Reconciling household residential location choice and neighbourhood dynamics. Under revision

The choice of residential location by individual households determines many aspects of the quality of the social, economic and physical environment experienced by its members, and there are well-documented adverse effects of living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor and racial minorities. We seek to analyze the processes of household choice of resi-dential location, and the neighborhood dynamics that emerge from these individual choices. Unfortunately, analysis of this choice process is complicated by the endogeneity of neigh-borhood social composition, housing prices, housing supply, and even of the spatial pattern of access to employment. This paper describes an effort to gain new analytical insights into the relationships between individual household choices and emergent outcomes by developing disaggregate discrete choice models and linking them in an agent-based simulation system. The framework is developed and applied to data from the Seattle metropolitan area, using a new open-source simulation platform and incorporating endogenous processes of residential location, housing supply, prices, job location, and travel. 1