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1. Housing, Distribution, and Welfare

   https://doi.org/10.1111/jmcb.13136  

   Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro; Michaelides, Alexander; Nikolov, Kalin (February 2024, Journal of money credit and banking)

   Housing is a long-lived asset whose value is sensitive to variations in expectations of long-run growth rates and interest rates. When a large fraction of households has leverage, housing price fluctuations cause large-scale redistribution and consumption volatility.We find that a practical way to insure the young and the poor from the housing market fluctuations is through awell-functioning rental market. In practice, homeownership subsidies keep the rental market small and the housing cycle affects aggregate consumption. Removing homeownership subsidies hurts old homeowners, while leverage limits hurt young homeowners 

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2. The Unequal Availability of Rental Housing Information Across Neighborhoods

   https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9357518  

   Besbris, Max; Schachter, Ariela; Kuk, John (July 2021, Demography)

   Abstract As more urban residents find their housing through online search tools, recent research has theorized the potential for online information to transform and equalize the housing search process. Yet, very little is known about what rental housing information is available online. Using a corpus of millions of geocoded Craigslist advertisements for rental housing across the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States merged with census tract–level data from the American Community Survey, we identify and describe the types of information commonly included in listings across different types of neighborhoods. We find that in the online housing market, renters are exposed to fundamentally different types of information depending on the ethnoracial and socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhoods where they are searching. 

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3. Collective responsibility in wildfire mitigation: optimizing subsidies for enhancing community resilience

   https://doi.org/10.23967/icossar.2025.008  

   Wang, Zhujun; Lee, Ji Yun (January 2025, CIMNE)

   Wildfire poses an escalating threat to communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where both government efforts and homeowner actions are critical for risk reduction. While actions such as home hardening, defensible space creation, and vegetation management are recognized as effective, homeowner adoption rates remain suboptimal. This highlights the need to better understand the drivers of homeowner mitigation behavior, the dynamic interactions with neighbors, and strategies to incentivize broader participation. Existing research largely examines individual decision-making in isolation, often neglecting the interdependence among homeowners inherent in wildfire mitigation as a collective action problem. Moreover, the role of government subsidies in promoting mitigation actions remains underexplored. This study develops a utility-based model that captures homeowners’ mitigation decisions by incorporating income, homeownership tenure, wildfire risk, mitigation costs and benefits, and neighbor behaviors. Using Nash equilibrium analysis, we examine how homeowner strategies evolve under different levels of government subsidy and assess the collective utility outcomes for the community. Our results demonstrate the existence of a critical subsidy threshold necessary for wildfire mitigation to become the dominant homeowner strategy and highlight the importance of early-stage interventions and personal risk framing to overcome free-riding behavior and coordination failures. These results also underscore the importance of dynamic, targeted subsidy policies to foster collaborative mitigation efforts and strengthen WUI community resilience. 

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4. Predatory Inclusion in the Market for Rental Housing: A Multicity Empirical Test

   https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231221079001  

   Besbris, Max; Kuk, John; Owens, Ann; Schachter, Ariela (January 2022, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World)

   Using a unique data set of millions of advertisements for rental housing and data on the geographic distribution of housing voucher holders, we examine the limits of housing market policies that rely on private-market landlords to meet public needs. We find that although advertised affordable housing is more prevalent in some zip codes than others, voucher households are more geographically clustered than affordable housing. Moreover, voucher holders are overly concentrated in “lower opportunity” zip codes, those with fewer resources for children’s well-being, despite the advertisement of affordable housing in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Using text-analysis techniques, we identify advertisements that explicitly accept or reject voucher holders and find that ads seeking voucher-holding tenants are overrepresented in lower opportunity neighborhoods. We evaluate the significance of these findings for theories of predatory inclusion. 

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5. Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Manhattan: Evidence from the Housing Market

   https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2020.12  

   Gray, Rowena (January 2020, Social Science History)

   null (Ed.)

   ABSTRACT Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time. 

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