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Equilibrium of Single- Family Housing Market Microsimulation of single- family residential land devel- opment for housing- market equilibrium was applied to the City of Austin and its 2-mi extraterritorial jurisdic- tion, assuming a 25% growth in household numbers. (The study area accommodated about 304,800 house- holds in Year 2000. With the projected 25% growth, the number of newly added households was around 76,000 in the whole area.) Both the supply of and demand for homes were modeled explicitly. On the supply side, undeveloped sites with potential for residential development were located by using a Year 2000 land use parcel map obtained from the City of Austinâs Neighborhood Planning and Zoning Depart- ment. Undeveloped parcels over 3,000 ft2 in size (in Year 2000) were considered available for single- family resi- dential development. Due to computational memory constraints (on a standard office PC, with 1 GB of RAM), a 10% random sample was drawn from all 16,750 developable parcels. Figure 1 depicts the study area, the undeveloped parcels, and the 10% sample. The distribution of existing single- family residential parcel sizes in Austin resembled a chi- square distribution, and large, undeveloped parcels were assumed to subdivide according to this distribution. Of course, not all subdi- vided parcels will be occupied by newly added house- holds; only the chosen sites were assumed to be developed into single- family residential land after the housing market reached equilibrium. To simulate home size, a floor- area ratio (FAR) of .25 was used. (As an extension to this work, this global variable is being made more site specific and random.) The newly generated single- family residential sitesâ defined by home size, parcel- specific unit price per interior square foot, and distances to employment sites and shopping centersâ were allocated to individual households based on rent- and utility- maximizing principles. On the demand side, the 7,600 future households con- sisted of five types categorized by annual income levels (on the basis of standard census- class weighted average): $11,000, $28,000, $42,000, $72,000, and $170,000. The new households were assumed to be demographically dis- tributed according to the 2002 American Community Sur- vey. [This survey puts 19.1% in the first (lowest) income bracket, 16.0% in the second, 15.5% in the third, 30.5% in the fourth, and 18.9% in the fifth (highest) bracket.] Corresponding to a 10% random sampling of undevel- oped parcels and a 25% population growth assumption, the numbers of households to be allocated (for each of the five types) were 1,500, 1,200, 1,200, 2,300, and 1,400, 65MICROSIMULATION OF SINGLE- FAMILY RESIDENTIAL LAND USE FIGURE 1 Map of study area showing all undeveloped parcels and 10% sample. TABLE 1 Results for Location Choice Model Explanatory Variable Coefficients t-Statistics Constant 2.59 15.5 Home price divided by household income 0.171 1.71 (Home price divided by household income)2 0.0509 4.04 Total interior square footage (ft2) 0.262 4.46 Euclidean commute distance (mi) 0.0643 7.86 Commute cost ($) 0.0208 4.66 Euclidean distance to the nearest shopping mall (mi) 0.121 6.28 Log-likelihood values Market shares 2293.0 Convergence 2437.8 LRI 0.0594 Number of observations 614a a While the original survey contains 965 records, the number of observations available for analysis here is just 614 due to missing data on workplace location (selected home attributes, such as home price, or both).
