reference library

The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling…
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Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control…
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated California’s housing crisis by heightening social and economic inequalities, with disparate impact on those unable to perform their jobs. The strong likelihood of a prolonged…
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Within the 65-and-over age group, most recent income gains have gone to the highest earners, and the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. Ensuring…
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As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for…
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Inclusionary zoning (IZ) has become an increasingly popular tool for providing affordable housing in an economically integrative manner. IZ policies typically require developers to set aside a proportion of units…
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Many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies. In this paper, we use panel data on IZ in the…
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Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as…
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Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations…
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The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
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Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study which types of landlords bear the burden of decreased rental…
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Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate…
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Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would…
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In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent…
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Measuring how rent-controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to rent increases is difficult, because new construction is automatically exempt. This paper explores evictions as a barometer for landlords’…
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Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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In the U.S., nearly 60% of recently built single-family houses, and 80% of houses in new subdivisions, are part of a homeowners association (HOA). We construct the first near-national map…
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This paper provides the first, comprehensive evidence on the question of whether the subsidized flood insurance rates are needed to meet the affordability goal of the National Flood Insurance Program….
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Zoning ordinances and the like have been endemic in the United States for the better part of a century. These laws have always influenced the location of housing within a…
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“California has a serious housing shortage. California’s housing costs, consequently, have been rising rapidly for decades. These high housing costs make it difficult for many Californians to find housing that…
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Because of a severe shortage of affordable housing in the United States, an increasing number of low-income households suffer from housing instability. However, little evidence exists as to why they…
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I study the short-run effect of new housing construction on housing affordability using individual address history data. Because most new construction is expensive, its effect on the market for more…
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We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing…
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These neighborhoods—which we call America’s most diverse, mixed-income neighborhoods—have high levels of racial, ethnic and income diversity. This report identifies, maps and counts the nation’s most diverse mixed-income neighborhoods. In…
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An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by…
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Previous literature has shown that land use regulations influence where people choose to live within the U.S. by impacting housing prices. In this paper, we study the impact of these…
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The nation’s 11.2 million extremely low income renter households account for 25.7% of all renter households and 9.5% of all households in the United States. The U.S. has a shortage…
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As the inaugural State of the Nation’s Housing report noted, the majority of Americans were well housed in 1988, and a number of metrics point to improving conditions since then….
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Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in…
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The 2018 national Housing Wage is $22.10 for a modest two-bedroom rental home and $17.90 for a modest one-bedroom rental home. Among the 50 states and the District of Columbia,…
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Municipal zoning, shockingly, may be the most consequential regulatory program in the United States. This article reports findings derived from an examination of provisions of zoning ordinances and zoning maps,…
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While recent research has illustrated the frequency and deleterious consequences of eviction, the number of executed evictions pales in comparison to the number of poor families threatened with eviction. This…
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“Housing is a central component of family life and can provide a foundation for family well-being. While we typically think of family households as homeowners, renters are more likely than…
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Economists have scrutinized the effects of residential building restrictions on the cost of housing, growth, and migration in recent years. More strictly zoned states and metro areas have lost population…
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The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
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Policymakers must focus on improving the jobs-housing fit—or connecting jobs with affordable housing—which is essential for working families and for the economy. Michela Zonta Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing…
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We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the…
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We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments (“wealth”), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term…
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In this paper, we discuss what economic researchers have learned about density and what we see as the most significant gaps in this understanding. We begin by describing how economic…
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We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in…
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The experience of Houston reaffirms much of what researchers already know: minimum-lot-size regulations limit urban development, driving up lot sizes and thereby increasing housing prices. By liberalizing these rules, the…
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We develop an urban model that incorporates: (1) heterogeneous sites; (2) fiscal and urban externalities; and (3) an endogenous number of cities, i.e., the extensive margin of urban development. Within-…
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Commentators have long decried the pernicious effects that overly restrictive land use regulations, which stifle new development, have on housing supply and affordability, regional and national economic growth, social mobility,…
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This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation…
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This paper shows that the capitalization of local amenities is effectively priced into land via a two-part pricing formula: a “ticket” price paid regardless of the amount of housing service…
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The politics of urban land use frustrate even the best intentions. A number of cities have made strong political commitments to increasing their local housing supply in the face of…
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What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood…
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We study gentrification at a micro-geographic scale using information on residents and businesses in New York from 1990 to 2010. We exploit atypical location decisions of businesses to identify the…
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Growing numbers of affordable housing advocates and community members are questioning the premise that increasing the supply of market-rate housing will result in housing that is more affordable. This article…
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“The State’s density bonus law (Government Code Section 65915 – 65918) has over the course of the last several legislative sessions been the subject of bills modifying the statute and…
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What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood…
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The politics of urban land use frustrate even the best intentions. A number of cities have made strong political commitments to increasing their local housing supply in the face of…
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The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the largest national affordable housing program in the U.S. By 2030, nearly half a million current LIHTC units, or nearly a quarter of…
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The problem of local-government barriers to housing supply is finally enjoying its moment in the sun. For decades, the states did little to remedy this problem and arguably they made…
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Inaction on housing affordability challenges could ultimately undermine the region’s future economic growth and prosperity. Housing challenges like these can undermine worker productivity, make it harder for companies to attract…
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We assess the impact of home-sharing on residential house prices and rents. Using a dataset of Airbnb listings from the entire United States and an instrumental variables estimation strategy, we…
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Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these…
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We use data on the appraised land value from a data set of more than 16 million appraisals to produce annual estimates of the average price of land used in…
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The fastest growing cities in the United States saw a substantial decline in affordable housing units from 2010 to 2017, according to new research released today by Freddie Mac (OTCQB:…
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Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to designate critical habitat for listed species. Designation could result in modification to or delay of residential…
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This paper investigates the effects of land use regulation restrictiveness on house and vacant land prices. In contrast to prior studies, the index of restrictiveness is treated as an endogenous…
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Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a major social concern in the United States and other developed countries. There is an extensive economic literature estimating the social costs associated with SUDs…
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We use new longitudinal census microdata to provide the first causal evidence of how gentrification affects a broad set of outcomes for original resident adults and children. Gentrification modestly increases…
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Housing affordability is a leading challenge for local policymakers around the world, yet a coherent framework for analysing the various policy options is lacking. This column builds such a framework…
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Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in…
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We explore the impact of rising incomes at the top of the distribution on spatial sorting patterns within large U.S. cities. We develop and quantify a spatial model of a…
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The Greater Boston Housing Report Card serves as an annual assessment of housing conditions in Greater Boston and what needs to be done to meet the region’s goals for current…
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More than half of the nation’s households are now headed by someone at least 50 years of age. These 65 million older households are highly diverse in their living situations,…
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This report finds that increases in housing prices in San Francisco were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides evidence…
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Like many large metropolitan areas, the Washington D.C. region faces a housing supply crunch. From 2010 to 2016, the population grew roughly twice as fast as the number of housing…
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This report finds that increases in housing prices in Contra Costa County were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides…
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In this brief, we present findings from interviews and focus groups with developers, general contractors, architects and nonprofits working to build both affordable and market-rate housing in San Francisco. The…
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This report finds that increases in housing prices in Alameda County were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides evidence…
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In this Article, we argue that non-cumulative zoning is an idea whose time has passed, if there ever was a convincing case for it at all. The two major justifications…
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This study shows that the homeownership rate for millennials was 37 percent in 2015, or about eight percentage points lower than that of the two previous generations (Gen X and…
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Regulatory constraints on housing production have shut millions of Americans out of the country’s most productive labor markets. Historically, Americans have moved to the parts of the country that offered…
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Whether Bay Area residents like it or not, city leaders across the country are watching how this high-tech region grapples with the consequences of dizzying economic growth — expensive housing,…
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A recent decline in fertility was sharpest in counties where home values rose the most, and the change was smaller—and sometimes even up —where home value growth was weaker. An…
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In D.C. and around the country, inclusionary zoning (also sometimes called “inclusionary housing”), is an increasingly popular way to produce affordable housing through the private market. And while these programs…
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We estimate the local and aggregate effects of total factor productivity growth on US workers’ earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find…
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If sharing firms prevail in the current fights over the right to operate (and indications suggest they will), it is unlikely that cities and states will ignore them. Instead, as…
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With a relatively light regulatory hand on land use, the Texas suburbs are more responsive to market forces than most metro areas. Even so, some of their single-family lots are…
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The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of…
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We examined whether the Gautreaux residential mobility program, which moved poor black volunteer families who were living in inner-city Chicago into more-affluent and integrated neighborhoods, produced long-run improvements in the…
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By enabling low-income families to move from high- to low-poverty neigh- bourhoods, tenant-based rental subsidies for poor families have the potential to reduce the degree of economic segregation in the…
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High levels of racial segregation persist in the United States. We argue that land use control is an important tool for maintaining this pattern. Cities have the capacity to make…
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The U.S. market for home improvement and repair is now well over $400 billion annually as the housing stock faces pressure to meet the nation’s growing and changing housing needs….
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This chapter explores the potential importance of local housing market regulation in determining homelessness in the U.S. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the connection between the operation of…
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The most immediate impact of HQ2 for non-college-educated residents would most likely be higher housing costs due to increased demand from the influx of new workers. Housing is already pricey:…
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Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans in August of 2005, devastating the built environment and displacing nearly one-third of the city’s residents. Despite the considerable literature that exists…
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This report highlights the financial stress facing teachers in regions of fast economic growth and high property values. Teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area report far greater financial anxiety…
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Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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The paper estimates a simultaneous equations model of housing price inflation 1975-1978 for a cross-section of 51 metropolitan areas…One of the major sources of inflation is shown to be a…
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Housing prices vary widely from market to market in the United States. The purpose of this study is to analyze the determinants of housing prices, with a particular focus on…
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The Portland, OR, region has had a strong urban growth boundary (UGB) since 1979, so observers have focused on the relationship between its UGB and home prices, which rose sharply…
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For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed…
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Approximately 60 percent of U.S. cities with more than 25,000 residents now impose impact fees to fund infrastructure needed to service new housing and other development. In 89 jurisdictions selected…
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Metropolitan areas with more fragmented government structures—many small suburbs—are more likely to have stringent development restrictions, which reduce the elasticity of supply of housing, than are other metropolitan areas. MSAs…
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This chapter investigates spatial variations in prices over the boom-bust cycle of housing markets both within and across urban areas. It considers the role of a new supply proxy–commuting time–in…
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The total cost of regulation amounts to about forty percent of the cost of housing across the various price segments in all of San Diego County…This study indicates that approximately…
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