Urban and Regional Planning and Design Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/26355
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Item Planning towards an equitable sharing economy: On housing, on transportation, on policymaking(2021) Zou, Zhenpeng; Knaap, Gerrit; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The sharing economy has experienced phenomenal growth in the past decade. Its two most popular sectors, short-term rental (STR) and shared mobility, have significantly transformed people’s travel behavior and disrupted the urban housing/transportation markets. On the other hand, planning and policy efforts lag behind the growth of the sharing economy due to its novelty and its market-based business model. In this dissertation, I use three empirical studies to demonstrate one of those planning and policymaking challenges from the equity perspective. In the first study, I investigate the impact of STR on single-family housing prices in Washington DC using a data-driven, hedonic analytical framework. Not only do I find a significant price inflation as a result of increasing STR activities, but I also identify the spatially uneven impacts that can adversely affect housing affordability in some minority-populated neighborhoods in the city. In the second study, I focus on the built and social environment factors to explain the spatial distribution of e-scooter sharing trips on Washington DC’s streets. Using real-time, trip trajectory level data, I am able to examine not only the built environment factors for a trip’s origin and destination neighborhoods, but also the street design factors for a trip’s traversing paths. Moreover, I apply a machine-learning based clustering analysis to segment trips by their temporal patterns, built environment, and social environment attributes. With both data-intensive analyses, I identify potential equity issues and opportunities associated with the emerging e-scooter sharing in DC. In the third study, I expand my analysis on STR and shared micromobility in a cross-city, cross-section exploration. I find similar tourist-oriented spatial patterns for three types of activities, including STR, station-based bike-sharing, and dockless bike/e-scooter sharing. Additionally, I find a significant lag in their uses in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods in eight cities, as well as identifying a potential connection between active STR business and gentrification in communities of high social vulnerability. The policy heterogeneities within the eight cities provide different angles to understand the feasible and effective planning practices and policy approaches to address the equity concerns on the rising sharing economy.Item Housing Value and Light Rail Transit Construction: Evidence from Three Essays(2020) Peng, Qiong; Knaap, Gerrit Jan; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In three essays, this dissertation explores what’s the determinants of multifamily rents and whether an anticipated investment in light rail transit influences multifamily rents and single-family housing prices in the rail transit pre-service period. In the first essay, I applied a multilevel linear model approach to account for the multifamily housing hierarchical data structure, and assessed the effects of service provision and management on multifamily rents. The findings show that pet allowance, availability of a short-term lease, and storage service increase rents significantly, while general renovations and availability of services for those with disabilities do not increase rents. The second essay empirically tests whether light rail transit in the pre-service period impacts multifamily housing rent in the transit corridor. Two approaches, a first-difference method and a difference-in-difference method, are used to test the research question. The results indicate that the rents of two-bedroom, three-bedroom, and four-bedroom units within a half-mile from planned light rail stops have significantly increased from 2015 to 2018 compared with the rent of units in other areas in Montgomery County. The third essay examines the temporal and spatial variation of the effect of the Purple Line on single-family home prices during the rail line pre-service period. The results show that the housing market saw a premium in 2012, the year the Purple Line project progressed into the preliminary engineering phase. The results also show that the effect of the new light rail transit line is distributed unevenly across the catchment areas of newly built stations and established stations.