Planning an Affordable City
America faces a housing affordability crisis in its most economically dynamic cities, including metropolises like New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston where prices are rising faster than [...]
How Land-Use Regulation Undermines Affordable Housing
To varying degrees, most municipalities regulate urban development with zoning, density restrictions, and parking requirements. Such policies restrict the housing supply and urban density relative to what it could be [...]
When Moving Matters: Residential and Economic Mobility Trends in America, 1880-2010
In recent years, observers across America’s political spectrum have expressed concern over declining residential mobility and its implications for economic mobility in the United States. There is a widespread belief [...]
Barriers to Shared Growth: The Case of Land Use Regulation and Economic Rents
Before I turn to longer-term structural trends, let me highlight that the housing recovery has been strong in recent years, aided by a wide range of countercyclical policies from the [...]
Bright Minds, Big Rent: Gentrification and the Rising Returns to Skill
In 1980, housing prices in the main US cities rose with distance to the city center. By 2010, that relationship had reversed. We propose that this development can be traced [...]
House Prices, Local Demand, and Retail Prices
We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail prices to changes in local house prices, with elasticities of 15%-20% across housing booms and busts. Notably, [...]
Land-Use Regulations, Property Values, and Rents: Decomposing the Effects of the California Coastal Act
Land-use regulations can lower real estate prices by imposing costs on property owners, but may raise prices by restricting supply and generating amenities. We study the effects of the California [...]
US Immigration Levels, Urban Housing Values, and Their Implications for Capital Share
In the densest urban areas of the United States, we find that 11.6 percent of the median contract rent prices are determined by the increased level of immigration relative to [...]
Housing Development Toolkit
Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including [...]
A Tool Kit to Close California’s Housing Gap
The housing shortage not only is costly for people renting or buying homes, but it also weakens California’s economy as a whole. We calculate that the housing shortage costs the [...]