So where do people want to live?

Shown below is a picture from some work in progress, where I am looking at the location choice preferences of different household types in Sydney. The picture shows where households with young children (i.e. all less than 15 years) would like to live. The graph shows the spatial variation in preference for detached dwellings only. I do look at the effect of dwelling type, but lets do one thing at a time shall we....

You can pretty safely ignore the scale -- just think warmer colours == 'more desirable'. (If you really want to know, its the log-probability of a couple-with-kids household choosing a dwelling in that region in a discrete choice experiment.... but lets not go there).



And what does it show? Well, couples with kids like the northen harbourside suburbs (i.e. Mosman, and around middle-harbour), and big chunks of the Eastern suburbs (Vaucluse, Centennial Park, etc). No real surprises there.

Other results show that couples with young kids do not like attached dwellings -- they really do want the suburban detached home. Well, most of them anyway.. there is always a distribution of preferences.

And what about couples without kids? The figure (below) shows an estimate for couple households without children where the household reference person is less than 55 years old. They really like the inner-west, dont they?