Jobs-Housing Fit

Jobs-Housing Fit is a proposed measure for how well the available housing in some area (eg municipality) matches the jobs in that area -- particularly, to what extent the housing available is affordable to people with those jobs.

It is a refinement or supplement to the earlier measure Jobs-Housing Balance, and was developed by researchers led by Chris Benner. 

 

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

Chris Benner & Alex Karner (2016): Low-wage jobs-housing fit: identifying locations of affordable housing shortages, Urban Geography, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2015.1112565

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1112565 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_E90AYG2sPDMU1jZmt4amc5QWs

ABSTRACT

Finding the right jobs-housing balancehas 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