Keywords
intraurban migration, agent-based modelling, housing locational decisions
Start Date
1-7-2010 12:00 AM
Abstract
Intraurban migration defines many neighbourhood dynamics and consequentlyimpacts land use patterns in the long term. Housing location decision-making is a complexprocess involving many features of the housing market that interact with the perceptions ofhome searchers. Although modellers have paid much attention to the prices and utilities ofthe environmental, ecological, and public services associated with housing, the housingsearch process is neglected in many agent-based land use models involving urban housingmarket. The challenge of incorporating housing search partially lies in the prohibitive costof identifying, recording, and quantifying housing search activities at a large scale. Thispaper presents an agent-based model of intraurban migration featuring straightforward yetempirically accurate rules for housing search. Drawing on intervening opportunity andintraurban migration theories, this model is specified and calibrated using real-worldhousing vacancies and relocation origin-destination pairs extracted from parcel recordsavailable in the Twin Cities for 2005 to 2007. Multiple validation methods, including innermigration rates, Syrjala tests, and minimum spanning tree comparisons, show that thesearch rules based on housing vacancy distribution and negative exponential distance-decayprobability can satisfactorily simulate the pattern of the housing search and locationalchoices made by homeowners in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
An Agent-based Model of Housing Search and Intraurban Migration in the Twin Cities of Minnesota
Intraurban migration defines many neighbourhood dynamics and consequentlyimpacts land use patterns in the long term. Housing location decision-making is a complexprocess involving many features of the housing market that interact with the perceptions ofhome searchers. Although modellers have paid much attention to the prices and utilities ofthe environmental, ecological, and public services associated with housing, the housingsearch process is neglected in many agent-based land use models involving urban housingmarket. The challenge of incorporating housing search partially lies in the prohibitive costof identifying, recording, and quantifying housing search activities at a large scale. Thispaper presents an agent-based model of intraurban migration featuring straightforward yetempirically accurate rules for housing search. Drawing on intervening opportunity andintraurban migration theories, this model is specified and calibrated using real-worldhousing vacancies and relocation origin-destination pairs extracted from parcel recordsavailable in the Twin Cities for 2005 to 2007. Multiple validation methods, including innermigration rates, Syrjala tests, and minimum spanning tree comparisons, show that thesearch rules based on housing vacancy distribution and negative exponential distance-decayprobability can satisfactorily simulate the pattern of the housing search and locationalchoices made by homeowners in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
