The impact of household characters on choosing a house: the housing unit and quality of access to urban facilities Case study: Tehran City

Abstract

Introduction:The "life cycle" theory is the essential tool for understanding the relationship among characteristics of housing and households, which reflects the behavior of households in the city. The theory, households are defined based on household size, number of students, employment status, income, and age of household. Based on their characters, every household has different priorities in housing choices. This study aims to analyze that characteristic of households are effective on housing choice, which develops in two parts: quality of housing unit and access to urban facilities. Methodology: To measure the variables, the city of Tehran was selected as a case study, and the research data were obtained from two sources; the data for households' characters was obtained from the households' expenditure-income survey, which implements annually by the National Statistics Center and the locations of urban facilities were gained by urban development plan of Tehran. By using a univariate multi-nominal method and cluster analysis, effective characteristics in the housing selection model were identified from the two groups of characteristics of quality of "housing unit" and "access to urban facilities", effective variables in selecting "housing unit" are, area of hous unit, the type of structure building, variables in "access to urban facilities" included access to educational services and public transportation system, which created a total of 6 options for selecting residential units and 8 options for accessing urban facilities. Then, the relationship between household characteristics and housing selection was performed using the multivariate regression method in R software. Results:The analysis of the model revealed that residential units with an area of 60-90 square meters are the most attractive ones for households with students. Also, increasing the income decile of households, the tendency of households to live near educational spaces and distance from the public transportation system increases. Households with the employment status in a non-simple working group are more inclined to choose to live in houses close to the public transportation system than households with a caregiver, which indicates the difference in financial capacity between the two groups of households. Conclusion:The relationship between students and the area of residential units has been proven in research background, but in this study, a specific range for the unit area(60-90 square meters) is proved for households with students. However, the relationship was not proved in other areas of housing characters, such as the situation of access to urban facilities. Another important conclusion has occurred in the relation between the variables "residence" and "household characteristics." Only the variables related to job and income effectively choose a place of residence. Other social and demographic characteristics of households do not significantly correlate with the household location. It reflects in living conditions, lack of identity and pr...