Publications
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The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values
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.
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The Effects of Small Area Fair Market Rents on the Neighborhood Choices of Families with Children
This paper reports and extends the quantitative findings of the Small Area Fair Market Rent Demonstration Evaluation, focusing on the important subgroup of families with children. The authors test whether varying housing assistance subsidy caps with ZIP Code rent levels (that is, introducing Small Area Fair Market Rents or SAFMRs) increases the likelihood that voucher-holder families with children locate in higher opportunity neighborhoods, as proxied by poverty rates, the proficiency levels of local elementary schools, jobs proximity, and environmental hazards. Five years after implementation, Small Area FMRs do not appear to affect overall move rates, but they meaningfully affect the locational outcomes among families with children who move.
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The External Effects of Place-Based Subsidized Housing
This study examines the external effects of subsidized housing built in New York City during the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper finds significant and sustained benefits to the surrounding neighborhood. Neighborhood benefits increase with project size and decrease with distance from the project sites. A simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that New York City’s housing investments delivered a tax benefit to the city that exceeded the cost of the city subsidies provided.
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The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988: The First Decade
Thirty years ago, Congress enacted the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed for the first time private as well as public discrimination in housing. Twenty years later, Congress passed the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, a law that significantly expanded the scope of the original legislation and strengthened its enforcement mechanisms. Like most important pieces of Federal legislation, the Fair Housing Act and the 1988 Amendments Act embody a series of careful compromises crafted by members of Congress.
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The High Cost of Segregation: Exploring Racial Disparities in High-Cost Lending
This article argues that policy makers addressing racial disparities in the share of subprime mortgages must take into account the relationship between existing levels of racial segregation and the racial disparities in the types of mortgages homeowners received. The authors examine approximately 200 metropolitan areas across the country and note the significant racial disparities in the percentage of subprime mortgages received by different racial groups. Various mechanisms that explain these racial disparities are also explored. The authors ultimately conclude that residential segregation plays a significant role in shaping lending patterns.
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The Housing Conditions of Immigrants in New York City
The influx of immigrants to New York City increases the demand for housing. Because the city has one of the nation’s tightest and most complicated housing markets, immigrants may disproportionately occupy the lowest-quality housing. This article examines homeownership, affordability, crowding, and housing quality among foreign- and native-born households. Overall, foreign-born households are more likely to be renters and encounter affordability problems. Multivariate analyses reveal that foreign-born renters are more likely to live in overcrowded and unsound housing but less likely to live in badly maintained dwellings. However, compared with nativeborn white renters, immigrants—especially Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Caribbeans, Africans, and Latin Americans—are more likely to live in badly maintained units. Because this disadvantage is shared by native-born blacks and Hispanics, it strongly suggests that race and ethnicity are more significant than immigrant status per se in determining housing conditions.
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The Impact of Business Improvement Districts on Property Values: Evidence from New York City
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.
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The Impact of School Reform on Student Performance
This paper evaluates the impact of the New York Networks for School Renewal Project, a whole school reform initiated by the Annenberg Foundation as part of a nationwide reform strategy. It uses data on students in randomly chosen control schools to estimate impacts on student achievement, using an intent-to-treat design. After controlling for student demographic, mobility, and school characteristics, the authors find positive impacts for students attending reform schools in the fourth Grade, mixed evidence for fifth Grade, and slight to no evidence for sixth Grade. On average, there is a small positive impact. The paper illustrates how relatively inexpensive administrative data can be used to evaluate education reforms.
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The Impact of the Capital Markets on Real Estate Law and Practice
Over the past twenty years, the real estate markets of the United States have been swept by enormous change. A sector of the economy that had long been resistant to change, real estate has been and is continuing to be transformed by the process of securitization on both the debt and equity side. Just twenty years ago, the vast majority of single family residential mortgage loans were provided by local banks or savings and loan associations that held the debt in their portfolios until maturity or prepayment. Today, most single family mortgage debt is sold into the secondary mortgage market and converted into securities. Ten years ago, mortgage loans for commercial properties were largely originated and held by commercial banks, pension funds or insurance companies. In recent years, with the exception of the meltdown of the commercial mortgage-backed securities market in the summer of 1998, the proportion of commercial loans that were securitized rapidly grew. Just six or seven years ago, real estate investment trusts (REITs) were commonly thought of as the investment entity that crashed and burned in the 1970s. In the last two or three years, however, REITs have increasingly come to be seen as a dominant, if not preeminent ownership vehicle in many real estate markets throughout the nation.
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The Importance of Using Layered Data to Analyze Housing: The Case of the Subsidized Housing Information Project
The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently developed a new database through its Subsidized Housing Information Project (SHIP). The SHIP database combines more than 50 disparate data sets to catalogue every privately owned, publicly subsidized affordable rental property developed in New York City with financing and insurance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), HUD projectbased rental assistance, New York City or State Mitchell-Lama financing, or the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program. The pooling and layering of data, as well as
combining the data with other local housing and neighborhood information, in databases like the SHIP allow for a clearer understanding of the existing affordable housing stock and enable practitioners to more effectively target resources toward the preservation of affordable housing.
