Publications
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Transforming Foreclosed Properties into Community Assets
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.
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Neighborhood Effects of Concentrated Mortgage Foreclosures
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.
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Spillovers and Subsidized Housing: The Impact of Subsidized Rental Housing on Neighborhoods
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.
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The Effects of Inclusionary Zoning on Local Housing Markets
Many local governments in metropolitan areas with high housing costs are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing housing that is affordable to low- and moderate-income households without direct public subsidies. Critics charge that IZ ordinances impose additional costs on new development and may lead to reductions in supply and increases in the price of market rate housing. Advocates of IZ argue that any negative effects IZ might have on production can be mitigated through density bonuses or other cost offsets. Rigorous empirical study of the effects of inclusionary zoning ordinances has been hampered by the lack of accurate, timely data describing IZ and the land use regulatory schemes in which IZ programs fit. In this paper, we use panel data on the adoption and characteristics of IZ in the San Francisco and Washington DC metropolitan areas and the Boston-area suburbs to analyze which jurisdictions adopt IZ, how much affordable housing the programs produce and the effects of IZ on the prices and production of market-rate housing. The IZ programs among our sample jurisdictions are complex policies and exhibit considerable variation in their design, particularly across the three regions. We find that larger, more highly educated jurisdictions and those surrounded by more neighbors with IZ are more likely to adopt IZ. Whether and how many affordable units are produced under IZ depends primarily on the length of time IZ has been in place. The results from Boston-area suburbs provide some evidence that IZ has contributed to increased housing prices and lower rates of housing production. There is no evidence that IZ has constrained supply or increased prices among Bay Area jurisdictions. Limitations on the availability and quality of our data suggest that our results should be interpreted cautiously, but also suggest that IZ programs should be designed cautiously to mitigate possible negative impacts on housing supply.
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The Condominium v. Cooperative Puzzle: An Empirical Analysis of Housing in New York City
One of the enduring puzzles of New York City’s housing market is the persistence of the housing cooperative, despite the prevailing wisdom that condominiums are more valuable than cooperatives. In this article, we examine the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of cooperatives and condominiums, and apply these theoretical insights to empirically test whether there is a price premium attributable to condominium housing. We then use our findings to speculate as to why the cooperative form remains dominant in New York City and whether its dominance is likely to continue in the future. The empirical analysis is based on hedonic models of house values and uses rich data on apartments sold in New York City between 1984 and 2002.
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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 Impact of Low Income Housing Tax Credit Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods: Evidence from NYC
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.
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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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Does Federally Subsidized Rental Housing Depress Neighborhood Property Values?
Few communities welcome subsidized housing, with one of the most commonly voiced fears being reductions in property values. Yet there is little empirical evidence that subsidized housing depresses neighborhood property values. This paper estimates and compares the neighborhood impacts of a broad range of federally-subsidized, rental housing programs, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model.
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The Impact of Subsidized Housing Investment on New York City’s Neighborhoods
The contemporary assumption is that the production of subsidized housing, if anything, accelerates neighborhood decline – “there goes the neighborhood” is the common refrain. Partially as a result, we’ve seen the policy pendulum swing away from place-based housing investment towards demand-side housing programs, such as housing vouchers. Through multiple studies, the Furman Center has consistently found significant, positive impacts from subsidized housing investment, suggesting that publicly-funded housing investments aimed at distressed urban properties can deliver significant benefits to the surrounding community.