ABSTRACT
Introduction We next add realism to the basic monocentric city model set out in Chapter 2. Here we allow a monocentric city to have both high-income and low-income workers who all commute to their jobs in the city center. The rent functions intersect at the distance from the center at which the settlement switches from lower incometo higher income. It turnsout to bequite straightforward to have high-wage households and lower-wage households arranged in an orderly way in a land-use equilibrium. A related analysis allows us to lay out a city with a suburban ring of employment places. We develop conditions for similar workers to be indifferent between living “far-out” and commuting to suburban jobs, and living closer-in and commuting to jobs in the center. Again key rent functions intersect at the distance of the ring of suburban jobs from the center. We require an assumption about differences in productivities for suburban workers and central city workers in our analysis of suburban employment. We invoke the law of urban growth and argue that the lowerdensity ofworkers in thesuburban jobsmakes them slightly less productive than the workers in the center of the city. We finally sketch how a worker-resident could be “consuming” extra amenities in a particular city and/or how such a household could be consuming a public or government good produced for the monocentric city.
