Good housing depends on good transportation. It sounds obvious, maybe too obvious to even say. But the relationship between transportation policy and housing policy in our cities is anything but harmonious.

Transportation policy tends to focus on available vehicles, their technical requirements, and the routes they can cover, along with the speeds and capacities of each technology. Housing policy, meanwhile, usually has a single goal in mind: build more housing, regardless of where it goes or how well it connects to the networks that move goods and services.

That was the starting point for a session we organized at the World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan: "No Good Housing Without Good Transportation: Approaching the Connection Between Urban Mobility and the Housing Crisis." The panel showcased the diversity of the Clean Mobility Collective network, bringing together Golda Hilario (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, Philippines), Rodrigo Faria Iacovini (Instituto Pólis, Brazil), Danielle Holanda (National Urban Mobility Plan, Brazil), Sarika Panda Bhatt (Raahgiri Foundation, India), and Larissa Menescal (ISOCARP).

Bringing together government officials and civil society around this topic made one thing clear fairly quickly: policies that try to connect transportation and housing are missing something essential. They're forgetting who the housing is actually for.

I'm talking specifically about Transit-Oriented Development, or TOD: a planning concept built on the idea that the highest housing densities in a city should sit around public transit corridors, especially stations. It's a simple idea that answers real needs. It helps limit unchecked urban sprawl, which is expensive for public budgets. It ensures public transit has enough ridership along its routes. And it encourages mixed-use development that takes advantage of the flow of people moving through transit hubs, turning a city into more than just a place to sleep.

TOD isn't a niche idea. It's one of the most widely adopted urban planning concepts in the world today. National and local governments across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa have folded it into their urban policies over the past three decades, and institutions like the World Bank and UN-Habitat actively promote it as best practice. In other words, it's close to a universal technical consensus on how a city should grow.

But that consensus hasn't solved the underlying problem. Urban planners, think tanks, and housing organizations have spent years documenting the same tension: TOD tends to be designed and evaluated through a lens that's almost purely about real estate and transit efficiency, without ever asking who's actually going to live there. When density goes up around a station with no mechanisms to protect affordability, land values typically rise fast, and the original residents of the neighborhood (often the very people who rely most on public transit) end up pushed out to areas farther away and worse connected. The result is a well-known paradox that still hasn't been solved: housing gets built right next to public transit, for the people who need it least.

From this dialogue, a few tactical ideas emerged for making TOD live up to its promise.

First, mobility can't be reduced to the commute between home and work. What's often called "care mobility", the school runs, the trips to medical appointments, the errands that keep support networks running, falls disproportionately on women and creates multiple, fragmented trips throughout the day that traditional transportation policy simply doesn't account for.

Second, preventing forced evictions and displacement is, in itself, a mobility policy. When a family is pushed to the periphery, they don't just lose their home. They lose proximity to jobs, services, and community networks built over years, and gain transportation costs and travel times they didn't have before.

Third, land value capture mechanisms need to be paired with explicit affordability requirements, not treated as a separate step. When public investment in transit raises land values around a station, that increase should be captured and reinvested, through tools like value capture financing, inclusionary zoning, or land banking, specifically to fund and protect social housing in the same area. Without that pairing, land value capture becomes just another driver of the displacement it should be preventing. The underlying question, in Baku and in any city, is who actually gets to stay close to the infrastructure everyone paid for.

In the end, this is what stands out: the quality of housing can't be measured only by the characteristics of the unit itself. Access to the city depends on mobility conditions and on where people's homes sit within it. Treating these as separate agendas produces incomplete policy, one that can't address the urban inequality it claims to be solving.

But the real challenge starts now. Housing and mobility can't keep being designed separately, and doing it right means listening to the people who use the streets and public transit every day, not just the people who plan them. At Clean Mobility Collective, we keep pushing for that conversation. If you're working on something that connects transportation, housing, and urban justice, or you just want to keep this conversation going, reach out and join the network.

Andrés Linares, Latin America Coordinator at CMC & Clareana Cunha, Community Mobilizar at Instituto Pólis