Of Tracks and Trails: How Accessible Green Spaces Change Housing Markets and Neighborhoods
Michelle Li will discuss this research in a webinar on Friday, March 27, 2026 at 12:15 pm ET.
Since the 1960s, more than 26,000 miles of abandoned rail lines in the US have been converted into multi-use trails, with another 9,000 miles in development. Previous research indicates that access to greener environments, such as rail trails, is associated with better health and social outcomes. However, relatively few studies have analyzed the impacts of rail trails on housing markets and neighborhood demographics at scale.
In a new working paper, I aim to fill this gap. I combine rail and trail data with US Census data from 1970 to 2020 and focus on two sets of outcomes: housing markets (home values and housing supply) and the demographic characteristics of neighborhoods near those trails. I find that both in the Boston metro area and nationally, rail trails are catalysts for urban revitalization, setting in motion long-term changes in the neighborhoods in which they are located.
In the first part of my paper, I focus on Greater Boston, a region with an extensive and growing network of rail trails. I identify neighborhoods where new trails were created and document when the local trail segment opened. I then track the decade-by-decade changes in the neighborhoods’ characteristics after a trail opened.
I find that the housing market responds immediately and persistently to the creation of new rail trails. Within the first decade of a trail opening, median home values increased by 7 percent relative to homes in otherwise similar areas without a rail trail, and by the third decade were 23 percent higher.
The neighborhoods' characteristics also changed in notable ways. College-educated individuals appear to be among the first to move in, with increases beginning in the first decade and growing in later decades. Those early changes triggered additional changes. While household incomes did not change significantly immediately after trails opened, they rose substantially in later decades. In addition, the rate of housing supply growth gradually slowed in neighborhoods with rail trails compared to neighborhoods without rail trails. Finally, I did not find clear evidence of changes in the racial composition of neighborhoods. Taken together, these results suggest that rail trails catalyze long-term neighborhood change, with later effects reflecting not only the impact of a new rail trail but also the broader neighborhood dynamics set in motion by the creation of a trail.
To assess whether these dynamics extend beyond Boston, I conduct a second analysis for the contiguous US. I find that neighborhoods that gained a rail trail between 1970 and 2020 saw substantially more growth in both home values and in the supply of new housing (as compared to otherwise similar, non-trail neighborhoods). In addition, both median household incomes and the share of college-educated adults increased faster in places with rail trails. Moreover, while the share of people who are white declined, it did so at a slower rate than in similar non-rail trail neighborhoods.
Overall, the national results align with Boston on the core story: rail trails are valuable amenities, and rail trail neighborhoods tend to attract more educated and higher-income residents over time, but the patterns differ for both housing supply and racial composition. These differences suggest that the neighborhood impacts of trails depend in part on local context. Trail-driven demand may have regionally different effects on housing construction, and the downstream demographic effects also may be different.
This study has broader policy implications. Many jurisdictions now promote green space investments as dual-purpose strategies for climate resilience and community revitalization. My findings suggest the takeaway depends on the policy goal. If the goal is to expand lower-income residents’ access to green spaces, then rail trails may not reliably achieve that goal in the long run, because the people living near the trail decades later may be considerably wealthier than the ones who lived nearby when the trail was built. If the objective is neighborhood revitalization and increasing homeowner wealth in disinvested areas, however, rail trails appear to be a potentially powerful tool. In short, rail trails can deliver real benefits, but the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed. For practitioners, the key question is not only whether to build trails, but also whether and how to pair them with policies that help existing residents stay to share in the new trail’s benefits.
