  With trends of urbanisation on the rise, providing adequate housing to
individuals remains a complex issue to be addressed. Often, the slow output of
relevant housing policies, coupled with quickly increasing housing costs,
leaves individuals with the burden of finding housing that is affordable and
safe. In this paper, we unveil how urban planning, not just housing policies,
can prevent individuals from accessing better housing conditions. We begin by
proposing a clustering approach to characterising levels of housing insecurity
in a city, by considering multiple dimensions of housing. Then we define levels
of transit efficiency in 20 US cities by comparing public transit journeys to
car-based journeys. Finally, we use geospatial autocorrelation to highlight how
commuting to areas associated with better housing conditions results in transit
commute times of over 30 minutes in most cities, and commute times of over an
hour in some cases. Ultimately, we show the role that public transportation
plays in locking vulnerable demographics into a cycle of poverty, thus
motivating a more holistic approach to addressing housing insecurity that
extends beyond changing housing policies.

Physics and Society