Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010
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 [...]
Housing America’s Older Adults 2019
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 [...]
Inclusionary Zoning and Housing Market Outcomes
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 [...]
The Spatial Mismatch Between Innovation and Joblessness
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 [...]
Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement
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 [...]
Housing, urban growth and inequalities: The limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality
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 [...]
Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data
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 [...]
Who Pays for Rent Control? Heterogeneous Landlord Response to San Francisco’s Rent Control Expansion
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 [...]
Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge
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 [...]
The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values
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 [...]