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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| 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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| The E ffects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment | Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz |
The E ffects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity ExperimentAuthor: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. KatzPublisher: Date: 08/2015 The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children's long-term outcomes using administrative data from tax returns. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood signicantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13) when their families moved. These children also live in better neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single parents. The treatment effects are substantial: children whose families take up an experimental voucher to move to a lower-poverty area when they are less than 13 years old have an annual income that is $3,477 (31%) higher on average relative to a mean of $11,270 in the control group in their mid-twenties. In contrast, the same moves have, if anything, negative long-term impacts on children who are more than 13 years old when their families move, perhaps because of the disruption effects of moving to a very dierent environment. The gains from moving fall with the age when children move, consistent with recent evidence that the duration of exposure to a better environment during childhood is a key determinant of an individual's long-term outcomes. The findings imply that offering vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods to families with young children who are living in high-poverty housing projects may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty and ultimately generate positive returns for taxpayers. |
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| Neighborhood Income Composition by Race and Income, 1990-2009 | Sean F. Reardon, Joseph Townsend, Lindsay Fox |
Neighborhood Income Composition by Race and Income, 1990-2009Author: Sean F. Reardon, Joseph Townsend, Lindsay FoxPublisher: Date: 07/2015 Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of one another, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint distribution of race/ethnicity and income among neighborhoods. In this paper, we use a new technique to describe the average racial composition and income distributions in the neighborhoods of households of different income levels and race/ethnicity. Using data from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, we investigate how patterns of neighborhood context in the United States over the past two decades vary by household race/ethnicity, income, and metropolitan area. We find large and persistent racial differences in neighborhood context, even among households of the same annual income. |
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| Housing and the Great Recession | Ingrid Gould Ellen, Samuel Dastrup |
Housing and the Great RecessionAuthor: Ingrid Gould Ellen, Samuel DastrupPublisher: Date: 10/2012 The story of the Great Recession cannot be told without addressing housing and, in particular, the dramatic decline in housing prices that began in late 2006. A distinctive feature of the Great Recession is its intimate connection to the housing sector; indeed many would argue that the Great Recession was triggered by the widespread failure of risky mortgage products. Whatever the sources of the Great Recession may have been, the housing sector is still deeply troubled and is a key contributor to our ongoing economic duress. This recession brief lays out the main features of the downturn in the housing sector. |
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| Neighborhood Effects on Economic Self-Sufficiency: A Reconsideration of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment | Clampet-Lundquist Susan, Douglas S. Massey |
Neighborhood Effects on Economic Self-Sufficiency: A Reconsideration of the Moving to Opportunity ExperimentAuthor: Clampet-Lundquist Susan, Douglas S. MasseyPublisher: American Journal of Sociology Date: 07/2008 |
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housing - CPI Affiliates
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Robert Haveman |
Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Economics, Faculty Affiliate, Institute for Research on Poverty |
University of Wisconsin-Madison |
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Thomas McDade |
Carlos Montezuma Professor of Anthropology; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research; Director, Laboratory of Human Biology Research |
Northwestern University |
| Lisa Sanbonmatsu |
Senior Researcher |
NBER | |
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Jackelyn Hwang |
Assistant Professor of Sociology |
Stanford University |
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Francesca Mari |
She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and others. She is a 2022 National Fellow at New America and a 2023 Radcliffe Fellow. |
Pages
Housing - Other Research
| Title | Author | Media | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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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| Dynamics of Urban Neighborhood Reciprocity: Latino Peer Ties, Violence and the Navigation of School Failure and Success | Maria G. Rendon |
Dynamics of Urban Neighborhood Reciprocity: Latino Peer Ties, Violence and the Navigation of School Failure and SuccessAuthor: Maria G. RendonPublisher: Routledge Date: 04/2015 |
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| Housing Discrimination in Metropolitan America: Explaining Changes between 1989 and 2000 | Stephen L. Ross and Margery Austin Turner |
Housing Discrimination in Metropolitan America: Explaining Changes between 1989 and 2000Author: Stephen L. Ross and Margery Austin TurnerPublisher: Date: 05/2005 |
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| Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United States | Lauren J. Krivo and Robert L Kaufman |
Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United StatesAuthor: Lauren J. Krivo and Robert L KaufmanPublisher: Demography Date: 08/2004 |
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| Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment | Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan and Paul Hirschfield |
Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility ExperimentAuthor: Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan and Paul HirschfieldPublisher: Quarterly Journal of Economics Date: 05/2001 |
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Housing - Multimedia
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