Referred Articles
Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 1998, 75-93
Prior research has found negative impacts of public housing on neighborhood quality. Few studies have examined the impact of public and other assisted housing programs on real estate prices, particularly differential impact by program type. In this study, federally assisted housing units by program type are aggregated by 1/8‐ or 1/4‐mile radii around individual property sales and regressed on sales prices from 1989 through 1991, controlling for area demographic, housing, and amenity variables. Results show that public housing developments exert a modest negative impact on property values. Scattered‐site public housing and units rented with Section 8 certificates and vouchers have slight negative impacts. Federal Housing Administration—assisted units, public housing homeownership program units, and Section 8 New Construction and Rehabilitation units have modest positive impacts. Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit sites have a slight negative effect. Results suggest that homeownership programs and new construction/rehabilitation programs have a more positive impact on property values.
Journal of Housing Economics, Vol 7, Issue 4, 1998, 287-303
Landlord abandonment of rental housing has affected many American cities since the 1960’s. Because of data limitations, there have been few empirical analyses of the determinants of housing abandonment. In this paper, we use a rich database that contains information on individual residential properties in New York City to estimate a reduced form model of owner abandonment. We model an owner’s decision to abandon his or her property as being similar to an investor’s decision to exercise a put option on a financial instrument. When required to pay delinquent taxes, a wealth-maximizing landlord has an incentive to cede ownership of his or her residential property when the value of all outstanding liens exceeds the property’s market value. Estimates from the model are used to examine whether empirical evidence supports this option model of abandonment.
Urban Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1998
Cities in the US have become home to an increasing concentration of poor households, disproportionately composed of racial and ethnic minorities. In the US, poor and minority populations are overrepresented in public housing, mostly located in central cities. Racial and ethnic minorities in American public housing are, for the most part, composed of native-born households whereas in Europe they are more likely to be foreign-born. After a description of this concentration of poor and minority populations in public housing, we examine the effect of public housing on neighbourhood poverty rates in central cities. We construct a longitudinal database (1950-90) for four large cities-Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia—and examine the relationship between the location of public housing and changes in neighbourhood poverty rates. We find that in each city, one or more of the variables relating to the existence of public housing is significantly related to increases in neighbourhood poverty rates in succeeding decades.
Journal of Urban Economics, Vol 44. 1998
Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, Vol. 3, No.3, 1998, 193-204
This article addresses the issue of how closely the fortunes of suburbs are tied to the fortunes of the central city. We develop housing price indices for most of the zip codes in California and use them in a clustering procedure to determine whether city and suburban housing markets naturally aggregate or move separately. We find that central cities tend to group with their suburbs, suggesting that the housing markets of cities and suburbs are closely linked.
University of Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 30.1, Fall 1997, 157-210
Journal of Housing Economics, Vol 6.4, 1997
This study has two main objectives. First, we estimate various alternative specifications of the tenure choice model with borrowing constraint variables, originally put forth by Linneman and Wachter, using a more recent sample of the Survey of Consumer Finance. Second, we simulate effects of policy changes governing constraints and changes in mortgage interest rates, both on households’ owning decisions and on the aggregate homeownership rate. While the impact of constraints has been demonstrated in previous studies, our research provides the first microsimulation estimates of the impact for aggregate homeownership rates for the entire U.S. population.
Journal of Housing Research, Vol 8.2, 1997
In this paper we analyze the factors that affect the tenure choice of young adults, highlighting the impact of mortgage lender imposed borrowing constraints. The data set is a panel of youth age 20-33 for the years 1985-90. Our methods differ from most prior studies in many ways including consideration of possible sample selection bias, a richer model of the stochastic error structure, better measurement of which households are bound by borrowing constraints, and a fuller consideration of the endogeneity of wealth and income. Once all changes are implemented, we find ownership tendencies to be quite sensitive to economic variables. Specifically, potential earnings, the relative cost of owning a home, and especially borrowing constraints affect the tendency to own a home. In our sample of youth, 37% of households are constrained even after choosing their loan-to-value ratio to minimize the impact of the separate wealth and income requirements. The constraints reduce the probability of ownership of these households by 10 to 20 percentage points (a third to a half) depending on the particular characteristics of the household.
Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics Vol. 14.1/2, 1997, 173-188
This article examines the characteristics and price behavior of repeatedly transacted properties. Using data from four U.S. counties, we estimate hedonic price models of properties grouped by transaction frequency, and compare estimated standard deviations and estimated appreciation rates by group. For each of four counties studied, we find that estimated house price appreciation is systematically higher among properties that transact more frequently. One possible explanation for this result is that purchasers make property improvements that are not adequately reflected in the available data We also find that estimated standard deviations of the disturbance term show a marked decrease as the frequency of transaction increases. Since frequently transacting properties are not found to be systematically more homogeneous than seldomly transacting properties, we do not attribute this to any increase in homogeneity for frequently transacting properties, but rather to the length of time elapsed between transactions of properties. The findings of this article suggest that repeat-sales price models may need to be adjusted to account for cross-sectional variation in transaction probabilities—that is, the selectivity of the subsample of properties that transacted (or transacted repeatedly) during any finite study period.
Journal of Financial Services Research, Vol. 11.1/2 1997, 205-208
Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 7.2, 1996, 327-365
This study investigates hypotheses regarding the association of census tract variables with the risk for homelessness. We used prior address information reported by families entering emergency shelters in two large U.S. cities to characterize the nature ofthat distribution. Three dense clusters of homeless origins were found in Philadelphia and three in New York City, accounting for 67 percent and 61 percent of shelter admissions and revealing that homeless families’ prior addresses are more highly concentrated than the poverty distribution in both cities. The rate of shelter admission is strongly and positively related to the concentration of poor, African‐American, and female‐headed households with young children in a neighborhood. It is also correlated with fewer youth, elderly, and immigrants. Such areas have higher rates of unemployment and labor force nonpartici‐pation, more housing crowding, more abandonment, higher rates of vacancy, and higher rent‐to‐income ratios than other areas.
Journal of Housing Research, Vol. 7.1, 1996, 33-57
This article describes the wealth accumulation of American youth and relates it to their eventual housing choices. A data set is compiled for youth ages 20 to 33 for the years 1985 through 1990. We construct wealth profiles for each household and compare these profiles across different patterns of labor supply, marriage, fertility, gender, education, race/ethnicity, and tenure choic. We find that renters’ wealth accumulates rapidly in the year before and year of first homeownership. The factors related to this increase are marriage, increased labor supply by married women, and gifts and inheritance. Of particular interest is the finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between the local price of housing and middle- and upper-income renters’ wealth. However, there is no relationship between these variables for low-income renters. One difference between these groups is that low-income renters have no tax advantage once they become homeowners.
Housing Policy Debate, Vol 7.1, 1996 175-200
Homeownership counseling encompasses several educational activities. Early approaches focused on reducing the risk of default and foreclosure among participants in government-assisted mortgage programs, but more recent approaches have focuesd on increasing homewonership opportunities among low-income and minority households. Unfortunately, little is known about the effectiveness of these approaches in terms of the number of new homeowners and the mitigation of default risk. To address that gap, this article presents a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate counseling efforts. A successful counseling program is defined as one that assists a household with a low long-term probability of ownership in buying a home and reducing its default risk. We conced that the methodological requirements for evaluating counseling are somewhat restrictive. However, if we establish an evaluation procedure using these goals as a framework, we can more accurately determine the effects of counseling on the sustainability of low-income homeownership.