Measuring Accessibility of Housing to Public–community Facilities Using Geographical Information Systems

This paper examines housing accessibility to public–community facilities (PCFs) using geographical information systems (GIS) for four county–wide metropolitan areas in North Carolina with population ranging from 90,000 to 700,000. An optimization–based assignment model is developed and implemented in ArcView GIS. Rather than using the conventional and less accurate traffic analysis zone (TAZ) or census geography, this research uses detailed county–wide building and parcel databases to estimate direct distances, hence accessibility, from homes (i.e., apartment, manufactured home, and single–family house) to PCF (i.e., office, shopping center, school). The results indicate that distinct housing accessibility patterns exist. In general, multi–family housing such as apartment and townhouse enjoys higher accessibility to positive (desirable) PCFs, followed by single–family detached housing. Manufactured housing has been placed further away from most positive PCFs, but closer to some negative (undesirable) ones.