Residential Preferences Study

This study reports on estimates of residential preferences in the Mountain West region of the US. The estimates are derived from a choice experiment funded by the Utah Department of Transportation and Utah Transit Authority – an experiment based on large samples of both homeowners and renters who participated in a larger, statewide transportation study. The choice experiment and transportation study provides a rich set of household- and individual-specific demographic controls, enabling us to identify a host of factors contributing to heterogeneity in residential preferences. We leverage a percentage-change housing-cost attribute included in the experiment to obtain measures of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the various residential attributes and attribute levels in our study. Our method to convert the percentage-change cost attribute to MWTP values denominated in dollars results in theoretically plausible estimates of a household’s MWTP. We find that residential preferences differ across homeowners and renters primarily with respect to intensity rather than direction. Our quantitative estimates of these preferences provide urban and regional planners with precise monetary measures of the underlying attitudes of a sizable majority of the region’s residents regarding ideal housing and neighborhood characteristics.