This paper develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets. We extend Rosen’s hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to local public goods and externalities. The model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these “capitalization effects” and w...

Although the rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, in the United States it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of poor minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use...

Since the early 1980s, low-income housing subsidies have increasingly shifted towards vouchers which allow recipients to rent in the private market. By 1993, vouchers subsidized as many households as lived in traditional housing projects, although most low-income households did not receive any subsidies. This study investigates whether this policy has raised rents for unsubsidized poor househol...

"Mortality data for ischaemic heart disease and lung-bronchus cancer in the 29 metropolitan boroughs of London and the 37 electoral wards of Glasgow are standardised for age and sex relative to an all-U.K. norm. The standardised mortality ratios (S.M.R.) obtained, when expressed in map form, reveal marked spatial inequalities. A relationship with social class and concomitant housing and livin...

This paper studies the links between housing policies and aggregate energy use in the U.S. I connect two strands of literature on cities–that cities vary in their per capita energy use and in terms of housing supply elasticity–to measure the e↵ects of location choice and housing consumption on aggregate energy use. I build a dynamic spatial equilibrium model of U.S. metropolitan areas, accounti...

Differences in Quality of Life Estimates Using Rents and Home Values Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages”, where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous researchers typically have us...

– Conventional segregation indices indicate complete integration when the proportion of minorities in a metropolitan area is replicated in any subarea. However, this would not occur, even absent discrimination, because majorities and minorities have different distributions of other residence-determining characteristics. Segregation indices derived from predictions of commuting times for blacks,...

Recent public attention has focused on whether and the extent to which Housing Choice Voucher Recipients (HCVRs) influence crime. Journalistic accounts of HCVR mobility imply that they do cause crime thus shedding negative light on the largest federal housing assistance program. This paper adds to the growing empirical literature in this area by examining in places among the 100 largest metropo...

Contrary to the conventional diagnosis of urban problems, this article argues that these problems do not arise from the long-term trends in the decentralization of employment and population in metropolitan areas. Instead, the most important fiscal problems confronted by central-city governments and the most significant social and economic problems of central-city residents arise from increased ...