Urban pull: The roles of amenities and employment

This paper leverages new measurement of neighborhood consumption amenities to demonstrate that housing prices and rents in U.S. cities are likely determined nearly as much by access to amenities as by access to employment. We extend the Alonso–Muth–Mills model, allowing residents to derive utility from within-city trips to amenities. The model delivers standard estimable log-linear pricing equations as well as new measures of local amenities—based on a destination’s popularity during leisure hours—and of access to consumption amenities city wide. We find our amenity measures add substantial explanatory power, have large effects in magnitude, and reduce naive estimates of commute costs by 30%. Elasticities of rents with respect to employment access are 20%–50% larger than those with respect to amenity access. The findings hold using a variety of alternative measures and are neither driven by density nor fully explained by the locations of business establishments. These results suggest the potential resilience of cities to changes in employment locations.