Jobs-housing relationships before and amid COVID-19: An excess-commuting approach

Abstract

<p>The outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent pandemic containment measures have significantly affected our daily life, which has been extensively examined in the existing scholarship. However, the existing scholarship has done little on the jobs/housing relationship impacts of COVID-19. We attempted to fill this gap by using an excess-commuting approach. The approach allows us to analyse a series of jobs-housing matrices based on the location-based service big data of around fifty million individuals in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China before and amid COVID-19. In the PRD, a zero-COVID policy was implemented, which presents a distinct and interesting context for our study. We found that after the COVID-19 outbreak: (1) residences and employment became more centrally located in downtowns, which is opposite to the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/suburbanization" title="Learn more about suburbanization from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">suburbanization</a> trend elsewhere; (2) in the whole PRD, the minimum and maximum commutes became smaller while the actual commute became larger, indicating the simultaneous presences of some paradoxical phenomena: a better spatial juxtaposition of jobs and housing, more compressed distribution of jobs and housing, and longer average actual commutes; (3) inter-city commutes between large cities were significantly refrained and decreased, while new inter-city commuters between smaller cities emerged; (4) it was more likely for the less-educated and female workers to see smaller minimum commutes amid COVID-19. This paper illustrates the potential of big data in the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/longitudinal-analysis" title="Learn more about longitudinal study from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">longitudinal study</a> on jobs-housing relationships and excess commuting. It also produces new insights into such relationships in a unique context where stringent anti-COVID-19 policies have been continuously in place.</p><ul>​​​​​​​</ul>