For whom is the city still affordable?A study conducted in collaboration with Université Paris-Saclay looks at the affordability of major urban centers.
The housing crisis raging in several major Western cities is well documented in the media. “While reading articles and reports on the subject, I developed an interest in the testimonies of middle-class workers who are no longer able to find housing in the cities where they work. I wanted to understand the extent of this phenomenon,” explains Florian Mayneris, a professor in the Department of Economics at ESG UQAM.
The researcher was awarded a SSHRC Développement Savoir grant of almost $70,000 to carry out a research project on this issue with his colleague Kristian Behrens, in collaboration with Miren Lafourcade, professor of economics at Université Paris-Saclay.
Commuting distance
Florian Mayneris and his team are looking at the major Canadian cities of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, as well as French cities such as Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille. We use census databases in Canada and France,” explains the researcher. They record respondents' place of residence and place of work. In the first, more descriptive part of our project, we can determine whether the distance between home and work has increased or decreased over the last 10, 15 or 20 years.”
The professor and his colleagues also intend to analyze whether these distances fluctuate according to the cities studied, occupations, gender and family situation.
Although anecdotal, the statistical reality makes you smile: between the 2016 and 2021 censuses, the average home-to-work distance in Canada saw a sharp drop… due to telecommuting. “For some people, the distance between home and work has gone from a few kilometers to a few meters,” laughs Florian Mayneris.
With telecommuting available, many workers have chosen to migrate from the city to the suburbs. How do we know whether these people decided to move out of the city by choice, to be closer to nature, for example, or because they could no longer afford to live in the city? It's impossible, and that's why we'll have to exclude teleworkers from our sample,” explains the professor.
Once telecommuters have been excluded, preliminary analyses don't suggest any significant changes in home-work distance among Canadians in recent years, observes Florian Mayneris. “This doesn't mean that there aren't significant variations for certain cities and occupations, but we'll be able to verify this once we've carried out a more in-depth analysis.”
The impact of the real estate boom
In the second part of the project, Florian Mayneris and his team will determine whether the fluctuation in commuting distance is linked, for certain professions, to the increase in property prices over the last 20 years. “We then intend to check whether, for a given geographical area, part of the real estate boom is attributable to the increase in wage inequalities,“We then intend to check whether, for a given geographical area, part of the real estate boom is attributable to rising wage inequalities,” he adds. For example, if many people living downtown work in finance and have very high salaries, it's likely that the rise in real estate prices will be more pronounced there than elsewhere.”
Service disruption on the horizon?
In a later phase, the team will analyze the results obtained in parallel with the supply of public services for residents of the same city. “If workers belonging to certain job groups - in teaching, catering or nursing, for example - have to leave the city for economic reasons and change employer, there will come a time when there may be a break in services,” fears the specialist.
The example he offers in this respect is well documented. The Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), responsible for public transport in the French capital, is experiencing difficulties in ensuring the continuity of its services, as it is no longer able to recruit and retain bus drivers, he illustrates. “This is mainly due to two factors: safety issues - passenger incivility, in particular - but also a wage offer too low for these workers to live in the Paris region.”
Inevitably, the study will address the crumbling of the middle class. “The phenomena of gentrification affect not only the poorest people, but also the middle class. We still need to determine the extent of this phenomenon, and outline the impact it will have on the economic dynamics of cities,” concludes Florian Mayneris.
Source: Actualités UQAM
