Philadelphia built a mass transit system. Now let people live next to it.

I grew up in the South Bronx, a short walk from the subway. I did not think of that as a privilege at the time, but it was. That train carried me to a good school, to my first job, and to internships across the city. The access I took for granted is exactly what hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians never get, not because the trains are not running, but because we have spent decades making it nearly impossible to build homes next to them.

Bill 260517, now before City Council, begins to undo that. It would rename and expand the city’s public transit zoning restriction from 500 feet to a quarter-mile around the entrances to subway stops, allow a modest number of homes near the train, trim parking requirements, and require new buildings to put shops and offices on the ground floor instead of garage doors.

It is a sensible, overdue reform, and the Council should pass it before the summer recess.

But we should be honest about how small a step it is.

The bill covers just 13 stations, all on the Market-Frankford Line. Most Philadelphians do not live near the El. I think about the family in the Northeast that cannot reach a steady job without a second car. I think about the retiree near Broad Street who cannot easily get to one of our region’s best hospitals. If the zoning change stops there, we will have passed a good policy and confined it to a footprint too small to reach them.

For generations, the neighborhoods cut off from fast, reliable transit have been the same ones cut off from opportunity.

We do not have to guess how that story ends. The Parking Reform Network, which tracks parking rules nationwide, has found that most cities that reform parking limit it to a handful of downtown blocks, blunting nearly all of the benefits, while housing reform lags behind commercial reform. The lesson is not that reform fails. It is that timid reform fails. The cities that get results match the scale of the policy to the scale of the city.

Other states have figured this out. Last October, California enacted SB 79, State Sen. Scott Wiener’s Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, which legalizes mid-rise housing within a half mile of major transit stops across the state’s largest urban counties.

New Jersey’s Transit Village Initiative now includes 37 designated municipalities, with concrete results: since 2020, Newark alone has approved nearly 6,800 housing units, far more than in the entire stretch from 2007 to 2019.

States like Massachusetts, Colorado, and New York have done versions of the same thing. Transit-oriented housing is one of the most consequential planning movements in the country right now, and the Northeast is leading it.

Philadelphia cannot afford to watch from the sidelines, and the stakes here run deeper than zoning. SEPTA is fighting for its financial life as state funding wavers, and every home built near a station adds riders and fare revenue at no cost to taxpayers. Every family that can live near mass transit and skip the cost of a second car keeps more of its paycheck. Building more homes doesn’t only help newcomers; it relieves pressure on the renters already here.

This is, finally, a question of fairness. For generations, the neighborhoods cut off from fast, reliable transit have been the same ones cut off from opportunity. I know what that access made possible in my own life. Withholding it from whole sections of this city should anger us.

So pass Bill 260517 and pass it now.

But do not treat 13 stations as the finish line. Council should follow this bill this fall with station-designation legislation extending the zoning change to the Broad Street Line, Regional Rail, the trolleys, and our busiest bus corridors.

On North Broad, six fast-food drive-thrus sit directly atop subway stops on the Broad Street Line — businesses built for drivers, on land that belongs to riders. That is exactly the land transit-oriented communities are meant to put back to work

Philadelphia spent a century building a public transit system. The least we owe the next generation is the right to live next to it.

Jay Arzu holds a doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a housing organizer with 5th Square Advocacy and the founder of the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway Movement.