An L.A. story: The impact of housing costs on commuting

Abstract

The empirical impact of housing costs on commuting is still relatively poorly understood. This impact is especially salient in California given the state's notoriously high housing costs, which have forced many lower- and middle-class households to move inland in search of affordable housing at the cost of longer commutes. To investigate this linkage, we relied on Generalized Structural Equation Modeling and analyzed 2012 CHTS data for Los Angeles County – the most populous county in the U.S. Our model, which jointly explains commuting distance and time, accounts for residential self-selection and car use endogeneity, while controlling for household characteristics and land use around residences and workplaces. We find that households who can afford more expensive neighborhoods have shorter commute distances (−2.3% and − 3.1% per additional $100 k to median home values around workplaces and residences respectively). Job density, distance to the CBD, and land-use diversity around workplaces have a relatively greater impact on commuting than the corresponding variables around commuters' residences. Compared to non-Hispanics, Hispanic workers commute longer distances (+3.5%), and so do African American (+5.1%) and Asian (+2.0%) workers compared to Caucasians, while college educated workers have shorter (−2.6% to −3.6%) commutes. Furthermore, commuters in the top income brackets tend to have faster commutes than lower income workers. Finally, women's commutes are ~41% shorter than men's, possibly because they are balancing work with domestic responsibilities. Better understanding the determinants of commuting is critical to inform housing and transportation policy, improve the health of commuters, reduce air pollution, and achieve climate goals.