THESIS
2023
1 online resource (xvi, 162 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color), color maps
Abstract
Integrated land use and transport planning is critical for community development and
metropolitan planning. The planning process creates an opportunity for policy-makers, property
developers, transit operators, and various stakeholders to shape the city form for a shared vision.
For metropolitan cities undergoing a rapid population growth but with limited space, the
primary issue is how to efficiently allocate the land and public goods in space to cater for
housing and activity demand. A common way is to centralize the employments in urban areas,
as it facilitates the interchange of innovative ideas and creates an increasing return to scale,
hence contributing to the economic growth and often referred to as economies of agglomeration.
Under this allocation, the well-educated intellectua...[
Read more ]
Integrated land use and transport planning is critical for community development and
metropolitan planning. The planning process creates an opportunity for policy-makers, property
developers, transit operators, and various stakeholders to shape the city form for a shared vision.
For metropolitan cities undergoing a rapid population growth but with limited space, the
primary issue is how to efficiently allocate the land and public goods in space to cater for
housing and activity demand. A common way is to centralize the employments in urban areas,
as it facilitates the interchange of innovative ideas and creates an increasing return to scale,
hence contributing to the economic growth and often referred to as economies of agglomeration.
Under this allocation, the well-educated intellectuals with higher-paid urban jobs outbid the
low-income workers for private flats in urban locations, which gives rise to residential income
segregation and unequal distribution of public goods. As witnessed in many metropolitan areas,
the high-performing public schools aggregate in convenient urban locations with an exorbitant
property price. Under the prevalent neighborhood assignment rule, the unequal distribution of
high-performing public schools creates unequal access to high-quality educational resources,
especially for children from low-income families in suburban areas. As majority land in urban
areas has been allocated to business development and auctioned by profit-seeking developers
for higher economic returns, most public housing units are allocated to suburban areas. The
public housing-led new town exacerbates the spatial mismatch between centrally located well-paid
jobs, high-performing public schools and remotely resided public housing tenants, which
hinders the educational achievement of public housing kids and makes them less competitive
in the job market. This might form a vicious cycle of unemployment, substandard education
and concentrated poverty for public housing tenants at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
In order to alleviate these unintended social issues, scholars have suggested to reallocate
the resources throughout space. For instance, job dispersion is proposed to increase the job
accessibility for suburban residents and alleviate the traffic burden caused by tidal flows under the monocentric urban structure with centralized employments. Apart from jobs, the quality
school dispersion scheme and school choice program have been promoted in hundreds of
Chinese cities to bring more high-quality public school places to kids from low-income families
in suburban areas. Also, the conversion of urban private housing sites for public housing has
been adopted in numerous megacities to increase the job and quality school access for public
housing kids. Albeit these resource reallocation schemes have been witnessed to effectively
mitigate those negative externalities, they might engender other social issues. For example, the
spread-out employments are witnessed to surge the property prices in the neighborhoods of new
employment centers, which makes the private flats less affordable for renters. The quality
school dispersion and school choice programs also increase the prices for dwellings near
inferior school districts, hence diminishing the disposable incomes of the renters there; some of
them do not have a child who requires schooling. Similarly, the public housing program in
urban areas exacerbates the urban land shortage for private properties, where real estate
developers condense the urban developments with more micro-flats provided in urban areas,
which deteriorates the living space for private flat residents. To date, there is a lack of theoretical
models in urban economics to analyze the impact of spatial distributions of public resources on
the housing market or sketch the intricate interplay between several stakeholders (e.g.,
developers, consumers, urban planners) under distinct resource allocations. This thesis aims to
fulfill this gap.
This thesis addresses the spatial distribution of three types of public resources, namely
public housing, public school and employment center. By extending the stochastic bid-rent
framework, the profit-seeking real estate developers' supply decisions under distinct spatial
distributions of different types of resources are analytically derived and validated through
simulations in a realistic network in Hong Kong. The residential location choices of
heterogeneous households with different compositions and expectations on various types of
resources are also simulated. The results indicated that, except for employment centers, the
spatial disparity in other types of public goods (public school, public housing) is beneficial to
real estate developers. Dispersion of these resources throughout the space attenuates the
housing premium associated with these resources. Hence, profit-seeking developers have no
incentives to alter but rather perpetuate or even exacerbate the spatial disparity through their
supply decisions to reap a higher profit. Counterintuitively, the status quo returns the highest
consumer surplus for all private housing residents, albeit there is evident inequality in public
resources access.
Post a Comment