This paper aims to understand residential mobility in non-market economies by conducting a case study of Chinese cities, a socialist society in transition. It is argued that residential mobility in China is mainly triggered by changes in housing supply and housing qualification, both of which are determined by housing policies. Using a retrospective survey (1949–94) in 20 Chinese cities, it was...

The use of short-term rental subsidy vouchers offers a new approach to addressing the housing needs of families facing homelessness. In Massachusetts, the Family Home pilot program placed homeless families in housing instead of shelter, providing two years of rental subsidy plus support services with the goal of enabling families to maintain market rate housing. This mixed-method case study com...

This paper proposes four metrics to measure sprawl in metropolitan regions as marginal changes in land use over time. The metrics (change in urban housing unit density, marginal land consumption per new urban household, housing unit density in newly urbanized areas and percent of new housing units located in previously developed areas) are computed for all 329 metropolitan areas in the continen...

With prices skyrocketing for housing, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is much talk about a housing bubble. However, the rapid price increases could also be due to changes in fundamentals: implicit rents, interest rates, and property and income tax rates. I use sales and implicit rental data from 1983 to 2005 for the City of San Francisco that is available through national accoun...

This paper seeks to address the problem of the empirical identification of housing market segmentation, once we assume that submarkets exist. The typical difficulty in identifying housing submarkets when dealing with many locations is the vast number of potential solutions and, in such cases, the use of the Chow test for hedonic functions is not a practical solution. Here, we solve this problem...

There has been considerable debate in recent years regarding the role of behavioral factors in determining housing prices. The question of whether psychology matters in the housing market has been settled long ago: the answer is yes. Rather, economists are now debating in what ways psychology impacts market behavior and how large an effect this impact has on housing prices. One oft-cited exampl...

Two decades of China's urban housing reform has produced significant quantitative and qualitative improvements. Despite various policies aimed to promote owner-occupied residential housing, the extent of commodification has been limited, and, in particular, most ownership transactions are independent of market considerations. This paper analyzes the reasons why significant commercial owner-occu...