Residential Mobility and Ozone Exposure in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

Although a large social science literature has focused on pollution’s influence on property values, less emphasis has been placed on residential mobility responses to pollution. However, the literature has not addressed two questions. First, when homeowners move and buy bigger homes, do they expose themselves to more ozone pollution? Second, do homeowners try to avoid extended ozone exposure by reducing the time between moves? If we can address each question using information about individual moving decisions, we can better understand the distributional consequences of environmental policy and learn more about the extent of ozone avoidance behavior. This study uses a new micro data set that combines Bay Area housing sales, buyer characteristics, and monitor-level ozone concentrations. Individual buyers can be followed as they move from their old house to a new house and individual houses can be tracked with the buyer’s race and income and the house’s year-by-year ozone concentrations. The research suggests that conditional on moving and buying more housing services, poor minority homeowners frequently “pay†for the additional housing services by taking on more ozone exposure. There is also evidence that after people move, they reduce the time between moves as ozone pollution gets worse relative to other Bay Area houses. As a result, the scope of ozone averting actions homeowners use to avoid ozone exposure may extend beyond common day-to-day responses such as reducing the time spent outdoors.