Investigating the Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Perception of Residential Accessibility in Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area

Abstract

This paper investigates the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on households’ perceived utility of the accessibility of their residence in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The paper considers several neighborhood and dwelling attributes and fuses those with property price data from mid-March 2019 to mid-March 2021 to analyze changes in housing trends before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two mixed geographically weighted regression (MGWR) models are estimated for the year before the start of the pandemic and the year during the pandemic to address spatial autocorrelation and non-stationarity in price data. The empirical models reveal new patterns in accessibility perception for some factors, including accessibility to regional subway and inter-regional rail transit. This study also contributes to the literature of MGWR modeling by assessing the capacity of the model through validation procedures. Estimation is performed on randomly selected samples from the population to compare the errors with the population-based model and a traditional hedonic price model. The findings suggest that the application of MGWR is restricted to cases where price data are abundant.