University of Cambridge

Department of Land Economy

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis

This work has been concerned with identifying and evaluating the attributes of housing which influence the households choice of location. The work may be divided into three parts. Firstly, a part which examines the existing literature on residential location theory with a view to ascer taining its suitability or otherwise as a basis for an empirical analysis of household location preferences. The view is taken (Chapter 1) that existing theory does not sufficiently accommodate environmental and neighbourhood amenity characteristics of residential locations, within a framework suitable for deriving testable hypotheses concerning their relevance. The second part of the work presents a theoretical model of residential preference determination which incorporates a consideration of both environmental and accessibility features of residential locations (Chapter 2). The emphasis is not however on the theoretical structure of the model which is seen under appropriate conditions to be no more than a traditional utility maximizing problem devoid of any general spatial interest. Rather the interest is with the need to provide an operational framework for calibrating the parameters of a general function relating renta11 payments to both amenity and accessibility in the context of their particular spatial distribution for a specific case. An econometric and statistical procedure sufficient to accomplish such a parameterization is illustrated, along with a description of the data used in the empirical analysis, (Chapters 3 and 4). The third part of the work presents the results of the analysis and is divided into two parts. One part, Chapter 5, identifying and evaluating the residential characteristics, and examining household socio-economic relationships with residential commodities, the other, Chapter 6" suggesting, the relevance of the methods developed for an approach to environmental appraisal. An Appendix A describes, in greater detail than Chapter 3, the data and the sample. An extended Analysis of the results of a social survey, in addition, to the results of Chapter 5 is included. An Appendix B illustrates the questionnaires and .data forms used in the data collection. The work is perhaps characterised firstly by the concern with residential environment and its measurement at a microeconomic level. This approach required a concentration upon one urban area and data of specific house purchases, the socio-economic characteristics of households concerned and of the amenity and accessibility features of each location. Secondly, the work is characterised by the attempt to measure Engelts 1. Throughout this work "rental payments 11 refer to the prices paid by households for their house. functions for the residential commodity bundle , for while other attempts to measure amenity have been made no attempt to identify expenditure functions a t such a level of disaggregation is known to the author.