Evaluating inclusive transit-oriented development with location affordability and its influencing factors

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is broadly hailed as a key strategy for promoting affordable and inclusive urban growth. Yet, housing and transportation unaffordability continues to pose significant challenges to social inclusion in TOD. Prior approaches often overlook the affordability dimension and rarely prioritize inclusion, despite it being a fundamental goal. This study introduces a novel inclusive TOD (iTOD) framework that explicitly integrates affordability into performance assessment. Combining open and big data with official statistics, we measure citywide location affordability indices for two prominent social groups—homebuyers and renters—and incorporate them into an inclusivity evaluation of 302 TOD sites in Shenzhen, China. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, we find that even generally well-developed sites often underperform in terms of inclusivity, with mean iTOD scores only ranging from 0.22 to 0.71 (out of 1)—indicating large potential for improvement. Clustering analysis identifies 20.5% of sites as considerably low-performing iTOD. Spatial regression reveals workforce housing availability as a determinant of inclusivity in some contexts. The findings underscore the need to incorporate affordability and inclusionary housing provision into TOD planning to systematically reflect transit investment effectiveness, ultimately aligning it with equitable urban development. These results offer actionable guidance for integrating affordable housing with high-capacity transit, enabling policymakers to target low-performing sites and advance equitable urban development.