Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
cf. Clark and Withers 1999 ). This research points to the importance of incomplete
information and bounded rationality of decision making in intraurban migration,
as much of the work on the first two components of housing condition and
utility assumes that households have complete information during the housing
search and will go to any lengths to find the optimal home. Instead, research on
search and perception highlights how housing search is often bounded in space
and time, whether by homebuyers' greater knowledge of and comfort with local
neighborhoods, bounds on how much time households (or their real estate agents)
can devote to the housing search, or a willingness to settle for a new house that is
good enough instead of being perfect.
The importance of spatial distance between current and potential housing is a
unifying theme in much work on housing search, along with direction to a lesser
extent. Most of this research relies on the theoretical antecedent of intervening
opportunity theory, developed by Stouffer ( 1940 ) to describe the relationship
between housing opportunities and moving distances within a metropolitan area.
Assuming the quantity of vacant housing units is proportional to the distance from
a household's current dwelling, Stouffer posited that the number of households that
move a given distance has a logarithmic relationship with the housing opportunities
located within that distance because people are likely to choose a vacancy near their
current dwelling. The related exponential distribution of moving distances has been
validated by empirical research on various metropolitan areas (Clark and Burt 1980 ;
Clark et al. 2003 ; Quigley and Weinberg 1977 ). The basic form of this negative
exponential distribution of move distances is
f.d/ D e d ;
>0and d>0
(6.1)
where f ( d ) is the probability of a household relocating by distance of d and is
a shape parameter. Mathematically, is the reciprocal of average d ,orinother
words 1/ is the average move distance. The intervening opportunities model was
extended to the case of interurban migration and evolved into the influential gravity
model and related family of spatial interaction models (Guldmann 1999 ; Jayet 1990 ;
Fotheringham 1983 ; Cochrane 1975 ; Ruiter 1967 ; Erlander 2010 ). Regardless of
variant or degree of sophistication, these models retain at their heart a focus on
logarithmic or exponential distance decay in space.
The direction people move is an important consideration alongside distance.
Adams ( 1969 ) argued that spatial search and residential locational behavior are
based on a limited mental map or image of the city. Importantly, this image is
sectoral in that it comprises a wedge-shaped region centered on the work-home
axis. While Adams took the central city is a proxy for work location, the theory
was validated using specific workplace data as well (Clark and Burt 1980 ;Clark
et al. 2003 ). Move directions can be modeled as a von Mises distribution (Gaile and
Burt 1980 ), which is the counterpart of the normal distribution for directional data
spanning 0-360 ı , with a density function of
f x LJ LJ LJ ;
e cos.x/
2I 0 ./
D
(6.2)
Search WWH ::




Custom Search