An official website of the United States government
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.
more »
« less
Housing, Distribution, and Welfare
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
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2215080
- PAR ID:
- 10512919
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of money credit and banking
- ISSN:
- 0022-2879
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
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.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
-
Abstract Hurricanes significantly harm homeowners through physical damage and long-term financial strain due to rising insurance costs, property value loss, and repair expenses. This paper focuses on the interrelated decisions of the government mitigation funding of residential acquisitions and retrofit subsidies and of price restrictions on the insurance market in eastern North Carolina to determine the financial effects on stakeholders. The introduction of these policy interventions have impacts that propagate through the system due to risk adjustments, homeowner take-up behaviour, and insurer profit-maximising behaviour. This study uses an integrated game theoretic model to demonstrate that there are cost-effective government spending levels that reduce residential loss from hurricane damage. When insurance prices are capped at preintervention levels, the number of households and their distribution of losses, which has been altered through mitigation, leads to increased insurer insolvency. When insurance prices are allowed to adjust after mitigation, some homeowners find insurance is no longer affordable. This highlights the tradeoff between ensuring insurer stability and expanding homeowner insurance accessibility.more » « less
-
Housing searches play a central role in the reproduction of racial inequality in U.S. cities. Past research finds that movers’ social ties influence residential segregation, as renters receive information about homes located near friends and family. Fewer studies examine how renters’ social ties also provide instrumental assistance during moves, or how this aid unequally shapes moving outcomes. In the present study, I show how 69 low-income, Latina/o and non-Hispanic white renters rely on their friends, family, and acquaintances to navigate moves in Los Angeles, a highly unaffordable rental market. Both groups mobilize their ties for instrumental assistance, but the resources available through renters’ ties contribute to diverging search outcomes. Low-income Latina/o renters’ ties, who also struggled to make ends meet, provided what I call constrained support—referrals to open units, loans to cover moving costs, and informal rental opportunities. This assistance channeled movers to specific apartments and left them negotiating informal, doubled-up homes and new debt. In contrast, low-income white renters leveraged comparatively affluent ties to cosign leases, provide financial gifts, and strengthen applications across buildings—what I refer to as flexible assistance. This aid helped low-income white movers secure housing advantages, while avoiding short-term reciprocal obligations to friends and family. These findings advance research on residential mobility and social support, and they show how network resource inequalities contribute to racial stratification in rental markets.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jmcb.13136
