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Figure 1: Research Framework |
Michael P. Johnson's NSF CAREER Homepage
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My Personal Home Page
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The National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a five-year postdoctoral fellowship for junior faculty embarking on innovative research agendas. My CAREER grant began August 1, 2002, and runs through July 31, 2007. My project, titled “CAREER: Public-Sector Decision Modeling for Facility Location and Service Delivery”, is intended to develop an novel body of work that:
(a) improves policy design in the areas of assisted/affordable housing and elderly services in such a way that practitioners and researchers can use or adapt specific analytical models, or apply more general insights regarding the utility of quantitative modeling that is policy-relevant, evidence-based and values-focused,
(b) draws explicit links between descriptive research that provides a detailed understanding of institutions, policies, programs and outcomes, and prescriptive research that develops policy-relevant planning models of use to researchers and practitioners,
(c) links the disciplines of operations research/management science, applied economics, policy analysis and information technology, and
(d) addresses quantitative policy design over multiple temporal perspectives--strategic, tactical and operational--using appropriate analytical models for each planning timeframe.
A detailed description of the specific goals for my project is contained in summary form here and in fuller detail here. Figure 1, below, demonstrates that I view the process of descriptive and prescriptive modeling, and modeling over different time frames for affordable/subsidized housing as iterative and dynamic.
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Figure 1: Research Framework |
Figure 2, a reproduction of a community development plan provided by an actual community development corporation in Pittsburgh, serves to demonstrate how complex the problem of prescriptive modeling for housing and community development really is.
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Figure 2: Sample Affordable Housing Plan |
To date, my research has resulted in conference presentations and publications that:
- Generate estimates of long-term population impacts of policies by which poor families relocate from low-income to affluent neighborhoods using government subsidies;
- Evaluate trade-offs between social welfare and equity associated with alternative location schemes for tenant-based and project-based subsidized housing;
- Present a spatial decision support system to enable low-income families to choose housing in neighborhoods that provide social opportunity and services consistent with their values and needs;
- Develop models for affordable housing provision that capture the wide range of programmatic and social impact characteristics of community-based housing development;
- Generate schemes for location of senior centers and meals-on-wheels kitchens and associated delivery routes that provide specific guidance to elderly-serving agencies.
Examples of research results are displayed below. Figure 3 (from [7]) represents a typical "policy trajectory" associated with a stylized model for housing mobility planning that is solved using techniques from optimal control. The insight here is that by choosing an optimal time path for low-income families to move from poor to middle class neighborhoods, the destination neighborhood might converge to two very different stable equilibria (large population/small population) plus one unstable equilibrium.
Figure 3: Policy Trajectory for
Housing Mobility
Figure 4 (from [9]) represents two "Pareto frontiers" associated with solution of a multiobjective math optimization problem for siting renter- and owner-occupied affordable housing across a large study area to jointly optimize social welfare and equity criteria. Each solution represents a particular distribution of housing developments of varying sizes across the study area. These results indicate that there are significant tradeoffs possible between the two criteria and moreover that there appear to be candidate "compromise" solutions for each decision problem that might serve as a basis for more detailed, site-specific policy design by affordable housing providers.
Figure 4: Tradeoff Curves for
Multiobjective Affordable Housing Planning
My vision is the research and teaching supported by this CAREER grant can result in improved coordination and increased collaborations between operations research/management science, public policy and the disciplines of community, city and regional planning.
Journal Articles, Working Papers, Book Chapters:
1. Johnson, M.P. and J. Caulkins. 2005. “Can Housing Mobility Programs Make a Long-Term Impact on
the Lives of Poor Families and the Health of Middle-Class Communities: A Policy
Simulation.”
2. Johnson, M.P. 2005. “Can a Spatial Decision Support System Improve Low-Income
Service Delivery? Analysis of Tools and Requirements for a Computer-Assisted
Mobility Counseling System.”
3. Johnson, M.P., Roehrig, S. and H. Yildiz. 2005. “A Genetic Algorithm for the Home-Delivered Meals
Location-Routing Problem.”
4. Johnson, M.P. 2005. “Flexible Affordable Housing Policy Design using Facility Location Models.”
5. Johnson, M.P. 2005. “Single-Period Location Models for Subsidized Housing: Project-Based Subsidies.” Based on Heinz School Working Paper Series 2002-44; Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, to appear.
6. Caulkins, J.P., Feichtinger, G., Grass, D., Johnson, M.P., Tragler, G. and Y. Yegorov. 2005. Placing the Poor While Keeping the Rich in Their Place: Separating Strategies for Optimally Managing Residential Mobility and Assimilation. Demographic Research 13(1): 1 – 34.
7. Caulkins, J.P., Feichtinger, G., Johnson, M.P., Tragler, G. and Y. Yegorov. 2005. Skiba Thresholds in a Model of Controlled Migration. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57(4) 490 - 508.
8. Johnson, M.P., Gorr, W.L. and S. Roehrig. 2005. Location of Elderly Service Facilities. Annals of Operations Research 136 (1): 329 – 349. (To download a complete copy of the article at no charge, please click here.)
9.
Johnson, M.P. 2004.
“Planning
Models for Affordable Housing Development.” Based on
10. Johnson, M.P., Caulkins, J., Feichtinger, G.,
Tragler, G. and Y. Yegorov. 2004. “Hidden Strategic
Challenges Posed by Housing Mobility Policy: An Application of Dynamic Policy
Modeling.”
11. Gorr,
W., Johnson, M.P. and S. Roehrig. 2004. “Policy Systems: The Integration of Information Technology
into Policy Analysis, Planning, and Program Evaluation.”
12. Kataria, G. and M.P. Johnson. 2004. “Neighborhood Selection by Public Housing Residents in the Housing Choice Voucher Program.” Heinz School Working Paper Series 2004-1.
14. Johnson, M.P. 2003. Single-Period Location Models for Subsidized Housing: Tenant-Based Subsidies. Annals of Operations Research : Facility Location Modelling: Papers in Honor of Kenneth E. Rosing, Part II , 123: 105 – 124.
15. Johnson, M.P. 2002. "Spatial Decision Support for Subsidized Housing Location and Residential Mobility,” in (Claudia M Bauzer Medeiros, Ed.) Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS): Advanced Geographic Information Systems. Oxford, UK: Eolss Publishers.
Works in Progress:
16. What Do Engineers Know about Housing? Methods and Tools to
Increase Access to Subsidized and Affordable Housing in the
17. Flexible Affordable Housing Policy Design with Scale
Effects and Equity Objectives (under review for presentation at
Multi-Echelon/Public Applications of Supply Chain Management Conference,
18. Policy Implications of a Planning Model for Home-Delivered Meals (with Hakan Yildiz; under review for presentation at Multi-Echelon/Public Applications of Supply Chain Management Conference, June 18, 2006, Atlanta, GA)
19. A Genetic Algorithm for the Home-Delivered Meals Location Routing Problem (with Hakan Yildiz; for submission to European Journal of Operational Research)
20. Agent-Based Models for Housing Mobility Policy Design (with Keith Hunter)
21. Urban Affordable Housing Location in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (with Justin Williams and Changmi Jung)
22. Practitioner Perspectives on Affordable Housing Design (with Meredith Fisher and Jeannie Kim)
Presentations:
“Flexible Affordable Housing Policy Design Using Facility
Location Models”, INFORMS Fall National Conference,
“Agent Based Modeling of Housing Mobility”, INFORMS Fall
National Conference,
“Policy Implications of a Planning Model for Home-Delivered Meals”, INFORMS Fall National Conference, San Francisco, CA, November 16, 2005 (Hakan Yildiz, lead author and presenter).
“How Should We Rebuild Urban Residential Areas in the Wake
of Hurricane Katrina?” INFORMS Fall National Conference,
“Can a Spatial Decision Support System Improve Low-Income
Service Delivery? Analysis of Tools and Requirements for a Computer-Assisted
Mobility Counseling System”, HUD Urban Scholars Fellowship Symposium,
“Can
Housing Mobility Programs Make a Long-Term Impact on the Lives of Poor Families
and the Health of Middle-Class Communities: A Policy Simulation”, APPAM Fall
Conference,
“A
Genetic Algorithm for the Home Delivered Meals Location Routing Problem”, IFORS
International Triennial Conference,
“Flexible
Affordable Housing Policy Design Using Facility Location Models”, Tenth Meeting
of the International Symposium on Locational Decisions (ISOLDE X), June 2, 2005,
“Spatial Decision Support for Assisted Housing Search:
Application and Extensions,” HUD Urban Scholars Reception and Poster Session,
2004 Fannie Mae Foundation Annual Housing Conference,
“Evaluation of Multi-Criteria Decision Models for
Computer-Assisted Housing Search,” Department of Social and
“Neighborhood Selection of Public Housing Residents in the
Housing Choice Voucher Program: Quasi-Experimental Results from
“Policy Systems in Local Government,” APPAM Fall
Conference,
“The Effects of Housing Vouchers on Youth Crime: Evidence
from a Randomized Lottery,” APPAM Fall Conference,
“Hidden Strategic Challenges Posed by Housing Mobility
Policy: An Application of Dynamic Policy Modeling,” APPAM Fall Conference,
“Public Resource Planning in a Fiscally Constrained
Environment,” Public Policy and International Affairs Fellowship Program
Convocation,
“How Can Public-Sector Decision Modeling Improve Provision
of Affordable Housing in the
“Locational Outcome and Neighborhood Selection of Chicago
Public Housing Movers through the Section 8 Voucher Program,” Allied Social
Sciences Associations national meeting, National Economic Association track,