Are Residential Land Use Controls and Effective Way to Reach Sustainability for Metropolitan Areas.

摘要

Land use control has the potential to affect societal sustainability in a number of ways. Sustainability may be promoted by increasing density, promoting mixed land use development, improving access to alternative transportation options, and enhancing street connectivity. If land use policies were to work, they need to be based on a prerequisite that appears to have been overlooked in literature to some extent: that is, neighborhoods modified or created through such land use control must first entice people to move in. In other words, households residential location choiceswhether they will indeed move into these neighborhoodsplay an important role in determining the success of these land use controls to reach sustainability. Most of the existing residential location studies assume no prior location influence. In this study, we recognize and quantify the prior location influence, as suggested by both behavioral theories and life course literature. We propose to decompose residential self-selection by understanding its formation process. We take a life course perspective and postulate that locations experienced early in life can have a lasting effect on our locational preferences in life. In other words, what was experienced spatially is a key factor contributing to our residential self-selection and our preferences in residential locations are formed long before the onset of our self-selection. We further hypothesize that the prior location influence is modified by the duration and recency of the prior stay. Using a dataset collected in the New York City Area, we estimated a series of multinomial logit models to test these hypotheses. The results confirm the prior location influence and demonstrate that it precedes residential self-selection and is impacted by its own properties such as duration and recency. Furthermore, the analysis separating child-bearing households from non-child-bearing households shows an interaction between prior location influence and the presence of children. The results suggest that the policies on creating denser neighborhoods to support sustainability face both challenges and opportunities. The finding that what was experienced spatially early in life has an impact on later life may mean that our effort of trying to encourage people to choose higher-density locations may be of limited success, since Americas past is associated with a pursuit for low density. Yet, if we continue to offer socially desirable options to people, over time, preferences toward those options are likely to be developed and maintained. The fact that prior location influence can be either adaptive or variety-seeking may also be used as an advantage for building toward a sustainable future. Even though one may have developed a preference to avoid density in the past, the presence of variety-seeking behavior resulted from prior location influence suggests that this density-avoidance behavior can be reversed.