The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market

Increasing supply is frequently proposed as a solution to rising housing costs. However, there is little evidence on how new market-rate construction—which is typically expensive—affects the market for lower quality housing in the short run. I begin by using address history data to identify 52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, their previous address, the current residents of those addresses, and so on. This sequence quickly adds lower-income neighborhoods, suggesting that strong migratory connections link the low-income market to new construction. Next, I combine the address histories with a simulation model to estimate that building 100 new market-rate units leads 45-70 and 17-39 people to move out of below-median and bottom-quintile income tracts, respectively, with almost all of the effect occurring within five years. This suggests that new construction reduces demand and loosens the housing market in low- and middle-income areas, even in the short run

Warding Off Development Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs

Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control affects housing production by exploiting a common electoral reform—changing from “at-large” to “ward” elections for town council. These reforms, which are not typically motivated by housing markets, shrink each representative’s constituency from the entire town to one ward. Difference-in-differences estimates show that this decentralization decreases housing units permitted by 24 percent, with 47 percent and 12 percent effects on multi- and single-family units. The effect on multifamily is larger in high-homeownership towns

Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs

Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control affects housing production by exploiting a common electoral reform—changing from “at-large” to “ward” elections for town council. These reforms, which are not typically motivated by housing markets, shrink each representative’s constituency from the entire town to one ward. Difference-in-differences estimates show that this decentralization decreases housing units permitted by 24 percent, with 47 percent and 12 percent effects on multi- and single-family units. The effect on multifamily is larger in high-homeownership towns

Black Suburbanization: Causes and Consequences of a Transformation of American Cities

Since 1970, the share of Black individuals living in suburbs of larger cities has risen from 16 to 36 percent. We study the causes and consequences of this shift, which involved as many people as the post-World War II wave of the Great Migration. We show that Black suburbanization is widespread across regions and suburban neighborhood types, while Black and total population have declined drastically in historically majority-Black city neighborhoods. A neighborhood choice model suggests that changes in relative housing prices and amenities each explain 30 to 50 percent of the shift to the suburbs, while rising education levels and regional reallocation together explain 10 percent. Next, we find that suburbanization accounts for over half of both the recent increase in within-Black income segregation and the improvement in the average Black household’s neighborhood quality. Suburbanization’s association with stratification is partially explained by low White flight and differentials in the supply of low-cost housing

Supply Shock Versus Demand Shock: The Local Effects of New Housing in Low-Income Areas

We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent relative to locations slightly farther away or developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. Results are driven by a large supply effect—we show that new buildings absorb many high-income households—that overwhelms any offsetting endogenous amenity effect. The latter may be small because most new buildings go into already-changing areas. Contrary to common concerns, new buildings slow local rent increases rather than initiate or accelerate them

Race to the Bottom? Local Tax Break Competition and Business Location

I analyze how competition between localities affects tax breaks and business location decisions. I first use a geographic instrument to show that spatial competition substantially increases firm-specific property tax breaks. I then use this pattern to estimate a model of localities competing for mobile firms by offering tax exemptions. Incounterfactual exercises, restricting which levels of government can offer tax breaks has little effect on equilibrium business locations but lowers total exemptions by 30 percent. This suggests that local tax break competition primarily reduces taxes for mobile firms and is unlikely to substantially affect the efficiency of business location