Publications Tagged ‘renters’
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Working Paper
American Murder Mystery Revisited: Do Housing Voucher Households Cause Crime?
In recent years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has shifted resources from public housing to the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV or “voucher”) program. There were 2.2 million vouchers nationwide in 2008, compared to 1.2 million public housing units. Although the academic and policy communities have welcomed this shift, community opposition to vouchers can be fierce, due to perceptions that voucher-holders will both reduce property values and heighten crime. Despite the public concerns, however, there is virtually no research that systematically examines the link between the presence of voucher holders in a neighborhood and crime. Our paper uses longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime and voucher utilization data in 10 large U.S. cities over 12 years, and finds voucher-holders moving to a neighborhood does not, in fact, increase crime. We do see, on the other hand, that households with vouchers tend to move to communities when crime rates are rising.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael C. Lens, Katherine O’Regan. November 2011.
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Article
Rental Housing Policy in the United States
In this volume of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s policy development and research journal, Cityscape, guest editors Vicki Been and Ingrid Gould Ellen bring together seven innovative proposals from leading housing researchers calling for changes in government policies to benefit renters and their communities. This collection of articles propose reforms, such as the elimination of the mortgage interest deduction, which could serve as viable alternatives to traditional federal rental programs. These perspectives offer U.S. policymakers ways to potentially adapt international housing assistance models to reform the domestic housing market.
Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen. Cityscape (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) . July 2011.
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Data Brief
Key Findings on the Affordability of Rental Housing from New York City’s HVS 2008
Every three years, the U.S. Census Bureau releases the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS), which assesses changes in various aspects of New York City’s housing and neighborhoods. The primary goal of the survey is to estimate the rental vacancy rate in the City, but the survey also provides valuable insight into other trends in the housing stock. However, the data are released in a format that is hard to understand without statistical software. In order to make the findings available to a wider audience, we have analyzed the data about New York City’s neighborhoods and compiled this summary of noteworthy trends.
Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. June 2009.
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Article
No Renters in My Suburban Backyard: Land Use Regulation and Rental Housing
Academics and policymakers have argued that the ability of low- and moderate-income families to move into desirable suburban areas is constrained by the high cost of housing. Local zoning and other forms of land use regulation are believed to contribute to increased housing prices by reducing supply and increasing the size of new housing. Suburban restrictions on rental housing are particularly likely to reduce mobility for low-income families. In this paper, I employ an instrumental variables approach to examine the effects of zoning on the quantity and price of rental housing in Massachusetts, using historical municipal characteristics to instrument for current regulations. Results suggest that communities with more restrictive zoning issue significantly fewer building permits for multifamily housing but provide only weak evidence of the effects of regulations on rents. The lack of effects on rents may reflect the low level of multifamily development, while analysis is complicated by development of subsidized housing under the state’s affordable housing law.
Schuetz, Jenny. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management . March 2009.
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Article
Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Nation’s Foreclosure Crisis
Renters are innocent victims of the foreclosure crisis, losing their homes through no fault of their own when their landlord goes into foreclosure. Until lately, the national discussion on the foreclosure crisis largely focused on owner-occupied homes, but recent analysis reveals that the crisis is significantly impacting renters across the country. New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that in New York City, well over half of all foreclosure filings in 2007 were on two to four family or multi-family buildings, and a growing body of data and anecdotal evidence indicates that the problem is not isolated to New York City; heart wrenching stories of renters losing their homes have appeared in newspapers nationwide.
Vicki Been & Allegra Glashausser. 2 Alb. Gov't L. Rev. 1 (2009) . February 2009.
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Chapter
Spillovers and Subsidized Housing: The Impact of Subsidized Rental Housing on Neighborhoods
Rental housing is increasingly recognized as a vital housing option in the United States. Yet government policies and programs continue to grapple with widespread problems, including affordability, distressed urban neighborhoods, poor-quality housing stock, concentrated poverty, and exposure to health hazards in the home. These challenges can be costly and difficult to address. The time is ripe for fresh, authoritative analysis of this important yet often overlooked sector.
Ingrid Gould Ellen. Revisiting Rental Housing (Brookings Institution Press) . December 2008.
affordable housing, neighborhoods, renters, subsidized housing
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Article
Does Federally Subsidized Rental Housing Depress Neighborhood Property Values?
Few communities welcome subsidized housing, with one of the most commonly voiced fears being reductions in property values. Yet there is little empirical evidence that subsidized housing depresses neighborhood property values. This paper estimates and compares the neighborhood impacts of a broad range of federally-subsidized, rental housing programs, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Michael H. Schill, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and Ioan Voicu. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 26, No. 2 . March 2007.
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Article
Nonprofit Housing and Neighborhood Spillovers
Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighborhood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these impacts on neighborhoods. This paper compares the neighborhood spillover effects of city-supported rehabilitation of rental housing undertaken by nonprofit and for-profit developers, using data from New York City. To measure these benefits, we use increases in neighboring property values, estimated from a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We study the impacts of about 43,000 units of city-supported housing completed during the 1980s and 1990s, and our sample of property transactions includes nearly 300,000 individual sales.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Ioan Voicu. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 25(1) . December 2005.
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Article
The Utilization of Rental Housing Assistance By Immigrants in the United States and New York City
The large influx of immigrants to the United States and New York City from poorer countries has sparked considerable debate as to whether immigrants are becoming a “public charge” to American society. Most arguments have centered around immigrants’ use of cash assistance programs. This article compares immigrants’ receipt of rental housing assistance with that of native-born Americans.
Bivariate analyses reveal that immigrants, as a group, are no more likely than native-born households to use any form of rental housing assistance. Indeed, in most instances immigrants are less likely than native-born households to receive assistance, with two exceptions: immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 and immigrants from the former Soviet Union in New York City. Multivariate analyses reveal similar results, except that immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 are no more likely than other immigrants to receive housing assistance when we control for other factors.
Friedman, Samantha, Michael H. Schill, and Emily Rosenbaum. Housing Policy Debate, (1999) . July 2005.
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Chapter
Comment on ‘The Effects of Affordable and Multifamily Housing on Market Values of Nearby Homes
Advocates of growth management and smart growth often propose policies that raise housing prices, thereby making housing less affordable to many households trying to buy or rent homes. Such policies include urban growth boundaries, zoning restrictions on multi-family housing, utility district lines, building permit caps, and even construction moratoria. Does this mean there is an inherent conflict between growth management and smart growth on the one hand, and creating more affordable housing on the other? Or can growth management and smart growth promote policies that help increase the supply of affordable housing?
Ingrid Gould Ellen. Growth Management and Affordable Housing: Do They Conflict? . December 2004.
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