High‐Speed Rail and Spatial Equity: Unpacking the Sustainability Paradox of Land Use and Fiscal Pressure in County‐Level Cities

ABSTRACT Infrastructure‐led development in rapidly urbanizing economies often generates accessibility gains that fail to translate into balanced urban outcomes, particularly when local fiscal institutions redirect those gains toward revenue‐generating land uses. Filling this gap, especially in fiscally constrained county‐level cities where land finance and transport connectivity intersect most directly, remains a critical challenge for sustainable urban development research. This study examines the “sustainability paradox” in 30 county‐level cities within China's Yangtze River Delta (2007–2021), investigating how HSR connectivity and local fiscal pressure jointly shape station‐area land‐use composition. Using a two‐way fixed‐effects panel design within 5 km catchments, the analysis reveals that HSR opening is associated with a significant increase in functional concentration ( β = 0.066, p = 0.023). Crucially, this effect is institutionally conditioned: the concentration increase is statistically absent under low fiscal pressure but strengthens significantly as fiscal stress rises. Interaction models and category‐specific analysis further show that elevated fiscal pressure leads to the crowding out of public‐service land shares, a finding corroborated by repeated cross‐sectional point‐of‐interest (POI) data showing a 5.7 percentage point decline in public service facilities post‐HSR. These results suggest that accessibility dividends are translated into imbalanced urban environments through local fiscal incentives that prioritize revenue‐generating land uses. The study highlights the necessity of targeting the fiscal‐institutional environment to mitigate distributive regressions in infrastructure‐led development.