The Effect of Public Goods on Residential Mobility: Comparison all Households and High-Income Groups in Tehran, Iran

Households move in cities for better housing and access to better public goods services, but the public goods are not equally important for households and their spatial distribution is not uniform in the city. In order to investigate in detail, we divvied the public goods into two groups: net and gross and modeling the housing residential choice. The main purpose of the study is to measure the impact of this product among all households and high-income groups. Data were collected from Census (2016) and the neighborhood quality survey (2015-2016) of Tehran Municipality. We use agent-based model for investigate the behavior of households. The results showed that the gross public goods are effective in choosing the house of all households in the city. Among the variables in this group, for all households in the city, “access to the public transportation system” has the greatest impact, but this variable does not affect the choice of high-income households. The variable “access to educational space” also has the least impact among all households, but in the high-income group, this variable has the most impact. In the group of net public goods, all variables are effective in choosing the house of all households in the city, and the variable “security” has the greatest impact. Compared to the high-income group, except for “distance to educational space”, other variables do not have a significant effect on housing choice, which indicates the unbalanced spatial distribution of net public goods in the city and the homogeneity of spatial distribution in high-income households. Also, based on the research background, educational space in the high-income group is considered as a measure of neighborhoods quality.