A Stated Preference Experiment of Residential Location Choice in Mandalay

Mandalay, as a major commercial and industrial hub of Myanmar, is now facing great challenges due to a substantial increase in automobile, traffic volume, air pollution, and urban sprawl. The rapid urban growth can be seen by the high-density housing development in many parts of the city. However, the current development of high-density housing that is going on in the city center may not best match with people's preference, on the contrary it will even make the problem more severe resulting in traffic congestion and accelerating the urban sprawl. This paper presents a Stated-Preference (SP) experiment of housing location choice in Mandalay. A multinomial logit model is developed based on the SP survey data. Although the discrete choice model has a long history of application in the economic, transportation, marketing and geography fields, it is not well developed in location analysis. The results reveal that people are considering factors not only house size, house price, but also locational convenience in terms of commuting time, and neighborhood quality. It is also found that different socio-economic groups, i.e., ethnicity, exhibit different location preferences.