Nearby public transportation boosts property values, and increasingly cities are asking developers to help fund transit improvements that will benefit their projects, according to a report by the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The most successful “value-capture” policies — by which government agencies recover infrastructure costs through special taxes or voluntary payments from developers — result from bringing developers and taxing bodies together during the earliest stages of transportation planning, the researchers found. The research team examined various value-capture methods used in four cities operating some of the largest and oldest transit systems in the nation, with the greatest backlogs of unfunded capital needs.
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