Envisioning Neighborhood Futures After the Chinatown Stitch
Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown was split by the construction of the Vine Street Expressway and Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS) is spearheading the Chinatown Stitch, a cap over the highway that will reconnect the neighborhood and provide safer streets and green space. The purpose of our study is to help OTIS understand and help inform current residents about possible changes in the housing market of the Chinatown neighborhood after the implementation of the Chinatown Stitch project by examining three alternate futures. We first explored the effects of highways on sales prices in Philadelphia and the study region, and found that highway effects are not as clear cut as expected. After some more exploratory analyses, we estimated property prices using three a random forest model under three different future scenarios: Scenario 0 - business as usual without the implementation of the Chinatown Stitch; Scenario 1 - implementation of the Chinatown Stitch (treating it as a park and changing distance to highway), and Scenario 2 - an alternative future in which the Chinatown Stitch significantly pushing for more commercial and multifamily housing investment in the study region. We found that the implementation of the Chinatown Stitch alone increases the median property price of the region by about $100,000 and Scenario 2 further increases median property price by 10% from Scenario 1, pointing to the fact that there need to be preventative measures such as protection of affordable housing for the most vulnerable residents of this community.
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