The Role of Employment Subcenters in Residential Location Decisions

In this paper we employ Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, a polycentric city with 10 employment subcenters, as a case study to explore the role of employment subcenters in determining residential location decisions. We estimate discrete choice models of residential location decisions: conditional logit models and heteroscedastic logit models with both the full choice set and sampled choices. We find that access to certain employment subcenters, measured in terms of generalized cost, is an important determinant of households' residential location decisions. The proximity to specific employment subcenters varies across households with different income levels. These patterns can be explained by existing land use and transportation patterns, as well as by subcenters' economic specialization.