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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How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into…
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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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American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American…
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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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A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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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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Scholars and policymakers have identified neighborhood activism and participation as a valuable source of policy information and civic engagement. Yet, these venues may be biasing policy discussions in favor of…
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In the rogues’ gallery of regulatory rent-seeking, copyright and patent laws are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. According to the ingenious and highly effective rhetoric of their beneficiaries and supporters,…
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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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Does owning property influence how individuals engage in the political process? This is a fundamental question in political economy, and a timely one given recent interest in understanding “NIMBYism” and…
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How does neighbors’ income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich US local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live…
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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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Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to access forms of political participation likely to…
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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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Housing is the most important asset for the vast majority of American households and a key driver of racial disparities in wealth. This paper studies how residential segregation by race…
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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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Worldwide, land ownership is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of communities founded in the frontier…
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Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that…
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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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Hence this report, which aims to help leaders understand how, and how much, changing demands for place are influencing the clustering of jobs both across and within metropolitan areas. The…
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In order to highlight the significance of why this policy change would be detrimental for the California housing market, it is critical to understand the ways that rent control reduces…
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This paper presents evidence that job suburbanization caused significant declines in black employment from 1970 to 2000. I document that, conditional on detailed job characteristics, blacks are less likely than…
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Is there a way for states to usefully recalibrate the local politics of land use while accepting homeowners as they are? This essay argues that state planning mandates could be…
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“A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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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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Although the pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. We used New York State…
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We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to explore the spatial structure of social networks in the New York metro area. We highlight the importance of transportation infrastructure in…
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Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies…
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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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This paper examines the tech cluster phenomenon by considering three partially answered questions. We first ask how to define a tech cluster—that is, what properties are required to be a…
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Residential energy demand can be greatly influenced by the types of housing structures that households live in, but few studies have assessed changes in the composition of housing stocks as…
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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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This paper estimates the link between population density and COVID-19 spread and severity in the contiguous United States. To overcome confounding factors, we use two Instrumental Variable (IV) strategies that…
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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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How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights – such as the right of possession or the right of transfer – differentially impact outcomes, such as…
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Researchers and policy-makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic…
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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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A fatal conflict in the legal definition of family lurks at the intersection of family law and zoning law. Family law doctrines have increasingly embraced the claims of “functional families”—those…
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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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There is significant evidence that restrictions on residential land use reduce housing supply, increase house prices, and limit inflows of low‐income households. Local decision‐makers often argue that their efforts are…
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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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In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining…
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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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California cities have some of the highest housing prices in the United States, but most of the state’s urbanized land is set aside for the least efficient uses. Using data…
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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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Many urban areas use non-cumulative zoning – zoning exclusive to one use (typically manufacturing) that prohibits other uses even if those uses are considered less noxious. Proponents of this zoning…
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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 its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking…
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This paper focuses on colocation rather than segregation in the context of Japanese large cities. Using the time cost of commuting from traditional urban economic theory, we analyze how different…
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Transportation scholars have long known that infrastructure investments both depend upon current land use patterns and spur changes in those patterns. There is a massive literature built around what are…
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This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom. We focus on Spanish local governments because of the…
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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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We argue, by contrast, that the dismissal of plans was shortsighted and has helped contribute to the excessive strictness of zoning in our richest and most productive cities and regions,…
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At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities. This paper estimates urban agglomeration effects, exploring simple and very nuanced measures of…
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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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Differences in the supply of housing generate substantial variation in housing prices across the United States. Because housing prices influence migration, the elasticity of housing supply also has an important…
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New survey data on residential land use regulation in California have allowed us to create the Mercatus-Augmented Terner California Housing Regulation (MATCHR) Index, which characterizes formal restrictions on density in…
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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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How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build…
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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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