Evaluating Measures of Job-Housing Proximity: Boston and Atlanta

This paper describes how balanced growth has been a major policy component of the smart growth initiative. Increased congestion, particularly in suburban areas, has been linked to numerical imbalances and qualitative mismatches between jobs and housing. Balanced growth that improves job-housing proximity (that is, the spatial proximity between workplace and residence) is believed to have the potential for reducing commuting time and distance. This paper hypothesizes that different selection of job-housing proximity measures can bring about a different quantitative relationship between job-housing proximity and commuting. Existing studies of commuting length in American metropolitan areas have mainly used three categories of measures of job-housing proximity. They are: (1) the ratio of jobs to employed residents (JER); (2) job or labor accessibility; and (3) minimum required commuting (MRC). Although existing studies have justification of why a particular category of measure or a particular format is preferred, none of them have presented comparative empirical evaluation of different measures. In order to address this, this paper offers a qualitative assessment and empirical examination of the three categories of measures, revealing their possible weakness regarding their ability to relate job-housing distribution to commuting.