A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as subsidized low-income housing, either via tenant-based rental assistance or construction of public or private projects, is that it has a real effect on market outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of subsidized housing – does it increase the housing stock? If subsidized housing raises the quantity of occupied hous...

This paper argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the “commodification” of housing and gives strong encouragement to private market provision of housing for sale, for rent and capital gain and less attention to housing need. The paper examines the extent and causes of house price increases over the last decade, it draws com...

I construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in this paper to study the fluctuations in the U.S. housing markets. The model features a market for newly built houses, a secondary market for old houses, and an endogenous term structure of nominal interest rates. Negative technological progress in the housing sector explains the upward trend in house prices over the past four ...

Inclusionary zoning (IZ) is an affordable housing tool that links the production of affordable housing to the production of market-rate housing. IZ policies either require or encourage new residential developments to make a certain percentage of the housing units affordable to lowor moderateincome residents. In exchange, many IZ programs provide cost offsets to developers, such as density bonus...

After the abolishment of object subsidies for housing construction and renovation in the mid 1990s, Dutch housing associations, the main non-profit housing providers in the country, heavily relied on market activities, such as selling homes to owner occupiers, to generate income for their social activities and to contribute to urban development policies. This worked well, which was one of the m...

Previous estimates of childhood lead poisoning prevention benefits have quantified the present value of some health benefits, but not the costs of lead paint hazard control or the benefits associated with housing and energy markets. Because older housing with lead paint constitutes the main exposure source today in the US, we quantify health benefits, costs, market value benefits, energy saving...

This paper proposes a model in which house prices are determined by housing affordability in the short run, while being determined by acquisition costs in the long run. Housing affordability is, in turn, determined by nominal income and nominal mortgage payments. The model explains the recent housing market run-up by lower housing repayment, decreasing nominal interest rates, and a large inflow...

Despite their importance as investment vehicles and as housing, very little analysis of multifamily markets has been undertaken to date. The literature that has been produced has, with few exceptions discussed below, focused on the aggregate national market, or occasionally on the regional market. But housing markets are well known to be local and diverse. The purpose of this paper is to examin...

In the U.S., macroeconomic policy makers are concerned about how consumers will respond to falling incomes, nominal home prices, falling income, rising mortgage interest rates and tightening credit standards. In order to address these questions, we estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand. In the model, consumers maximize expected discounted lifetime utility from housi...

This paper presents the key findings from a 2004 NESC study on the Irish housing system, Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy. The paper begins by identifying the anxieties and concerns people have about housing. These cluster into three broad concerns: the stability of the housing market, the degree of inequality in housing opportunities experienced during the housing boom and the sustai...