Job-Housing Mismatch: An Affinity Model of Worker-Job Matching

Project summary:

Travel surveys based on one percent of the population are traditionally used to understand travel behavior. Recently, much more complete data has become available to researchers and policymakers, allowing them to better understand job/housing mismatch in a region. The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, available from the Minnesota Department of Labor, includes residence and employment location information for each employed individual in the Twin Cities metropolitan area (excluding self-employed and selected sales personnel). Using these data, as well as data from other sources, this project analyzed the relationship between people's choices of residence relative to their employment locations in the Twin Cities region. This project extended travel behavior research to help understand the characteristics of people's choices of residence relative to their employment locations. The central research hypothesis was that although travel time and income are important factors in where people live and work, other factors may help shape the commuting patterns observed in metropolitan areas. Certain residential neighborhoods produce more workers for a given employment district and in a given industrial classification than can be explained by travel time and income alone. By better identifying the causal factors in travel location, travel demand modelers, transportation planners, and engineers are better able to address job/housing mismatches and imbalances between demand skills and worker skill sets.