Urban spatial structure, housing markets, and resilience to natural hazards

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays on urban structure, housing, and environment. The first paper contributes to the existing debate on the co-location hypothesis by devising a proximity measure and controlling for a set of other urban form measures. Multiple regression analysis revealed that job-worker proximity leads to shorter commuting time. In addition, results from subareas suggested that the impact of job-worker imbalance and the impact of job-worker mismatch on the commuting time are both greater in the suburb in comparison with the city center. The second paper examines the impact of the LIHTC construction on nearby housing prices in the Boston metropolitan area by using the AITS-DID method. The paper found that the price gap between the LIHTC micro-neighborhood and the area beyond is reduced by approximately 16.5 percent points after the LIHTC construction. The segmentation of the analysis by sub-region showed spatially heterogeneous results. The findings from this research are contrary to the conventional perception that subsidized housing developments lead to neighborhood decline persistently. Measuring resilience to natural hazards is a central issue in the hazard mitigation sciences. The third paper applied a confirmatory factor methodology to operationalize the biophysical, built environment, and socioeconomic resilience dimensions for local jurisdictions in large urban metropolitan areas in South Korea. The factor covariances showed a trade-off relationship between natural infrastructure and human activities. Densely developed and affluent urban areas tend to lack biophysical resilience. Some local governments, sorted into the same groups, turn out to be located in different metropolitan areas. The spatial variation and inequality in the resilience dimensions suggest the necessity of integrated and flexible governance for sustainable hazard mitigation.