No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeorge GalsterGeorge Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University. Galster has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, North Carolina, Amsterdam, Delft, Glasgow, Mannheim, Oslo, and Western Sydney, among others. He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute before coming to Wayne State University in 1996. His research has focused on urban neighborhoods and housing markets, exploring how they change and how they change the people who live within them. This has resulted in over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 30 book chapters and seven books. His latest book is Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (2012). He has provided housing policy consultations to public officials in Australia, Canada, China, Scotland, and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.
Identifying a few indicators that summarily tracked key dimensions of neighborhoods would be invaluable for neighborhood monitoring and measuring impacts of interventions. The goal of this article is to search empirically for such robust, parsimonious indicators. In five cities, the authors analyze the interrelationships among a broad set of census tract indicators related to mortgage market activity; home prices; jobs and firms; demographic, socioeconomic, and housing stock characteristics; crime; and public assistance and health. Through factor analysis, they identify four to six neighborhood dimensions among these indicators that are common across cities. Using regression, the authors identify a parsimonious number of indicators that are inexpensive, annually updated, and available for all U.S. communities yet robustly capture significant variation in these neighborhood dimensions. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data on mortgage approval rates, loan amounts, and loan applications and Dunn and Bradstreet data on businesses comprise such a set for four of the dimensions.
Capitalists, managers, unions and government today have espoused employee ownership and participation in order to further their own selfish ends. By so doing, they unwittingly usher in full workers' democracy, and concomittant radical transformations of the socioeconomic system which, ironically, will curtail their power. These transformations would stem from our populist ideological roots and would promote profound changes in the distribution of political power and in the way the society deals with technology.
C. Institute of University of “-i.7 Business and California, ~ qA Economic Research Berkeley CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES WORKING PAPER No, 87-331 SUBSIDIES FOR REHABILITATING SINGEE- FAMILY DWELLINGS: A BENEFIT-COST ANALYSIS ' ray GEORGE» C. 'GALs:'r=:ER Thes are Pfeiiminary in nat e; 'r purpose ' to stimulate discussion comment. Therefore. they are not to b ‘ted or quoted ' ny pub ' ‘on with t express permissio the author. GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
This chapter summarizes the major themes of the book, which has aimed to enhance our understanding of the mutually causal roles in which our neighborhoods and we are intertwined. On the one hand, we make our neighborhoods. We as residential developers and property owners invest the resources to build, maintain and modify dwellings and their supportive infrastructure. Collectively, our neighbors and we tautologically constitute the profile of residents in our neighborhood. Finally, we make our neighborhoods through the local social interactions in which we engage. On the other hand, neighborhoods start to make us once we occupy them. They influence our physical and mental health by shaping our exposures to pollutants and violence and our accessibility to health care services. They influence our attitudes, especially our satisfaction with the quality of our lives. They influence the information we receive about the world, and how we interpret, evaluate and respond to it. They influence when we move and which neighborhood we will move to next. They influence our major life decisions that shape our education, fertility, work, and legal and illegal activities. Unfortunately, the market forces that drive neighborhood dynamics are inefficient and inequitable from a societal perspective.
Dam removal in the United States has grown exponentially, yet we do not know whether the pattern of such removals comports with principles of environmental justice. This exploratory study investigates the spatial pattern of dam removals across the United States to ascertain whether there were any geographic areas where the probability of removal was correlated with the racial or ethnic composition of the environs. We analyze dam removals since 2010 using national data on existing dams, removed dams, and demographics. We estimate multivariate probability models of dam removal stratified by census region and dam ownership to pinpoint contexts where significant spatial-racial patterns occur that cannot be attributed to dam characteristics. Our exploration reveals only a few such contexts. After controlling for dam purpose, construction type, age, and height, the probability of a dam being removed since 2010 is positively associated with the proportion of nearby White residents for dams owned by local or state governments in the South. The probability of removal is negatively associated with the proportion of nearby White residents for dams owned privately or by state or local governments in the West. Future case studies should probe these contexts of clear spatial–racial patterns from an environmental justice perspective.
For decades it has been widely believed that owners occupied higher quality dwellings than renters, and that a major reason for this difference was the superior investments in home maintenance undertaken by owner-occupants.' Grigsby (1963, pp. 235-6), Sternlieb (1966, pp. 176, 227), Taggart (1970, p. 123), Sternlieb and Burchell (1973, pp. 306-8), Peterson et al. (1973, pp. 46-47, 63), and Schafer (1977) have found that owner-occupants generally spent more on maintenance and engaged in maintenance activities more frequently than their absentee-owner counterparts. The implications of these studies are ambiguous, however, since a variety of other factors besides tenure, which could have explained the observed differences, were not controlled for. Recently, this conventional wisdom has been challenged in a rigorous empirical study by Ozanne and Struyk (1976, pp. 54-77), which examines dwelling conditions in a multivariate analysis. They claim that:
provide a careful, scholarly critique of palpable policy relevance.Their analysis reflects the consistent pattern that their past productive collaboration has established: a thoughtful amalgam of legal, historical, economic, and statistical expertise that yields provocative conclusions.It is thus my privilege to have the opportunity to comment upon it.The fundamental claim of Schill and Wachter's article is that past and current federal housing law and policy (especially as they relate to public housing and mortgage markets) intensify the concentration of low-income families in inner-city neighborhoods, either intentionally or unintentionally. 2 Fortunately, they argue, many of these mistakes are capable of remediation through new federal initiatives.Much of the historical evidence Schill and Wachter offer to support their claim is compelling.Although this is familiar territory to scholars, as Schill and Wachter's footnotes show, the authors present the material succinctly and powerfully.To their credit, they bring to bear econometric methods to supplement the historical analysis, and find evidence related to the geography of public housing and the rejection patterns of mortgage lenders that they claim buttress their case.My response to Schill and Wachter's analysis essentially is that important aspects of their argument are either conceptually and/or empirically inconclusive.Furthermore, their discussion of "current" federal housing policy pays insufficient attention to recent initiatives of the Clinton Administration that go a long way in the directions advocated by the authors.I will first consider Schill and Wachter's arguments that relate to public housing, then those that relate to t
The U.S. mortageg finance system has made great strides, especially in the 1990s, to increase homeownership opportunities for all Americans. A combination of lower interrest rates and higher incomes have contributed to a record 1999 homeownership rate of 66.8 percentaeup from 64.0 percent in 1993. This increase is due, in part, to the large increase in the number of low- and moderate- income families that have become homeowners in the past ten years. And both Fannie Mae and Freddie mac, by changing their guidelines and introducing new technologies, have made it easier for many lower income and minority families to become homeowners. Yet, lower income and minority families still are much less likely to own homes than are higher-income and white families.
No abstract is provided for this article.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
