Housing
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Matthew Desmond -
Rebecca Diamond
Leaders: Matthew Desmond, Rebecca Diamond
The Housing RG is tasked with exploring the the inner workings of disadvantaged neighborhoods and the low-cost housing market, with a focus on (a) the relationship between housing, employment, and poverty, (b) the causes, dynamics, and consequences of eviction, and (c) the effectiveness of housing vouchers and other housing programs. A sampling of our ongoing projects follows.
Evictions and poverty: Are evictions an important cause of deep and extreme poverty? In collaboration with Raj Chetty, Matt Desmond is starting a project on the long-term consequences of eviction that will reveal the extent to which deep and extreme poverty can be reduced with a “housing first” policy that ramps up federal housing programs.
Housing voucher policy: The U.S. currently spends approximately $20 billion per year on subsidized housing vouchers, but 80 percent of these vouchers are used in moderate- or high-poverty neighborhoods, where opportunities for upward mobility are typically limited. Can voucher policies be recast to increase the number of families moving to “high opportunity” neighborhoods?
Featured Examples
Housing - CPI Research
| Title | Author | Media | |
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| The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco | Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, Franklin Qian |
The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San FranciscoAuthor: Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, Franklin QianPublisher: American Economic Review Date: 09/2019 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 individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. |
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| Forever Homes and Temporary Stops: Housing Search Logics and Residential Selection | Hope Harvey, Kelley Fong, Kathryn Edin, Stefanie DeLuca |
Forever Homes and Temporary Stops: Housing Search Logics and Residential SelectionAuthor: Hope Harvey, Kelley Fong, Kathryn Edin, Stefanie DeLucaPublisher: Social Forces Date: 08/2019 Residential selection is central in determining children’s housing, neighborhood, and school contexts, and an extensive literature considers the social processes that shape residential searches and attainment. While this literature typically frames the residential search as a uniform process oriented around finding residential options with desired characteristics, we examine whether individuals may differentially conceive of these searches in ways that sustain inequality in residential attainment. Drawing on repeated, in-depth interviews with a stratified random sample of 156 households with young children in two metropolitan counties, we find that parents exhibit distinct residential search logics, informed by the constraints they face. Higher-income families usually engage in purposive searches oriented around their residential preferences. They search for “forever homes” that will meet their families’ needs for years to come. In contrast, low-income parents typically draw on a logic of deferral. While they hope to eventually search for a home with the unit, neighborhood, and school characteristics they desire, aspirations for homeownership lead them to conceive of their moves (which are often between rental units) as “temporary stops,” which justifies accepting homes that are inconsistent with their long-term preferences. In addition, because they are often “pushed” to move by negative circumstances, they focus on their immediate housing needs and, in the most extreme cases, adopt an “anywhere but here” approach. These logics constitute an unexamined mechanism through which economic resources shape residential searches and ultimate attainment. |
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| State of the Union 2019: Housing | Darrick Hamilton, Christopher Famighetti |
State of the Union 2019: HousingAuthor: Darrick Hamilton, Christopher FamighettiPublisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality Date: 06/2019
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| The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco | Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade, Franklin Qian |
The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San FranciscoAuthor: Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade, Franklin QianPublisher: NBER Date: 01/2018 We exploit quasi-experimental variation in assignment of rent control to study its impacts on tenants, landlords, and the overall rental market. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control increased renters’ probabilities of staying at their addresses by nearly 20%. Landlords treated by rent control reduced rental housing supply by 15%, causing a 5.1% city-wide rent increase. Using a dynamic, neighborhood choice model, we find rent control offered large benefits to covered tenants. Welfare losses from decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against rent increases were provided as government social insurance, instead of a regulated landlord mandate. |
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| State of the Union 2017: Housing | Matthew Desmond |
State of the Union 2017: HousingAuthor: Matthew DesmondPublisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality Date: 06/2017 Racial and ethnic gaps in homeownership, housing wealth, and tax expenditures on housing are still very wide. Whereas 71 percent of white families live in owner-occupied housing, only 41 percent of black families and 45 percent of Hispanic families do. Many nonwhite families were excluded from social programs that facilitated dramatic growth in homeownership in the mid-20th century. The ownership gap is related to an affordability gap. Black and Hispanic families are approximately twice as likely as white families to experience “extreme housing costs,” defined as spending at least 50 percent of income on housing.
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housing - CPI Affiliates
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Matt Desmond |
Housing Research Group Leader; Professor of Sociology |
Princeton University |
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Rebecca Diamond |
Associate Professor of Economics; Housing Research Group Leader, Assistant Professor of Economics |
Stanford University |
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Heather L. Schwartz |
Associate Director, RAND Education, Policy Researcher |
RAND Corporation |
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Jens Ludwig |
McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy, Director, University of Chicago Crime Lab, Co-Director, University of Chicago Urban Education Lab |
University of Chicago |
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Lisa Gennetian |
Research Professor, Institute for Human Development and Social Change; Director, the beELL initiative , Director, Poverty and Economic Self-Sufficiency, National Center for Research on Hispanic Families and Children; Senior Researcher, National Bureau of Economic Research |
New York University |
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Housing - Other Research
| Title | Author | Media | |
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| Does Condominium Development Lead to Gentrification? | Leah Platt Boustan, Robert A. Margo, Matthew M. Miller, James M. Reeves, Justin P. Steil |
Does Condominium Development Lead to Gentrification?Author: Leah Platt Boustan, Robert A. Margo, Matthew M. Miller, James M. Reeves, Justin P. SteilPublisher: National Bureau of Economic Research Date: 08/2019 The condominium structure, which facilitates ownership of units in multi-family buildings, was only introduced to the US during the 1960s. We ask whether the subsequent development of condominiums encouraged high-income households to move to central cities. Although we document a strong positive correlation between condominium density and resident income, this association is entirely driven by endogenous development of condos in areas otherwise attractive to high-income households. When we instrument for condo density using the passage of municipal regulations limiting condo conversions, we find little association between condo development and resident income, education or race. |
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| Building Inequality: Housing Segregation and Income Segregation | Ann Owens |
Building Inequality: Housing Segregation and Income SegregationAuthor: Ann OwensPublisher: Sociological Science Date: 08/2019 This article foregrounds housing in the study of residential segregation. The spatial configuration of housing determines the housing opportunities in each neighborhood, the backdrop against which households’ resources, preferences, and constraints play out. I use census and American Community Survey data to provide the first evidence of the extent of housing segregation by type and by cost at multiple geographic scales in large metropolitan areas in the United States from 1990 to 2014. Segregation between single- and multifamily homes and renter- and owner-occupied homes increased in most metropolitan areas, whereas segregation by cost declined. Housing segregation varies among metropolitan areas, across geographic scales, and over time, with consequences for income segregation. Income segregation is markedly higher when and where housing segregation is greater. As long as housing opportunities remain segregated, residential segregation will change little, with urgent implications for urban and housing policy makers. |
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| Subsidized Housing and the Transition to Adulthood | Yana Kucheva |
Subsidized Housing and the Transition to AdulthoodAuthor: Yana KuchevaPublisher: Demography Date: 04/2018 Despite abundant evidence about the effect of children’s socioeconomic circumstances on their transition to adulthood, we know much less about the effect of social policy programs aimed at poor families with children in facilitating how and when children become adults. This issue is particularly important for the U.S. federal subsidized housing program given its long history of placing subsidized units in some of the poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. Using counterfactual causal methods that adjust for the length of receipt of subsidized housing, I estimate the effect of subsidized housing on teenage parenthood, household formation, and educational attainment. I find that the subsidized housing program has either null or positive effects on the transition to adulthood and that these effects vary by both race and gender. These results underscore the importance of considering whether social programs have differential effects on the life chances of individuals based on both race and gender. |
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| Gentrification and the Amenity Value of Crime Reductions: Evidence from Rent Deregulation | David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, Parag A. Pathak |
Gentrification and the Amenity Value of Crime Reductions: Evidence from Rent DeregulationAuthor: David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, Parag A. PathakPublisher: NBER Date: 10/2017 Gentrification involves large-scale neighborhood change whereby new residents and improved amenities increase property values. In this paper, we study whether and how much public safety improvements are capitalized by the housing market after an exogenous shock to the gentrification process. We use variation induced by the sudden end of rent control in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 to examine within-Cambridge variation in reported crime across neighborhoods with different rent-control levels, abstracting from the prevailing city-wide decline in criminal activity. Using detailed location-specific incident-level criminal activity data assembled from Cambridge Police Department archives for the years 1992 through 2005, we find robust evidence that rent decontrol caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 reported crimes annually—with the majority of the effect accruing through reduced property crime. By applying external estimates of criminal victimization’s economic costs, we calculate that the crime reduction due to rent deregulation generated approximately $10 million (in 2008 dollars) of annual direct benefit to potential victims. Capitalizing this benefit into property values, this crime reduction accounts for 15 percent of the contemporaneous growth in the Cambridge residential property values that is attributable to rent decontrol. Our findings establish that reductions in crime are an important part of gentrification and generate substantial economic value. They also show that standard cost-of-crime estimates are within the bounds imposed by the aggregate price appreciation due to rent decontrol. |
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| Preservation of Affordable Rental Housing: Evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation's Window of Opportunity Initiative | Heather L. Schwartz, Raphael W. Bostic, Richard K. Green, Vincent J. Reina, Lois M. Davis, Catherine H. Augustine |
Preservation of Affordable Rental Housing: Evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation's Window of Opportunity InitiativeAuthor: Heather L. Schwartz, Raphael W. Bostic, Richard K. Green, Vincent J. Reina, Lois M. Davis, Catherine H. AugustinePublisher: RAND Corporation Date: 06/2016 In 2000, the MacArthur Foundation began the Window of Opportunity initiative, a 20-year, $187 million project intended to help preserve privately owned affordable rental housing. The authors of this report assess whether the initiative achieved its goals and identify lessons learned about effective preservation practices. In doing so, they also provide a summary of the evolution of practices in preserving affordable rental housing, discuss challenges and opportunities for preservation going forward, and identify lessons learned that may help other philanthropies in their own philanthropic initiatives, even if they do not pertain to housing. The authors find that the MacArthur Foundation met most of its goals for Window of Opportunity. As the initiative nears its end, large nonprofit preservation developers/owners have greater financial capacity and reputation, there are more resources and vehicles for preservation, and, to a lesser degree, the policy environment has changed to the benefit of preservation. However, Window of Opportunity has not achieved its most ambitious federal policy goals and is likely to fall short of its target for the number of privately owned affordable rental housing that will be preserved. |
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