Dr. Alex Karner (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Join NCTSPM on Thursday, September 10, as Dr. Alex Karner, Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech's School of City and Regional Planning, will be speaking on the topic of "The Convergence of Social Equity and Environmental Sustainability: Jobs-Housing Fit and Commute Distance". 

Please RSVP to NCTSPM@ce.gatech.edu if you plan to attend. 

Dr. Karner received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Davis, and completed postdoctoral work at Arizona State University. His research investigates how publicly available data can best be used to understand the performance of integrated transportation-land use system in the areas of public health, environmental justice, and environmental sustainability. He regularly partners with civil rights attorneys and affordable housing advocates to ensure that his results are used to inform policy and planning efforts. 

Researchers have long argued that achieving a rough balance between the number of jobs and housing units in a local area can improve transportation performance. Given the complexity of factors shaping commute patterns, however, evidence of a relationship between jobs-housing balance and travel patterns has been less robuts. recent advances in data availability have enabled a more sophisticated examination of the fit between jobs and housing in local areas, not just the balance. In this talk, Dr. Karner will describe the development of a low-wage jobs/affordable housing fit metric using publicly available data sources and its application to the study of commute distances across all census tracks in California. While there are some limits to this data, we find that the obs-housing fit measure is strongly correlated with lower commute distances, including when controlling for a range of other appropriate variables.