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Rents rose fastest in the study area, so the paper concludes that the transit investment drove displacement. The study area is the six census tracts around the stations. Two of them contained the only large development sites in the borough, one was half student housing, and the tract where most of the displaced households actually moved to sits just outside the line somebody drew on a map before the analysis began.

We edit what urban researchers write — neighbourhood change and gentrification studies, housing and planning research, transport and mobility analyses, urban policy evaluations, qualitative and ethnographic urban work, comparative city studies, reports for local authorities and civic organisations, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the study area boundary and what it includes.

The boundary of a study area is an analytical decision that shapes every result, and the failure is an area defined by convenience and treated as though it were given by the city. Cities do not have edges where the data does. We work through these so the boundary is defined with the rule that produced it and the alternatives considered, since a radius, a set of administrative units and a travel-time catchment give different areas and different answers; so the sensitivity of the result to the boundary is tested and reported, because a finding that disappears when the area is drawn 200 metres wider is a finding about the drawing; so the areas immediately outside are examined, given that displacement, spillover and substitution show up next door and an inside-only design cannot see them; so administrative units are described in terms of what they actually contain rather than assumed homogeneous, as a tract with a large institution or a single development in it behaves differently; so change within the area is separated from change in its composition, since a neighbourhood mean can rise while every household in it gets poorer; so the time boundary is justified alongside the spatial one; and so the conclusion names the area as it was defined. Studies written this way inform decisions that get made about real places.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, community research and reports for local bodies. We are editors rather than urban researchers or planners, and we offer no view on neighbourhood change, policy or development. What we can do is make the boundary and its consequences explicit.