Understanding the Spatial Effects of Unaffordable Housing Using the Commuting Patterns of Workers in the New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure

Abstract

Commuting behaviour has been intensively examined by geographers, urban planners, and transportation researchers, but little is known about how commuting behaviour is spatially linked with the job and housing markets in urban cities. New Zealand has been recognised as one of the countries having the most unaffordable housing over the past decade. A group of middle-class professionals called ‘key workers’, also known during the pandemic as ‘essential workers’, provide essential services for the community, but cannot afford to live near their workplaces due to a lack of affordable housing. As a result, these key workers incur significant sub-optimal commuting. Such job-housing imbalance has contributed to a so-called spatial mismatch problem. This study aims to visualise the excess commuting patterns of individual workers using the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) from Statistics New Zealand. The visualisation suggests that over the last demi-decade, housing unaffordability has partially distorted the commuting patterns of key workers in Auckland. More of the working population, in particular those key workers, are displaced to the outer rings of the city. While there is an overall reduction in excess commuting across three groups of workers, key workers remain the working population with a disproportionate long excess commute.