MAKING DO: How Working Families in Seven U.S. Metropolitan Areas Trade Off Housing Costs and Commuting Times

This report explores how working families in seven major metropolitan regions (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas–Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Baltimore–Washington) tradeoff housing and commuting costs, and how their tradeoffs differ from those of wealthier families. It is organized into five sections. Beyond this brief introduction, the report consists of five parts. Section 2 introduces the PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample) database, upon which this analysis is based, and presents the procedures used to identify the seven case study metropolitan regions. Section 3 presents a series of descriptive statistics comparing the housing and transportation choices confronting different types of working families in each of the seven case study metropolitan regions. Section 4 develops a series of statistical “bid- rent” models to contrast the housing and transportation tradeoffs made by working families versus upper-income families. Section 5 looks at the tradeoff issue through the lens of residential location to examine the types of neighborhoods favored by working families. Section 6 summarizes the research results and explores their implications for public policy.