Transportation Amenities and Neighborhood Change: A Longitudinal Analysis of Property Listings and Mortgage Application Data

Keywords: residential location choice, residential sorting, transportation, amenities, text-mining
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28

Abstract

Changes in neighborhoods’ socioeconomic and demographic composition is driven by residential location decisions made by households. These decisions are influenced by property characteristics as well as the local amenities associated with that property, subject to individual homebuyers’ budget constraint. However, the bundle of and preferences for different neighborhood amenities changes over time and can lead to intra-urban shifts in residential sorting patterns. In this paper we explore the changing preferences for different transportation amenities over time across neighborhoods in the Charlotte, NC metropolitan area using text from property listings and home mortgage application data. We address questions such as how, where and to whom different transportation infrastructure has been advertised, across neighborhoods and time. First, neighborhoods are classified based on trajectories of who is applying for mortgages in the neighborhoods between 1993 and 2020 in order to capture neighborhood change. Second, using text-mining techniques, we explore how different transportation related amenities has been marketed in public remarks of property listings from the mid-1990s to 2020 across these neighborhood types. This allows us to visualize and analyze how the relationship between different transportation related amenities and residential sorting patterns changed over the past decades. Preliminary findings highlight the suburban and auto-oriented nature of lower-income, minority neighborhoods and the increasing demand for walkable environments among higher-income, white homebuyers in recent years.