Income Elasticity of Demand for Large, Modern Rapid Transit Rail Networks

In spite of evidence to the contrary, there is a common perception inside of academia and out that rail transit is an inferior good. This paper proposes a demand model for radial subway networks utilizing the monocentric city model in order to quantify the income elasticity of demand. This model is tested against extant data from the 2000 Census, and controls for spatial variability, demographic and economic factors, and commuter costs. This paper concludes that while the factors that drive demand vary across urban areas, the results suggest that rail transit may in fact be a normal good

What Can We Learn from the 1918 Pandemic? Careful Economics and Policy Lessons from Influenza

Economists and policymakers have turned to the 1918 Spanish flu for guidance on the COVID-19 crisis, and some have been cheered by the example of its sharp post-pandemic economic recovery. Policymakers have also been encouraged to use lockdowns and school closures (called non-pharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs) in part by research showing that 1918’s NPIs saved lives while aiding the subsequent economic recovery. I review a wide range of research to caution that our own recovery will likely be harder and slower because of how the economy has evolved. I conclude by discussing pro-recovery policy that account for post-1918 economic changes

The Effects of an Ellis Act Eviction on Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status

Rent-control advocates argue that its strongest feature is offering tenants strong protections from economic displacement. Nonetheless, rent control may have negative effects on tenants, as previous research has shown that these tenants have longer commutes and higher unemployment rates because they are incentivized to stay in place even after their location is no longer optimal. I study what happens to tenants when they are displaced from their rent-controlled apartments by exploiting a California law called the Ellis Act that allows landlords in Los Angeles and San Francisco to evict tenants even if they are lease-compliant, under the condition that all the tenants in the building must be evicted at once and are compensated by the landlord with substantial relocation payments. In large apartment buildings (five units or more), these Ellis Act evictions act as an exogenous shock because these landlords are unlikely to be evicting all their tenants just to target an individual household. Using Infutor data, I identify over 900,000 people who lived in a five-plus unit rent-controlled apartment in either San Francisco or Los Angeles in 1999, 11,470 of whom were evicted between 2000 and 2007. I find that evicted tenants were less likely to stay in their original city and more likely to live in lower-income and lower-intergenerational-mobility neighborhoods than control tenants. The negative effects of these evictions appear to be highly persistent: neighborhood socioeconomic status is lower for the evicted group than the control group at least 12 years ex post. These findings support that the Ellis Act imposes steep costs on tenants and may be partially undermining California’s recent attempts to improve housing affordability and stability

Do Rent Increases Reduce the Housing Supply under Rent Control? Evidence from Evictions in San Francisco

Rent control balances strong tenant protections with supply-side incentives for landlords. However, cities with rent control are also some of the United States\u27 most unaffordable, prompting questions about how well these incentives are working. I examine how controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to price increases using a well-identified hyperlocal demand shock the privately operated commuter shuttle systems in San Francisco. Controlled landlords increased market withdrawal filings and became less likely to create vacancies via evictions in response to a shuttle stop placement. Policies raising barriers to market withdrawals prompted controlled landlords to respond my increasing their at-fault evictions

The Case for Dynamic Cities

Cities today are confronting never-before-seen challenges to their top spot in the economic hierarchy. In this chapter, we lay out four challenges, past and future, that cities face today and identify policies that can help address the problems we identify. We call attention to the need for many U.S. cities to redevelop the large amount of aging postwar single-family housing, while reforming past exclusionary zoning and infrastructure decisions that exacerbated inequality. Cities will have to fix these past mistakes against the backdrop of an aging population and the rise of remote working, both of which undercut cities’ traditional source of growth by reducing the flow of younger and middle-aged people willing to live in urban centers. The common theme running throughout this paper is that cities, their residents and their business leaders will need to embrace a dynamic ethos and be given a freer hand to reposition their municipalities to face a future that is shaping up to be quite different from the past

Rent Control in California: Policy Review

The largest number of housing units subject to rent control can be found in California, but the policy environment is quite complex and is characterized by a series of interacting state and local laws. This complexity represents a significant barrier for researchers and policymakers seeking a clear and accurate picture of how rent control works in California, and how it incentivizes different behaviors among landlords and tenants alike. This technical report surveys rent control rules in California, with special attention paid to the recent statewide rent caps, historic developments, and the systems in Los Angeles and San Francisco. This report should be regarded as a selective snapshot of the current system, and researchers interested in pursuing their own analyses involving the California systems are encouraged to conduct supplemental legal research. This paper will be updated on a rolling basis as further information comes to light