outlying urban areas are more significant than those in the inner-city areas. The empirical evidence of this research is novel in literature and is valuable for developing and verifying gentrification hypotheses via bi-theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, the study results also imply that a local government should adopt suitable strategies to diminish possible gentrification effects when deploying MRT systems and to balance the concerns of economic efficiency and social justice.