Transit-Oriented Development: Creativity in the Face of Bureaucratic Adversity

I’ve been interning with the Transit-Oriented Development team, a subset of the Department of Real Estate Development, which is a division of the Real Estate Department at the MTA. And I thought the bureaucracy at Hunter College was convoluted.

The sheer number of departments and agencies with their own jurisdictions and mandates within the MTA is astonishing. I’d imagine that, given the number of hands that any approval must go through to get a final “OK,” even putting up a “Change of Service” poster in a Subway station is a small miracle. I’d venture to say that few New Yorkers have a grasp of how massive a system the MTA is, and what goes into keeping the transit network up.

The TOD team works to promote private and joint development on MTA-owned and operated property in the half-mile radius surrounding transit hubs in New York City and its suburbs. Using livability principles a la Jane Jacobs as an operative framework, MTA-TOD incites growth with an eye toward economic and ecological sustainability. Yet I’ve already become frustrated with the constraints that the City’s bureaucracy have placed on MTA-TOD’s capacity to negotiate plans with developers. Because TOD is still largely on the periphery of the MTA’s greater vision for New York City transit, it has not received the resources and the funding that it needs to operate at full efficiency.

Still, I’ve been incredibly impressed by my supervisors’ work; the amount that they have accomplished, in terms of ensuring that growth on MTA land remains sustainable and friendly to the pedestrian and bicyclist, is astounding. I am amazed at the intuitive ways in which they’ve crafted streamlined solutions to bureaucratic limitations. I look forward to working with MTA-TOD on applying creative problem-solving to a largely technocratic institution.

I am pleased to say that my supervisors have worked with me very closely to make sure that my work reflects my interests to the greatest extent possible. Of course, as in any internship (or any job, I would imagine) there are tedious tasks to be taken care of. No matter how you frame it, a spreadsheet is always still a spreadsheet, and an archive is still an archive. But for the most part, I’m loving what I’m doing.

As such, my assigned tasks have required a great deal of creative thought. I’ve been tasked largely with documenting the real estate value added by transit in neighborhoods surrounding transit. The aim of these “added value” assignments is to quantify the impact that TOD has on communities. To supplement this work, I’ve been doing external research with one of my supervisors into the feasibility of using tax increment financing to fund transportation projects in and around the City.

As a discipline, TOD is an integral part of sustainable development, an area toward which I have definitely noticed my interests and career aspirations trending. The internship I’m completing here will no doubt provide me with some of the planning and neighborhood-building skills that I need in order to succeed in my career.