UC Irvine

Southern California’s rapid urbanization and persistent housing constraints have intensified the spatial mismatch between residential locations and employment centers, contributing to long-distance commuting, congestion, and reduced quality of life for many workers. Employment opportunities remain concentrated in high-cost coastal and central job hubs, while housing affordability pressures continue to displace households toward inland and peripheral regions. These dynamics have produced some of the longest and most burdensome commute patterns in the United States, with significant implications for accessibility, equity, environmental sustainability, and workforce stability. This dissertation examines the extent of the jobs–housing imbalance in Southern California and evaluates how targeted housing and land-use interventions may influence commuting burdens and regional employment accessibility.This research is organized into three empirical studies that collectively develop an integrated analytical framework combining descriptive accessibility analysis, behavioral joint residence-work location choice modeling, and policy-based commuting simulation. Together, the studies integrate concepts from urban economics, land-use planning, and transportation modeling to examine how housing-market constraints, employment geography, and mobility between residences and work locations jointly shape commuting behavior and regional spatial structure. Study 1, presented in Chapter 2, provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of commuting burdens and job accessibility across Southern California. Using worker-level data from the California Household Travel Survey, congestion-adjusted travel times derived from the Google Maps Distance Matrix API, and ZIP-level housing and employment indicators, the study documents substantial spatial and demographic variation in commute duration and accessibility. Threshold-based measures identify populations experiencing long-duration and long-distance commuting, including “supercommuting,” and demonstrate how housing affordability, occupation, income, household structure, and educational attainment interact with residential location to shape commuting outcomes. Study 2, presented in Chapter 3, develops a Joint Residence-and-Work Location Choice Model to examine how households simultaneously choose where to live and work. The model captures trade-offs among commuting costs, housing affordability, employment accessibility, occupational matching, and neighborhood characteristics using a multinomial logit framework grounded in random utility theory. By jointly modeling residential and employment decisions, the study estimates behavioral sensitivities and substitution patterns between the attributes of home locations, work locations, and travel between home and work locations. The resulting behavioral parameters form the analytical foundation for the policy simulations developed in Study 3. Study 3, presented in Chapter 4, applies the estimated residence-and-work location choice model to evaluate two housing-policy interventions: (1) employer-sponsored housing subsidies for professional and essential workers and (2) office-to-residential conversion strategies near employment centers. Choice probabilities are updated under counterfactual policy scenarios and translated into revised commuting patterns using a behavioral simulation framework. The analysis evaluates how policy interventions influence commute durations, accessibility, residential location patterns across worker groups, congestion exposure, and regional equity outcomes under varying housing-market conditions. The results demonstrate that commuting behavior in Southern California is shaped by transportation conditions and interaction of housing affordability, employment concentration, occupational structure, and employment accessibility constraints. Housing subsidies alone produce relatively limited regional relocation effects, while housing expansion strategies generate substantially larger residential redistribution responses. The greatest commute-related improvements emerge from an integrated policy approach that combines increased housing availability with targeted workforce allocation mechanisms near major employment centers. Overall, this dissertation contributes an integrated behavioral and policy-evaluation framework for analyzing jobs–housing imbalance within large metropolitan regions. The findings provide empirical evidence and modeling tools that can inform housing, land-use, and transportation planning strategies aimed at reducing long-distance commuting, and improving employment accessibility for the regional workforce.