Peoples' expectations will play a major role in determining choices about residential mobility, financial investments, and psychological investments in neighborhoods. This chapter explores how households, property owners, and residential developers go about acquiring information, forming expectations, assessing risks and ultimately making choices under terms of uncertainty. It presents a conceptual model of this process and synthesizes empirical research about how people form expectations and make decisions, drawing implications for neighborhood change processes. Two fundamental propositions are advanced. The proposition of asymmetric informational power states that information about the absolute decline of the current neighborhood will prove more powerful in altering residents' and owners' mobility and investment behaviors than information about its relative decline or its absolute improvement. The proposition of racially encoded signals states that key types of information shaping perceptions and expectations about the neighborhood will influence the behaviors of residents and property owners; a significant amount of such information lies encoded within the share and the growth of the black population in the neighborhood.
This report details the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) response to the major 1994 earthquake in southern California. It documents the policy response to the earthquake, synthesizes the evaluative impressions of individuals involved in formulating and implementing those policies, and distills the potential lessons and unresolved issues that will be of value for future disaster response. Also discussed is HUD's rapid development of three new policies for emergency relief?the Section 8 Emergency Certificate Program, the Mobility Program, and the HELP Program. An appendix presents a content analysis that examines the role played by five local newspapers played in shaping, documenting, and influencing HUD's efforts.
No abstract is provided for this article.
We investigate the relationship between neighborhood income composition and income trajectories of adults, employing annual panel data from Stockholm over the 1991–2008 period and multiple measures of neighborhood income mix. We advance the human geography literature in three ways by quantifying neighborhood effects that: (1) are unusually precise due to our large sample size; (2) are arguably causal and unbiased due to the econometric techniques employed; (3) are potentially heterogeneous, varying according to gender, income group, and ethnicity. Our innovative, fixed‐effect change modeling indicates that neighborhood income mix affects subsequent one‐ and five‐year income trajectories of residents in highly heterogeneous ways according to gender, income and ethnicity, and for some groups this effect is substantial. The evidence supports on Pareto improvement grounds a social mix policy that attempts to reduce the incidence of lower‐income dominant neighborhood environments and replace them with more mixed or middle‐income dominant ones.
A persistent feature of urban regions in the United States has been the marked degree of racial segregation in residential areas which effectively encloses nonwhite households in central city ghettos. It is widely believed that only a fraction of this segregation can be attributed to either racial economic differentials or to voluntary actions, although the evidence on the latter point is far from conclusive. A few authors have tried to provide alternative explanations for the observed interracial housing price differentials which revolve around either disequilibrium or higher cost of operation arguments. This paper, on the other hand, will provide a new skeptical counterpoint to the claim of discrimination by attempting to demonstrate that the existing econometric specifications cannot conclusively identify housing discrimination without recourse to arbitrary and often implausible assumptions concerning households' preferences for neighborhood racial composition and other components of the housing package. While it is not claimed that existing studies yield no inferences about discrimination, the potentially-biasing flaws of the specifications cannot be overlooked in any comprehensive consideration of the topic.
Within the last two decades, renting has become a much more popular way of accessing housing in the United States.Nearly 10 million more American households rented their homes in 2022 than in 2002, and renters now make up more than 34% of the whole.Growing rentership has been accompanied by a dwindling supply of low-cost rentals, and a rising share of households that carry severe rent burdens (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2023).The COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized the market, suddenly interrupting income for many renters (and consequently for their landlords), but also ushering in bold interventions such as eviction moratoria.This issue of Housing Policy Debate features the latest research on rental housing in the United States and has implications for rental housing policy at every level of government.Three articles set the stage by interrogating how rental affordability is measured and experienced.In "'The Rent Eats First': Rental Housing Unaffordability in the United States," Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, Alexander Hermann, and Sophia Wedeen ask how many renter households we would consider to be living in unaffordable housing if we calculated residual income (money left over after paying for rent) rather than the traditional rent-burden formula.They find that millions of American households (especially those with children) cannot cover basic nonhousing expenses after paying rent, even if they are not rent burdened per se.Matthew Brooks' "Measuring America's Affordability Problem" complements this analysis, calculating a wide array of affordability measures and examining how some measures mute or amplify racial disparities in access to affordable housing.Finally, Jovanna Rosen, Victoria Ciudad-Real, Sean Angst, and Gary Painter follow with "Rental Affordability, Coping Strategies, and Impacts in Diverse Immigrant Communities," drawing on focus groups to understand the special constraints that keep immigrant and refugee households in unaffordable rental housing.A second set of articles examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected renters, landlords, and rental housing policy in the United States.Michael Manville, Paavo Monkkonen, Michael Lens, and Richard Green, in "Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response: Evidence from COVID-19," find that tenants who missed rent payments in the first year of the pandemic usually did so because they had lost work or income (not because they were withholding rent to pay for other things).Eviction threats were rare during this time, but small landlords were the most likely to threaten delinquent tenants with eviction.Eric Seymour adds to the evidence base with "Corporate Landlords and Pandemic and Prepandemic Evictions in Las Vegas."Like Manville and colleagues, Seymour finds that smaller landlords were often more likely to evict tenants during the pandemic than their larger, corporate peers.The worst offenders in Las Vegas, though, are extended-stay properties, which evicted at high rates before the pandemic and simply accelerated evictions once COVID-19 struck.We next turn to the federal and state response with "COVID-19 Housing
Scholars have long debated the relative merits of site-based, subsidized housing owned and operated by a public entity or by the private sector. This is the first study to classify long-term residential trajectories of nationally representative low-income households in the United States by their initial assisted housing status. We employ a matched sequence analysis of neighborhood poverty and racial trajectories of low-income households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics who formed during 1988–1992. Among households carefully matched by their demographic and economic attributes, we find that those first forming households in public housing spend much longer durations over the subsequent 20 years in poorer, minority dominant neighborhoods than similar households first forming in market-rate housing do. In contrast, forming a household in private site-based subsidized housing is associated with superior neighborhood socioeconomic (but not desegregated racial composition) trajectories compared with starting in market-rate housing. Implications for housing policy are discussed.
The paper first outlines the pure theoretical model, specifying the basic elements of utility functions, transformation functions, and the choice of optimum housing quality. Next, the richness of the model is demonstrated by using it to explain several realistic scenarios in both comparative static and dynamic contexts. Its predictions will be compared to those of previous models and to available empirical evidence.
This paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects, explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state. We employ a longitudinal database comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan Sweden 1991–1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status. We control for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first-difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991–1995 and 1996–1999 periods. We further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non-movers. These methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low-, middle- and high-income males. Nevertheless, statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist, though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status. Males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Several of the papers appearing in this issue were originally presented at a conference 'Inside Poverty Areas' hosted by the University of Cologne in December 2004. This issue of Housing Studies has been co-ordinated by us in collaboration with the regular co-editors of the journal. In addition to the reviews of the editors, all papers have been subjected to the usual, anonymous peer review process of Housing Studies.
The Denver Child Study explores the extent to which multiple dimensions of neighborhood context affect the physical and behavioral health, exposure to violence, risky behaviors, education, youth and young adult labor market outcomes, and marriage and childbearing of Latino and African-American children and youth from low-income families. The study uses a natural experiment involving the Denver, Colorado, Housing Authority (DHA), which since 1969 has operated public housing units located in a wide range of neighborhoods throughout the city and county of Denver. Because the initial assignment of households on the DHA waiting list to vacant public housing units (and, thus, to neighborhoods) mimics a random process, this program represents an unusual opportunity for reducing parental geographic selection bias and observing the unusual combination of low-income, minority youths raised for extended periods in advantaged (as well as disadvantaged) neighborhoods.
We investigate spatial patterns of residential and nonresidential land use for 257 United States metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far, the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, which became more prevalent per unit of geographic area, but less spatially concentrated and farther from the historical urban core, on average. Our exploratory factor analyses reveal that four factors summarize land use patterns in both years, and remained relatively stable across the two years: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. Mean factor scores vary by metropolitan population, water proximity, type, and Census region. Improved measurement of metropolitan land use patterns can facilitate policy and planning decisions intended to minimize the most egregious aspects of urban sprawl.
A multi-equation recursive model is specified wherein the level and inequality of income in US metropolitan areas are functions of population, labor force characteristics, industrial structure, and occupational structure. Parameters are estimated for a 1980 sample of 120 standard metropolitan statistical areas representative of all population sizes. These parameters suggest that metropolitan areas of 1.9 million population demonstrate on average the greatest inequality, ceteris paribus. Population proved not to be strongly correlated with per capita income, either directly or indirectly.
We present a conceptual framework for metropolitan opportunity and a model of individual decision making about issues affecting youth's future socioeco‐nomic status. Decision making and its geographic context have objective and subjective aspects. Objective spatial variations occur in the metropolitan opportunity structure—social systems, markets, and institutions that aid upward mobility. Decisions are based on the decision‐maker's values, aspirations, preferences, and subjective perceptions of possible outcomes, which are all shaped by the local social network (e.g., kin, neighbors, and friends). We also review the psychological literature on decision making. We hypothesize that the decision‐making method varies with the range of opportunities considered: Those with fewer options adopt a less considered method wherein mistakes and short‐term focus are more likely. Our review also finds empirical evidence that the local social network has an important effect on youth's decisions regarding education, fertility, work, and crime. Policy implications are discussed.
In this paper, an assessment is made of the extent to which proximity to 38 dispersed public housing sites opening in Denver during 1992-95 affected post-development levels and trends in neighbourhood crime rates. A new econometric specification incorporating pre- and post-controls for selection bias as well as spatial autocorrelation was employed to test for statistical relationships between the development of dispersed public housing sites and subsequent increases in various types of crime. The findings suggest that proximity to dispersed public housing was not associated with any post-development increase in reported crime of any type.
In 2013 Detroit became the largest municipality to declare bankruptcy. Unfortunately, bankruptcy does not treat the long-term cause of Detroit’s financial crisis: the ongoing fiscal death spiral triggered by loss of industrial, commercial and residential tax base starting in the 1950s. The first loss came from manufacturers who abandoned older factories in the city in favor of suburban locations. The second came from the federal government, whose guarantees for FHA-VA mortgages and subsidies for expressway construction spurred suburbanization of Detroit’s (overwhelmingly white) middle class. Detroit trimmed services and raised tax rates in response. But this made it an increasingly uncompetitive location, thereby further contracting its property and income tax bases, forcing still more cuts in services and increases in tax rates. What is required to break out of the fiscal death spiral in which Detroit finds itself is substantially more federal and state revenue sharing and regional growth management.
