No abstract is provided for this article.
We synthesize the vast, international scholarly literature related to the growing problem of housing affordability. As a foundation for assessing both the causes of housing affordability problems and possible policies for alleviating them, we take a systematic, holistic perspective and specify nine structural relationships for a metropolitan area that comprehensively delineate the determinants of housing affordability. We discuss concepts and measures of housing affordability, evidence on the primary causes and effects of unaffordable housing, alternative policy approaches, potential future trends in affordability, and suggestions for further research. While focusing on the most recent, high-quality empirical evidence, we also rely on previously published reviews and seminal papers in order to provide historical perspective on how the literature has evolved. Our reconnaissance of the international literature since 2008 demonstrates that although evaluation research in the context of western, developed countries' housing policies has dominated, increasingly such research has emerged from other countries.Highlights We discuss how to frame housing affordability issues, synthesize evidence from the relevant literature, and propose directions for future research.We take a holistic perspective to understand causes of housing affordability problems and assess policy responses.Our review of the international scholarly literature encompasses the evidence from non-western, developing countries.Despite the extensive literature, there remain unexplored questions and emerging topics.
Public housing authorities (PHAs) are entering a brave new world. Major proposed changes to the public housing program will force PHAs to compete with private sector providers for tenants. To succeed, they will have to act more like entrepreneurial market participants: to change their management practices, the types of tenants they house, and the kinds of developments they operate, and to attract private capital for the development and operation of public‐private public housing ventures. PHAs must confront the challenges of transformation while pursuing four mutually conflicting goals: housing the neediest, achieving diversity of tenantry, cross‐subsidizing by attracting unsubsidized tenants, and attracting private capital. Success, or even survival, may require sacrificing one or more of these goals. Whether PHAs can increase housing production to such an extent that they can provide sufficient housing for the neediest while fulfilling the other goals as well remains unclear. Keywords: Low‐income housingPolicyMarkets
:Do the geographic contexts in which disadvantaged children are raised influence whether they have difficulties in elementary school? We address this question by estimating Cox proportional hazard models with instrumental variable measures of context, using data for 410 low-income Latino and African American children who lived in Denver public housing before age six. The Denver Housing Authority's procedure for allocating families to dwellings mimics random assignment, thus offering an unusual natural experiment for measuring context effects isolated from geographic selection bias. We find that several socioeconomic and demographic contextual indicators are statistically and substantively important predictors of low-income Latino and African American children's difficulties in elementary school, though sometimes in nonlinear and interactive ways. Generally, the hazard of being assigned to special education classes, suspended, or forced to repeat a grade is greater in neighborhoods with higher occupational prestige and percentages of immigrants and lower in those with higher percentages of African American residents.
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.
We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, employment, and fertility outcomes. Effects are contingent on when a youth was first assigned to public housing and the neighborhood characteristic in question. Benefits from neighbors of higher occupational prestige are stronger if a child begins experiencing them at a younger age, whereas negative consequences of neighborhood crime are only manifested for teens. Neighborhood effect sizes apparently depend on the interaction among exposure duration, disruption effects of mobility, and developmental stage-specific differences in vulnerability to the given neighborhood effect mechanism operative. Our results hold powerful and provocative implications for where assisted housing should be developed and how applicants should be assigned to neighborhoods.
As compared with places that are gentrifying or experiencing concentrated disadvantage, middle neighborhoods have been largely ignored by urban scholars and planners. This oversight must be rectified because middle neighborhoods play a vital role in the overall health of a city and in the well-being of its poorest citizens, even if they do not live in them. This chapter establishes a rationale for why scholars and policymakers should seriously consider middle neighborhoods as a locus of potential policy innovation and intervention.
Virtually all aspects of socioeconomic inequality in the United States are organized in space (Sampson, 2012). The spatial organization of inequality is, in part, simply a manifestation of inequali...
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Neighbourhoods are salient for many dimensions of individuals’ social and economic well-being, yet the impacts of rapidly emerging digital information and communication technologies (DICTs) on neighbourhoods and the social processes within them are understudied. This gap motivates this Special Issue, the themes of which we introduce here. We provide an overarching conceptual framework within which the topics, conceptualisations and empirical results of the 11 constituent research papers can be placed. Our framework posits multiple, mutually causal interrelationships between each element in the triad of neighbourhoods, individual residents’ characteristics and individual residents’ actions. In each element we focus on the role(s) of DICTs and their interplay with social processes. These technologies alter traditional housing search patterns, sometimes reinforcing existing segregation, but they also present opportunities for greater access to information and potential social integration. The issue’s 11 research papers, contributed by scholars from various global contexts, explore diverse aspects of these themes. They examine how DICTs mediate neighbourhood change by influencing local housing choices, amplifying or mitigating neighbourhood stigma and transforming social cohesion. By offering a rich empirical and conceptual exploration, this special issue aims to deepen our understanding of the transformative role that DICTs play in neighbourhoods, urging further research into their implications for neighbourhood change and urban social processes.
Flood risks are forecast to rise significantly across many parts of Europe, USA, and Asia. As the climate warms, sea levels will continue to rise and the water holding capacity of the atmosphere will increase exponentially. At the same time, the cost of building flood barriers will increase disproportionately with every additional centimetre of height. For many countries, these flood risks will be highly localised, however, and with strong spatial spillovers. This paper uses a unique dataset for 5 boroughs in London to develop a spatial econometric simulation model of the impacts of current and future flood risks on house prices and the location of employment. We consider the broader socio-economic implications of our results.
This paper examines the results of a paired testing study of neighbourhood-based discrimination in the provision of quotes for home insurance in New York City and Phoenix, Arizona. We examine whether agents treated insurance-seekers buying their first homes in moderate-income, predominantly black or Hispanic-occupied neighbourhoods differently from insurance-seekers in comparable predominantly white neighbourhoods. The study examines differences in whether a quote is provided, the type of insurance and policy options offered and the premium quoted. Overall, of 10 key measures (5 for each city), only 1 (optional replacement cost coverage on personal property in Phoenix) showed a statistically significant difference consistent with discrimination. Testers in Hispanic neighbourhoods of Phoenix were quoted premiums 12 per cent higher than those offered to testers in white neighbourhoods. This difference, however, is in line with the price schedules for the state-approved rating territories in which the white and Hispanic homes were located.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
:Our study contributes to the growing literature on how insurance industry practices vary across space in ways that may unfairly penalize central cities. We utilize a unique, comprehensive database that allows us to examine the spatial patterns of premiums collected and claims paid out to policyholders for all home and auto insurance companies in Michigan during 2001–2002. As a result, we can test whether higher premiums typically charged in urban areas are justified by the higher claims losses incurred there. Territories that persistently evince low ratios of losses to premiums for a given policy type, all else equal, provide prima facie evidence of excessive premium-setting. We analyze three groups of homeowners’ policies, delineated by the comprehensiveness of perils covered and the nature and level of compensation provided in case of loss, and three auto policy types—mandatory, collision, and comprehensive coverage. We find that both premiums and claims losses are higher in urban than suburban areas of Michigan, on average. However, the mean loss ratios for all segments of the home insurance market are not systematically lower in urban areas, even after a host of proxies for transactions costs are employed as controls. The same results appertain in the case of auto insurance across all but one policy type, comprehensive, where loss ratios are 16% lower in urban compared to suburban territories statewide, all else equal.
Neighborhood is the bundle of spatially based attributes associated with a proximate cluster of occupied residences, sometimes in conjunction with other land uses.
This report charts the evolution of American urban policy since the 1960s to help readers understand attempts to make our cities more livable and what these attempts reveal about the policymaking process and policy research and how that research has influenced American urban policy. Nine core topics in the urban social agenda are analyzed. They are economic development, poverty, family support and social welfare, housing, land use and transportation, education, drug abuse, racial discrimination and segregation, and intergovernmental financial arrangements. A chapter describing the evolution of the Urban Institute and a chapter on managing urbanization in the developing world are also included.
