Putting public housing where transit already reaches

Brazil’s public housing program faced a fundamental challenge: identifying which parcels near transit infrastructure were truly accessible to jobs, schools, and services. Simple distance-based screening — lots within 3 kilometers of a SuperVia station — is insufficient because proximity to a transit stop does not guarantee usable travel time to destinations that matter. Working with ITDP Brazil, we applied their 16-parameter accessibility standard to every parcel in a 240 square-kilometer study area spanning 7 SuperVia stations, evaluating each lot’s access to employment, education, health, and leisure using actual network routing rather than as-the-crow-flies distance.

The scoring revealed stark mismatches between proximity and accessibility. Some parcels nominally close to a station proved to have poor travel times to job centers because of circuitous network routing or unreliable transfer patterns. Conversely, other parcels slightly farther from the station but positioned along direct network corridors scored higher on accessibility parameters, offering residents genuinely faster reach to multiple opportunity clusters.

The model overturned the radius-based heuristic: “near transit” became a precise, measurable concept grounded in actual travel behavior rather than Euclidean distance. This shifted site selection from map-based proximity screening to network-informed rigor, ensuring that public housing investment reached locations where residents could genuinely leverage the transit system’s reach.