Foothill Goldline Attracts $6B in Private Investment

The Foothill Gold Line extension stretches from East Pasadena to Montclair.

LOS ANGELES—The Foothill Gold Line has attracted billions of dollars in private investment, according to a new report entitled Foothill Gold Line Transit Oriented Development Update, from the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority and complied by Beacon Economics and the Maxima Group. The report shows that since 2003, when the passenger service first opened for service, transit-oriented development projects along the 18-station corridor have resulted in $6.7 billion in private investment and has created more than 70,000 jobs and $50 million in tax revenue.

“The Foothill Gold Line is being built along a historic freight corridor that was originally built to service the citrus industry,” Lisa Levy Buch, director of public affairs, at the Foothill Gold Line Transit Authority, tells GlobeSt.com. “Land uses along the route were therefore industrial in nature. Those industrial uses are shifting to higher and better uses of the land, [including] housing, shopping and office space, because the corridor is transitioning to passenger light rail. We knew we had a tremendous opportunity to accommodate growth along this corridor and this study demonstrates that even during one of the worst economic downturns in our region’s history, the corridor saw such a significant amount of investment. It is gratifying to see that already $6.7 billion of private investment has been put into this corridor and now thousands of new homes and hundreds of thousands of square feet of office and institutional space has been created within half a mile of one of the Gold Line stations.”