Publications Tagged ‘neighborhoods’
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Working Paper
How Low Income Neighborhoods Change: Entry, Exit, and Enhancement PDF
Ingrid Gould Ellen, Kathy O'Regan. August 2010.
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Working Paper
The Role of Neighborhood Characteristics in Mortgage Default Risk: Evidence from New York City PDF
We construct a database of non-prime hybrid adjustable and fixed rate mortgages from New York City that augments a rich set of loan and borrower risk characteristics with a variety of census tract level neighborhood characteristics. We find that these neighborhood characteristics are important for default behavior, even after an extensive set of controls. First, default rates increase with the rate of foreclosure notices and the number of lender-owned properties (REOs) in the tract. Second, default rates for home purchase mortgages are higher in predominantly black tracts, regardless of the borrower’s own race. We explore possible explanations for our findings.
Sewin Chan, Michael Gedal, Vicki Been, Andrew Haughwout. June 2010.
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White Paper
Building Environmentally Sustainable Communities: A Framework for Inclusivity PDF
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has decided to include two key goals in all of its programs: encouraging sustainable communities and enhancing access to opportunity for lower-income people and people of color. This paper examines the relationship between these two goals through a literature review and an original empirical analysis of how these goals interact at the neighborhood and metropolitan area levels. We also offer policy recommendations for HUD.
Vicki Been, Mary Cunningham, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Adam Gordon, Joe Parilla, Margery Austin Turner, Sheryl Verlaine Whitney Aaron Yowell, and Ken Zimmerman. May 2010.
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Chapter
Exploring Changes in Low-Income Neighborhoods in the 1990s PDF
While there has been much talk of the resurgence of lower-income urban neighborhoods in the United States over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been surprisingly little empirical examination of the extent and nature of the phenomenon. Our chapter aims to address these key questions. In the first half, we undertake a broad empirical investigation of income changes in low-income neighborhoods in U.S. cities during the 1990s, comparing them to the changes that occurred during the two previous decades. In the second half of the chapter, we explore some reasons why the fortunes of lower-income urban neighborhoods improved during the 1990s.
Ingrid Gould Ellen & Katherine O'Regan. December 2009.
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White Paper
An Opportunity to Stabilize New York City’s Neighborhoods PDF
A core mission of the Furman Center is to provide essential data and analysis about New York City’s housing and neighborhoods to those involved in land use, real estate development, community economic development, housing, research and urban policy. Towards this end, we present this fact sheet describing some of the ways that government agencies and other stakeholders can use data to target the use of funds made available to stabilize neighborhoods in the wake of the foreclosure crisis.
Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. July 2009.
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Working Paper
Crime and U.S. Cities: Recent Patterns and Implications PDF
For most of the twentieth century, U.S. cities – and their high-poverty neighborhoods in particular—were viewed as dangerous, crime-ridden places that middle class, mobile (and typically white) households avoided, fueling suburbanization. While some pundits and policy analysts bemoaned this urban flight, others voiced concern over the potential impact of crime-ridden environments on the urban residents who were left behind. In the past decade or so, the media has instead highlighted the dramatic reductions in crime taking place in many large cities. In this paper we explore these crime reductions and their implications for urban environments.
Ingrid Gould Ellen & Katherine O'Regan. January 2009.
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White Paper
Transforming Foreclosed Properties into Community Assets PDF
Last May, the Furman Center, with support from the Ford Foundation, convened leading housing researchers, policymakers, lenders, and nonprofit housing organizations to discuss how best to leverage public and private resources to reuse foreclosed properties in a manner that helps stabilize neighborhoods. The Furman Center has produced a White Paper, Transforming Foreclosed Properties into Community Assets, that documents that roundtable conversation, summarizes much of the discussion’s substance, and includes links to resources—ranging from existing research papers on related topics to listings of REO properties—that we hope will be useful to practitioners, researchers and policymakers involved in neighborhood stabilization projects.
Josiah Madar, Vicki Been, Amy Armstrong. December 2008.
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Article
Neighborhood Effects of Concentrated Mortgage Foreclosures LINK
As the national mortgage crisis has worsened, an increasing number of communities are facing declining housing prices and high rates of foreclosure. Central to the call for government intervention in this crisis is the claim that foreclosures not only hurt those who are losing their homes to foreclosure, but also harm neighbors by reducing the value of nearby properties and in turn, reducing local governments’ tax bases. The extent to which foreclosures do in fact drive down neighboring property values has become a crucial question for policy-makers. In this paper, we use a unique dataset on property sales and foreclosure filings in New York City from 2000 to 2005 to identify the effects of foreclosure starts on housing prices in the surrounding neighborhood. Regression results suggest that above some threshold, proximity to properties in foreclosure is associated with lower sales prices. The magnitude of the price discount increases with the number of properties in foreclosure, but not in a linear relationship. Working Paper
Schuetz, Jenny, Vicki Been and Ingrid Gould Ellen. Journal of Housing Economics . December 2008.
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Article
Neighbors and Neighborhoods LINK
The concept of neighborhood has long been a topic of popular discourse and a subject of academic interest. Despite this attention, there is little agreement on what the term ‘neighborhood’ means.
Ingrid Gould Ellen. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. December 2008.
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Chapter
Spillovers and Subsidized Housing: The Impact of Subsidized Rental Housing on Neighborhoods LINK
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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Policy Brief
The Impact of Supportive Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods: Evidence from New York City PDF
This study on the neighborhood impacts of supportive housing examines the effects that 123 supportive housing developments across New York City’s five boroughs have had on surrounding property values over an 18-year period.
Amy Armstrong, Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Gedal, Ioan Voicu. November 2008.
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Working Paper
The Impact of Supportive Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods PDF
Communities across New York City and around the nation commonly oppose proposals to open supportive housing in their neighborhoods because of fear that the housing will decrease the quality of life in the neighborhood, and lead to reductions in property values. This study aims to give supportive housing providers and local government officials objective, credible information to guide policy decisions and to respond to opponents’ fears and arguments. Using a difference-in-difference regression model to isolate the effect of supportive housing from more general macro and micro market trends and neighborhood variations, this paper examines the impact that almost 7,500 units of supportive housing created in New York City over the past twenty years have had on their host neighborhoods over time.
Been, Vicki, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Gedal, Ioan Voicu. October 2008.
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Article
Reversal of Fortunes? Low Income Neighborhoods in the 1990s LINK
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O'Regan. Urban Studies 45(4), 2008: 845-869. April 2008.
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Working Paper
The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values PDF
Cities across the United States that have considerable vacant land are debating whether to foster community gardens on that land, while cities with land shortages are debating when to replace gardens with other uses. Meanwhile, many cities are looking for new ways to finance green spaces. Little empirical evidence about the neighborhood impacts of community gardens is available, however, to inform the debate or to help cities design financing schemes. This paper estimates the impact of community gardens on neighborhood property values, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that gardens have significant positive effects, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact.
Been, Vicki and Ioan Voicu. Real Estate Economics, Vol. 36, Issue 2, (Summer 2008). June 2007.
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Working Paper
The Impact of Low Income Housing Tax Credit Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods: Evidence from NYC PDF
In this report, we examine the neighborhood impact of low income housing tax credit developments in New York City, where 42,077 units of LIHTC housing were newly constructed or rehabilitated between 1987 and 2003.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould and Ioan Voicu. May 2007.
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Working Paper
The Impact of Business Improvement Districts on Property Values: Evidence from New York City PDF
Our paper aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of BIDs on commercial property values in New York City. With the largest pool of BIDs in the country, New York is an ideal study site. Its 55 BIDs encompass a broad range of budget sizes, services and locations. This large and diverse set of BIDs, together with the city’s tremendous size and diversity of neighborhoods, allows us to examine the impact of BIDs in very different types of areas, including both very high-density office districts and more suburban-style, retail strips. Thus, we can gain some insight into the underlying mechanisms through which BIDs influence property values and the circumstances under which BIDs may be a useful tool for local economic development. Further, the diversity of BID and neighborhood types offers the opportunity to examine the robustness of our findings, and gauge the extent to which the lessons learned can be generalized and applied to other cities and circumstances.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Ioan Voicu. Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, (2007). May 2007.
business improvement districts, economic development, neighborhoods, property values
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Article
Comment on ‘Metropolitan Growth, Inequality, and Neighborhood Segregation by Income’ LINK
Over the last three decades, residential segregation by income has become an increasingly important feature of the U.S. metropolitan landscape. From 1970 to 2000, income sorting grew in large cities. In the 1980s almost all American metropolitan areas experienced a rise in segregation of the rich from the poor, though these changes were slightly offset by modest declines in segregation during the 1990s. More than 85 percent of the U.S. metropolitan population lived in an area that was more segregated by income in 2000 than in 1970. The time trend in residential segregation by income hints that income inequality may play an explanatory role.
Ingrid Gould Ellen. Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs . December 2006.
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Working Paper
The Impact of Subsidized Housing Investment on New York City’s Neighborhoods PDF
Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. July 2006.
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Article
Nonprofit Housing and Neighborhood Spillovers PDF
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.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Ioan Voicu. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 25(1). December 2005.
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Working Paper
Nonprofit Housing and Neighborhood Spillovers PDF
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, Vol. 25, No. 1, (2006 ). August 2005.