Equity in job accessibility and environmental quality in a segmented housing market: The case of Greater London

Public services and resources such as job accessibility and environmental quality are often not equally distributed in spatial and/or social dimensions within metropolitan regions. Availabilities of these public services and resources affect the quality of residential locations, and can be expected to be capitalised into house prices. For prospective house owners, selections of properties will be based on their preferences and appreciations of different attributes of the properties, but also be constrained by their housing budgets. Such a constraint may lead to segmentation of local housing markets into submarkets by price bands, and availabilities of public services and resources, as well as prices of them, might be different between the resulted submarkets. In such a case, distribution of public services and resources might be highly dependent on the public’s abilities to pay for housing, rather than based on their needs for, consumptions of, or expenses on each specific service or resource. Using Greater London as the case metropolitan region, this study examined the existence of housing submarkets by price bands, and explored the differences in availabilities, prices and trade-offs of job accessibility and environmental quality between the submarkets. Results of this study show that submarkets by price bands did exist in Greater London, and indicate that households with lower housing budgets were more likely to have lower job accessibility but enjoy higher environmental quality. They were also more likely to pay less, in relative to the total house price, for both job accessibility and environmental quality.