Does Commercial Housing Have Better Access to Public Service Than Affordable Housing? – An Empirical Study for Accessibility to Public Service of Different Housings in Chengdu

Affordable housing is a kind of social security housing provided by the government for low-income families. Unlike the commercial house is sold and rent entirely according to the market price, affordable housing orients to a particular group at a standard rate or rent. Studies indicate that Many affordable houses are built in urban fringe areas and do not have adequate public services, such as hospitals, schools or shopping malls, which raised a question, “is there any quantitated evidence supporting that commercial housing has better access to public service than affordable housing?” In this paper, we proposed to use the accessibility to measure public service level of different housings. Within the central urban area of Chengdu, we selected 20 affordable communities and 20 commercial communities (near the median price of the second-hand house in Chengdu) randomly. After a brief overview of the theoretical foundation of accessibility, we proposed a mixed movement model to measure accessibility with Gaode Map API. The tool is arranged in such a way that it can easily calculate the travel time from the communities to 5 types of public service facilities through public transportation (schools, culture/sports facilities, commercial facilities, hospitals and public parks) separately. The independent sample t-test reveals that the commercial communities have significantly better access to all the public services than the affordable ones. The results could provide the decision-makers with supporting the allocation of affordable housing and observing the public service from a different perspective.