Renters vs owners: the impact of accessibility on residential location choice. Evidence from Lyon urban area, France (1999-2013)

Urban areas face important challenges linked to contradictory trends of concentration, urban sprawl and segregation. More and more people choose to buy a residence in the suburbs taking advantage of the accessibility increase. At the same time, young households choose to rent in central areas. In this paper, distinguishing between renters and owners, we investigate the evolution of the households' location choice determinants over time with a special focus on accessibility to employment. Our case study is the Lyon urban area. We rely on discrete choice models using the disaggregated census data of the location choices of households from 1999, 2008 and 2013 and we calculate elasticities. The results confirm our initial intuition. Owners become less sensitive to accessibility to employment over time whereas it is the opposite for renters. Our results suggest the importance of incorporating these temporal evolutions into models for a better land-use transport integration and policy.