Abstract:

Housing cost and commuting cost are two major and interrelated endogenous variables in urban spatial models. Households make trade - off between these two costs when choosing their residential locations, which in turn generate the spatial structure of housing price, construction density and commuting patterns. This paper reviews the theoretical equilibrium relationship between commuting cost and housing cost, discusses the impacts of various factors in real world on such a relationship, and provides some empirical evidence using the data from a special- designed survey in Beijing. We also discuss two implications of the empirical results in our paper for the public policies in urban growth management. One is that commuting cost should be considered together with housing cost when studying urban Households' housing affordability; the other is that the extreme departure of housing and jobs may produce negative outcomes, e.g., the bed - community at city edge, traffic congestion, air pollution, and spatial mismatch problem for disadvantaged population groups.

Key words: bid- rent function, commuting cost, housing cost, residential location choice