The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.
Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.
Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem?wprov=sft...
In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.
The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.
There are malls and neighborhoods built entirely around the subway station
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/value_capture/defined/tax_incre...
If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.
The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.
Like through taxes on the sale of the property or the increased business income it produces? The public will.
That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
As a silly dystopia, imagine that a transit agency could grab revenue as you suggest it might. Then everything becomes a transit land grab.