Impact of Information on Housing Relocation Using Analytical Hierarchy Process and Interactive GIS

The problems of the urban poor, especially that of housing/shelter have been studied and documented by many researchers and social scientists. The state of affordable housing has been a cause for concern in the state of Illinois and especially in the six-county Chicago region. This concern stems from various factors. While studies have shown that a significant portion of a household's expenditure is dedicated to housing/shelter, it has also been documented that low-income families that make minimum-wage struggle to cope in the more expensive urban housing markets such as Chicago. This coupled with the inadequate affordable owner-occupied and renter homes is contributing to the complexity of the situation. In such a situation where both the supply and demand are not adequate, one needs to maximize the supply with ajudicious reallocation of resources (demand). Knowledge about the location of affordable housing, travel times to job destinations, along with familial factors such as the quality of local transit access, proximity of daycare centers, schools, and crime in a neighborhood are all viewed as important attributes in the relocation decision of a household. The lack of clear, transparent, and timely information at a disaggregate geography makes this task daunting. The research team at the Urban Transportation Center (UTC) at UIC developed a spatial decision support system to facilitate individuals to rank census tracts and in turn neighborhood based on their personal preferences about the various criteria mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph. This paper extends the concept of this spatial decision support system, by describing the template for a web-enabled interactive spatial decision support system (web-SDSS). The objective of this web-SDSS is to facilitate the housing relocation process for mobility counselors using decision criteria such as transit access, affordable housing, daycare, schools, crime, and jobs. These various criteria and sub-criteria are used in a hierarchical manner framed by the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The web-SDSS is intended for the primary use of mobility counselors assisting individuals/families seeking to relocate within the six-county metropolitan Chicago region. The web-SDSS will be designed using Mapserver 4.0 and linked with the decision-support system and the database housed at UTC.