Household Location and Migration within the Boston

HOUSEHOLD LOCATION AND MIGRATION WITHIN THE BOSTON METROPOLITAN REGION by PETER MURRAY ALLAMAN Submitted to the Department of City and Regional Planning on June 19, 1967, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master in City Planning. The thesis of this study is that migration within a metropolitan area cannot be meaningfully understood except in terms of an explanation of residential location which articulates specific concepts of location theory, as developed in economics, with those of social class, as developed in sociology. Further, that, while location theory, formulated in terms of site rents and transportation costs, provides the overall structuring of a region, social class concepts will account for significant biases not attributable to income differences. In a preliminary chapter, recent literature touching on both location and migration is reviewed. In subsequent sections, 1960 Census tract data for the Boston region is analysed, primarily by means of canonical correlation and principal components analysis, in an effort to test the thesis. The principal findings of the study are as follows: 1. The most strongly marked result of the analysis was the emergence of a white-collar/blue-collar clustering of occupational groups, although variations to this pattern were found. 2. A gradient pattern, consisting of a lower amount of residential clustering along class lines for the inner rings of the.region, rising to a peak in a middle ring, then falling off toward the outside of the region, was found. 3. Within the framework of canonical correlation, median education, employed as a proxy for "life style" factors, weights more heavily than does median income in indexing the distribution of occupational groups within each Census tract.