A Micro-Market Analysis of Tenure Choice Using the Logit Model

Empirical studies on housing tenure choice have generally uncovered a multiplicity of factors that influence households in their decision to own using mostly national aggregate or cross-metropolitan data that often obscure intrametropolitan influences. In this aper we focus on these localized influences by investigating micro-locational and occupation-specific influences on the housing tenure choice behavior of college professors in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Our logit analysis of this behavior shows that employment-related and spatial forces exert a strong influence on their decision. We also found that the explanatory power of the micro-location variable incorporates some income effect.