Residential Location and Household Expenditures on Transport and Housing: The Example of the Greater Paris Region

This paper describes how household car ownership and use are strongly influenced by residential location. Inversely, transport-related motivations like travel time take part in the choice of the place of residence. This paper examines how this interaction “translates” in terms of budget shares devoted to these two items by households of the Greater Paris region. The results raise doubts about the effectiveness of a trade-off between transport costs and housing costs, at least in the case of low-income households. Indeed, the budget share of housing is roughly the same irrespective of the zone of residence, because of the control exerted by lessors and banks to ensure the solvency of their customers. However, the share of transport is higher the further a household lives from the city-center. Despite decreases of fuel prices, the dynamism of motorization of low-income households living in the periphery causes the share of their budget that they devote to car use to be maintained over time, whereas it decreases for rich households. In other respects, as one moves away from the center, household size, accommodation surface per person and home-buying households’ proportion increase whereas living standards fall. Moreover, the proportion of low-income households living in the city-center decreased whereas that of those living in the suburbs increased. Thus, high housing prices and insufficiency of low-cost accommodation in the center force low-income households to locate in the periphery to have a dwelling suited to their size, particularly when they want to acquire their homes. This peripheral location involves high car expenditures, thus endangering their financial condition, particularly their ability to repay their loans.

• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Berri, Akli
• Conference:
  • 11th World Conference on Transport Research
  • Location: Berkeley CA, United States
  • Date: 2007-6-24 to 2007-6-28
• Publication Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 57p
• Monograph Title: 11th World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automobile ownership; Budgeting; Expenditures; Financial analysis; Households; Low income groups; Residential location; Travel time
• Geographic Terms: Paris Metropolitan Area
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01124291
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 18 2009 1:32PM