The purpose of the proposed research is to examine the determinants of neighborhood choice within a metropolitan area, the "demand for neighborhood" of a cross-section of households. While the subject area has heretofore been considered within the exclusive domain of sociology and demography, the proposed anaylsis will use an economic model, with standard utility functions, budget constraints, and optimization procedure. The model assumes that households pick a neighborhood first and then a housing unit. The cost and availability of housing in different neighborhoods (the "supply-side" of neighborhood) are controlled for, as households examine the varying levels of public school quality, racial mix and other neighborhood goods. Neighborhoods are thus viewed as bundles of attributes, the object of the analysis will be to discover how taste for attributes varies across households stratified by income, family size, race, age, workplace location, and so on. A special 1970 Census tabulation of households in the Cleveland metropolitan area will be used. The unit of neighborhood observation will be the 33 school districts in the Cleveland SMSA. The data will be analyzed, and logits estimated, using both discrete multivariate analysis and the (continuous) conditional logit model. Because school quality and racial mix will both enter the model explicitly, it will be possible to estimate (1) the impact of an educational voucher scheme (free choice among schools, and hence zero school quality differentials for any given neighborhood) on the spatial structure of a city; ( 2) the impact of racial mix in neighborhoods and public schools on white flight; and (3) the trade-off, for different household strata, between public school quality and school racial make-up. The research is in the spirit of recent research on intraurban population distribution funded by NICHD, yet it has policy components as well. Three papers and a possible monograph will be produced.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter