The Influence Mechanism of Housing Affordability Stratification on Community Public Service Accessibility

The issue of housing affordability has become an important factor that defines not only where people can live but also where they can actually access the services of the city. This research explores the impact of housing affordability stratification on public service accessibility in New York City and transmission of such effects through public service resource density and transit connectivity. The data obtained from the 2023 American Community Survey about socioeconomics of census tracts of New York City is merged with housing data from NYC PLUTO, public service facilities' data from NYC Open Data and pedestrian network data from OpenStreetMap. Housing cost burden of households is divided into three strata using the Jenks natural breaks classification. Healthcare, education, parks, libraries and public transit accessibility is calculated using an advanced version of the network-based two-step floating catchment area method and is weighted using entropy weights. Further analysis includes spatial autocorrelation analysis, spatial durbin modeling and mediation analysis. As a result of simulation of the proposed research design, tracts with high cost burden have a lower value of accessibility index (Mean = 0.486, SD = 0.137) compared to low burden tracts (Mean = 0.672, SD = 0.118). The effect size of the total spatial Durbin model is -0.254***. The contribution of the mediator variables is -0.115***.