Low-wage jobs-housing fit: identifying locations of affordable housing shortages

ABSTRACT

Finding the right jobs-housing balance has long been an important concern for urban planners. More recently, attention has turned to jobs-housing fit – the extent to which housing price is well matched to local job quality. Prior analyses have been constrained by a lack of local data on job quality, making it difficult to identify the geography and scale of the problem. We introduce a new methodology for calculating the low-wage jobs-housing fit at both a jurisdiction and neighborhood scale that was designed in collaboration with affordable housing advocates and has been directly applied in urban planning and affordable housing policy efforts. Low-wage fit is particularly important because of ongoing difficulties with affordable housing provision and the disproportionate benefits of reducing transportation costs for low-income earners. We use the calculated metric at both a city and neighborhood scale to identify what can be learned from a low-wage jobs-housing fit metric that is not evident in traditional measures of jobs-housing balance. In contrast to jobs-housing balance, the low-wage fit analysis clearly highlights those jurisdictions and neighborhoods where there is a substantial shortage of affordable housing in relation to the number of low-wage jobs. Because of the geographic coverage of the data sources used, the results can be widely applied across the United States by affordable housing advocates, land-use planners, and policy makers.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordable housing
• jobs-housing balance
• jobs-housing fit
• regional planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For comparison, the Federal poverty levels in 2011 for an individual, a family of two, and a family of four were $10,890, $14,710, and $22,350, respectively.

2. See Appendix 1 for a discussion of the associated margins of error (MOEs).

3. See: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/home/homelimits.html.

4. Based on total number of jobs from the LEHD data, and total number of housing units from the ACS.

5. In the 9-County Area in 2011, the Employment Development Department estimates there were a total of 3,194,200 jobs, and the Decennial census identified 2,070,458 households with householders under the age of 65.

6. For San Francisco County in 2011, for example, the California Department of Housing and Community Development considered $48,100 to be low-income for the purposes of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) programs, and $76,950 to be low-income for the purposes of the HOME Investment Partnerships Program. See http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/home/homelimits.html.

7. See http://locationaffordability.info/.

8. For details, see Appendix 3 of US Census Bureau (2008).

9. This value is calculated for each of the 50 states separately. Details of this methodology are described in chapter 12 of American Community Survey Design and Methodology (Washington, DC: UC Census) available here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/methodology_main/.