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This paper examines the question of whether there is any correlation between the prevalence of nonprofit organizations with property, plant, and equipment exempt from property taxation and the property tax burden for homeowners. Data from the Tax Foundation and Internal Revenue Service was used to analyze general-purpose local governments within larger counties (populations greater than 65,000) in the United States for years 2005 and 2006. Several econometric specifications were used to estimate homeowner property tax burden as a function of the value of nonprofit fixed assets, government tax structure characteristics, and a series of control variables. Our estimates suggest that county geographies with greater presence of nonprofits tend to have higher homeowner tax burdens on average. Specifically, the value of nonprofit tax-exempt fixed assets within a county geography that is 10% above the mean of $15.4 million is generally associated with a median property tax paid by homeowners as a % of household income that is between 0.0009% and 0.0154% above the mean or between $2 and $24 higher on average. The median property tax paid as a % of homeowner’s home value would be between 0.0006% and 0.0069% above the mean or between $3 and $12 higher on average. Overall, we find a strong, positive correlation between nonprofit fixed assets and property tax burden for homeowners at the local level.

A family’s housing unit provides more than simply shelter. It also provides a set of neighborhood amenities and a package of local public services, including, most critically, a local school. Yet housing and education policymakers rarely coordinate their efforts, and there has been little examination of the schools that voucher holders or other assisted households actually reach. In this project we describe the elementary schools nearest to households receiving four different forms of housing assistance in the country as a whole, in each of the 50 states, and in the 100 largest metropolitan areas.We compare the characteristics of these schools to those accessible to other comparable households. We pay particular attention to whether voucher holders are able to reach neighborhoods with higher performing schools than other low-income households in the same geographic area.

In brief, we find that assisted households as a whole are more likely to live near low-performing schools than other households. Surprisingly, Housing Choice Voucher holders do not generally live near higher performing schools than households receiving other forms of housing assistance, even though the voucher program was created, in part, to help low-income households reach a broader range of neighborhoods and schools. While voucher holders typically live near schools that are higher performing than those nearest to public housing tenants, they also typically live near schools that are slightly lower performing than those nearest to households living in Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Projectbased Section 8 developments and lower performing than those nearest to other poor households.

While less well known to the average American than other federal affordable housing programs such as public housing, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC) is the largest federal program for the production and preservation of affordable housing. Over the past 25 years it has financed the new construction or rehabilitation of more than 2.2 million affordable units, which represents more than enough units to house the population of Colorado. It also, in 2010, accounted for half of all multifamily housing production. Despite its importance, policymakers know little about the tenants the LIHTC program serves, or about the program’s effects on individuals and communities.

Increasingly, local governments are trying to meet the parking needs of their residents and visitors more efficiently, and in ways that are more consistent with broader sustainability, transportation, and land use goals. Concerns about traffic congestion, housing affordability, and anticipated population growth have even prompted some policy analysts and policymakers to reexamine the well-entrenched practice of mandating a minimum number of parking spaces that developers must include in residential developments

The immediate cause of the housing bubbles in the United States and the eurozone periphery was not regulatory oversight failure, but the precipitous drop in interest rates in the early 2000s. Without China's rise, China and other emerging economies' savings would not have depressed long-term interest rates worldwide. 

CHANGING FORTUNES - HOW CHINA’S BOOM CAUSED THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Since the financial crisis in 2008 and the ensuing economic recession that rocked the world economy, plenty of blame has been going around. The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, specifically singled out subprime mortgages and the Wall Street bankers that sold those mortgages. In bureaucratic jargon it is often dubbed a regulatory oversight failure. This study, however, shows that the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy at the start of the new millennium triggered the U.S. refinancing boom in 2003 and 2004, spurring personal consumption expenditures through home equity extraction. The U.S. spending binge boosted economic growth and savings in China and oil-exporting nations. The build-up of savings in China, which are heavily skewed towards fixed income assets, depressed interest rates worldwide from 2004 on. The decline in long-term interest rates accounts for the U.S. housing boom. Despite popular belief, the proliferation of exotic mortgage products can hardly be faulted for the U.S. housing boom and eventual bust.

A speculative bubble in the housing market comes with Dutch disease-like symptoms. 

The twenty-first century is emerging as the century of the "super-commuter," a person who works in the central county of a given metropolitan area, but lives beyond the boundaries of that metropolitan area, commuting long distance by air, rail, car, bus, or a combination of modes. The super-commuter typically travels once or twice weekly for work, and is a rapidly growing part of our workforce. The changing structure of the workplace, advances in telecommunications, and the global pattern of economic life have made the super-commuter a new force in transportation.

Many workers are not required to appear in one office five days a week; they conduct work from home, remote locations, and even while driving or flying. The international growth of broadband internet access, the development of home-based computer systems that rival those of the workplace, and the rise of mobile communications systems have contributed to the emergence of the super-commuter in the United States. Super-commuters are well-positioned to take advantage of higher salaries in one region and lower housing costs in another.

Many workers are not expected to physically appear in a single office at all: the global economy has made it possible for highly-skilled workers to be employed on a strictly virtual basis, acquiring clients anywhere and communicating via email, phone and video conference. Furthermore, the global economy has rendered the clock irrelevant, making it possible for people to work, virtually, in a different time zone than the one in which they live. Simply put, the workplace is no longer fixed in one location, but rather where the worker is situated. As a result, city labor sheds (where workers live) have expanded over the past decade to encompass not just a city's exurbs, but also distant, non-local metropolitan regions, resulting in greater economic integration between cities situated hundreds of miles apart.

NYU's Rudin Center has found that super-commuting is a growing trend in major United States regions, with growth in eight of the ten largest metropolitan areas.

Declining birth rates, increasing longevity and urbanization have created a new challenge for cities: how to respond to an ageing population. Although population ageing and urbanization are not new concerns for national governments around the world, the consequences of these trends for quality of life in cities has only recently started to receive attention from policy makers and researchers. Few comparative studies of world cities examine their health or long-term care systems; nor have comparisons of national systems for the provision of long-term care focused on cities, let alone world cities.

By extending the work of the CADENZA and World Cities Projects , this report investigates how three world cities -- Hong Kong, New York and London -- are coping with this challenge. These world cities are centers of finance, information, media, arts, education, specialized legal services and advanced business services, and contribute disproportionate shares of GDP to their national economies. But are these influential centers prepared to meet the challenge posed by the “revolution of longevity?” How will these world cities accommodate this revolutionary demographic change? Are they prepared to implement the health and social policy innovations that may be required to serve their residents, both old and young? Will they be able to identify the new opportunities that increased longevity may offer? Can they learn from one another as they seek to develop creative solutions to the myriad issues that arise? Finally, can other cities learn from the experience of these three cities as they confront this challenge?

To address these questions, we examine comparable data on the economic and health status of older persons, as well as the availability and use of health, social and long-term care across and within these cities. In the report “How Well Are Seniors in Hong Kong Doing? An International Comparison”, a first attempt was made to compare the situation in Hong Kong with five economically developed countries. This report extends this study by comparing the situation in Hong Kong with two other world cities—New York City and London, which are more comparable in terms of population size and economic characteristics.

Prior researchers have deployed the Vietnam-era draft lottery as an instrument to estimate causal effects of military service on health and earnings. However, household and residential outcomes may be more sensitive to the psychological effects of military service. Using 2SLS analyses of the 2000 Census and the 2005 American Community Survey, we find mixed results for residential stability, housing tenure, and extended family residence. While in the ACS white veterans are less mobile, veteran status has no effect on homeownership. Veteran status reduces extended family living for whites in the Census but increases it for ACS veterans of "other" races.

This paper examines whether the economic gains experienced by low-income neighborhoods in the 1990s followed patterns of classic gentrification (as frequently assumed) -- that is, through the in migration of higher income white, households, and out migration (or displacement) of the original lower income, usually minority residents, spurring racial transition in the process. Using the internal Census version of the American Housing Survey, we find no evidence of heightened displacement, even among the most vulnerable, original residents. While the entrance of higher income homeowners was an important source of income gains, so too was the selective exit of lower income homeowners. Original residents also experienced differential gains in income and reported greater increases in their satisfaction with their neighborhood than found in other low-income neighborhoods. Finally, gaining neighborhoods were able to avoid the losses of white households that non-gaining low income tracts experienced, and were thereby more racially stable rather than less.

On October 1, 2011, the maximum loan size eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance or a guarantee from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (known as "Government-Sponsored Enterprises" or "GSEs") dropped in dozens of metropolitan areas around the country. When this change took effect, a segment of the mortgage market in each of these areas instantly lost some or all federal backing. If enough borrowers seeking loans in this segment are unable to find financing, the result will be further downward pressure on the corresponding segment of the housing market. In this report, we use recent mortgage origination data to explore some of the possible implications of this policy change for the housing market and the U.S. mortgage finance system.

Is U.S. easy monetary policy in the early 2000s to blame for the global saving glut? This column argues that the Federal Reserve’s policy triggered the refinancing boom and ensuing spending spree, which spurred economic growth and savings in China. The prolonged decline in long-term interest rates in the mid-2000s is largely to blame for the housing boom in the United States.

This report demonstrates that New York City has successfully achieved almost all of the key elements in the NYC2012 Olympic Plan, despite the fact that it was not chosen to host the 2012 Games. For New York City, planning for the 2012 Olympics provided the framework to shape the future of the city, through new mass transit, rezoning, and investment in parks, recreational facilities, and housing throughout the city. Long neglected and underused industrial areas have been transformed as a result of the NYC2012 Plan, including the far west side of Manhattan, which will soon be linked to the rest of the city through an extension of the #7 subway line. This report describes how many projects, long the subject of public discussion and civic debate, were able to be carried out as a result of the NYC2012 Olympic Plan.

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects” that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To analyze multigenerational effects, the authors use newly developed methods designed to estimate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. A family's exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias.

This month, Chairman of the House Budget Committee Representative Paul Ryan, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and President Obama shared three very different FY 2012 budget proposals and deficit reduction strategies. The CPC's People's Budget calls for investments in job creation and deficit elimination by increasing tax revenues from the wealthy. President Obama's deficit reduction plan combines spending cuts, tax reform and enhancing the Affordable Care Act to reduce growth in health care spending. Representative Ryan's proposal extends tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations, while cutting social safety net programs such as food stamps, housing assistance, and Pell Grants. This policy brief evaluates each proposal's impact on people of color and recommends investing in job creation and infrastructure to strengthen communities in times of hardship and prosperity.

Substance use (SU) disorders adversely impact health status and contribute to inappropriate health services use. This qualitative study sought to determine SU-related factors contributing to repeated hospitalizations and to identify opportunities for preventive interventions. Fifty Medicaid-insured inpatients identified by a validated statistical algorithm as being at high-risk for frequent hospitalizations were interviewed at an urban public hospital. Patient drug/alcohol history, experiences with medical, psychiatric and addiction treatment, and social factors contributing to readmission were evaluated. Three themes related to SU and frequent hospitalizations emerged: (a) barriers during hospitalization to planning long-term treatment and follow-up, (b) use of the hospital as a temporary solution to housing/family problems, and (c) unsuccessful SU aftercare following discharge. These data indicate that homelessness, brief lengths of stay complicating discharge planning, patient ambivalence regarding long-term treatment, and inadequate detox-to-rehab transfer resources compromise substance-using patients' likelihood of avoiding repeat hospitalization. Intervention targets included supportive housing, detox-to-rehab transportation, and postdischarge patient support.

We argue in this paper that neighborhoods are highly relevant for the types of issues at the heart of regional science. First, residential and economic activity takes place in particular locations, and particular neighborhoods. Many attributes of those neighborhood environments matter for this activity, from the physical amenities, to the quality of the public and private services received. Second, those neighborhoods vary in their placement in the larger region and this broader arrangement of neighborhoods is particularly important for location choices, commuting behavior and travel patterns. Third, sorting across these neighborhoods by race and income may well matter for educational and labor market outcomes, important components of a region's overall economic activity. For each of these areas we suggest a series of unanswered questions that would benefit from more attention. Focused on neighborhood characteristics themselves, there are important gaps in our understanding of how neighborhoods change - the causes and the consequences. In terms of the overall pattern of neighborhoods and resulting commuting patterns, this connects directly to current concerns about environmental sustainability and there is much need for research relevant to policy makers. And in terms of segregation and sorting across neighborhoods, work is needed on better spatial measures. In addition, housing market causes and consequences for local economic activity are under researched. We expand on each of these, finishing with some suggestions on how newly available data, with improved spatial identifiers, may enable regional scientists to answer some of these research questions.

In the United States, public housing developments are predominantly located in neighborhoods with low median incomes, high rates of poverty and disproportionately high concentrations of minorities. While research consistently shows that public housing developments are located in economically and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, we know little about the characteristics of the schools serving students in these neighborhoods.

In this paper, the authors examine the characteristics of elementary and middle schools attended by students living in public housing developments in New York City. Using the proportion of public housing students attending each elementary and middle school as their weight, they calculate the weighted average of school characteristics to describe the typical school attended by students living in public housing. They then compare these characteristics to those of the typical school attended by other students throughout the city in an effort to assess whether public schools systematically disadvantage students in public housing in New York City. 

Their  results are decidedly mixed. On one hand, they find no large differences between the resources of the schools attended by students living in public housing and the schools attended by their peers living elsewhere in the city; on the other hand, they find significant differences in student characteristics and outcomes. The typical school attended by public housing students has higher poverty rates and lower average performance on standardized exams than the schools attended by others. These school differences, however, fail to fully explain the performance disparities: they find that students living in public housing score lower, on average, on standardized tests than their schoolmates living elsewhere -- even though they attend the same school. These results point to a need for more nuanced analyses of policies and practices in schools, as well as the outside-of-school factors that shape educational success, to identify and address the needs of students in public housing.

After analyzing six key indicators of housing market performance for the third quarter of 2010, NYU's Furman Center finds that New York City home prices are stabilizing, but still remain 22% below peak. The report also finds that a decrease in third-quarter foreclosure filings compared to last year may point to a slowdown in the foreclosure crisis. The Quarterly Housing Update incorporates sales data, development indicators and foreclosures, and presents a repeat sales index for each borough to capture price appreciation while controlling for housing quality.

We examine the diffusion of sustainable planning and design concepts into neighbourhood development projects, based on findings of a survey of planners in all 180 cities of five Southern California counties. Sustainable neighbourhood development has particular significance in Southern California owing to the regions’s rapid growth. We compare ‘typical’ and ‘innovative’ neighbourhood developments to determine whether sustainable planning and design concepts are being incorporated in these projects. Although planners agree that ‘innovative’ projects are more likely than ‘typical’ projects to incorporate sustainable planning and design concepts, sustainability is not a high priority even in innovative neighbourhood projects. Our respondents identified significant barriers to and limited opportunities for encouraging sustainable neighbourhood development. These trends in planning and design appear likely to continue unless strong policy and other mechanisms are adopted to encourage sustainable neighbourhood development. The paper concludes with recommendations to promote more sustainable neighbourhood development.

FROM THE COFOUNDER OF SEVENTH GENERATION, the most trusted brand in environmentally friendly household products, comes this indispensable guide to maintaining absolutely everything in the home in a natural, nontoxic way. Jeffrey Hollender leads you through each room of the house with straightforward advice, comprehensive checklists, quick tips, and unparalleled resources while revealing the hidden repercussions of daily routines that most of us take for granted. From improving air quality in your bedroom to avoiding mildew in the bathroom, from sourcing local or organic food to safely laundering your clothes, Planet Home offers invaluable information for making conscious decisions for your family, your neighbors, and our shared planet home.

With additional information on power, garbage and recycling, air quality, and community activism, this book goes a step further to describe how any household is part of a much larger system. Planet Home offers a unique, comprehensive, educational, and easy approach to helping you and your family lead healthier lives as we collectively protect and maintain our shared resources for many years to come.

This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning practices through which immigrant workers developed skill and innovated new techniques were also heavily tacit. Because these practices were never made formal and were never made explicit, they remained invisible and difficult to defend. With the housing market collapse and subsequent decline in housing renovation in south-center region of Philadelphia, this tacit knowledge and the practices that gave it shape and significance, are no longer easily accessible. We draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of access to the political and economic resources to turn learning practices into visible structured institutions that protect knowledge and skill. Whether or not the practices that support knowledge development are themselves made explicit can determine whether the knowledge they produce becomes an innovation that is recognized and adopted or whether it remains confined to a set of ephemeral practices that exist only so long as they are being enacted.

New York City policymakers are planning for a city of over 9 million residents by 2030, a large increase from today. A central goal of City officials is to accommodate this increase while simultaneously improving the City’s overall environmental performance, addressing externalities arising from traffic congestion and providing increased access to affordable housing. The requirement in the City’s zoning code that new residential construction be accompanied by a minimum number of off-street parking spaces, however, may conflict with this goal. This paper combines a theoretical discussion of parking requirements in New York City with a quantitative analysis of how they relate to transit and development opportunity. It draws direct relations between minimum parking requirements with the rise in housing prices and the reduction of density.

We argue in this paper that neighborhoods are highly relevant for the types of issues at the heart of regional science. First, residential and economic activity takes place in particular locations, and particular neighborhoods. Many attributes of those neighborhood environments matter for this activity, from the physical amenities, to the quality of the public and private services received. Second, those neighborhoods vary in their placement in the larger region and this broader arrangement of neighborhoods is particularly important for location choices, commuting behavior and travel patterns. Third, sorting across these neighborhoods by race and income may well matter for educational and labor market outcomes, important components of a region's overall economic activity. For each of these areas we suggest a series of unanswered questions that would benefit from more attention. Focused on neighborhood characteristics themselves, there are important gaps in our understanding of how neighborhoods change - the causes and the consequences. In terms of the overall pattern of neighborhoods and resulting commuting patterns, this connects directly to current concerns about environmental sustainability and there is much need for research relevant to policy makers. And in terms of segregation and sorting across neighborhoods, work is needed on better spatial measures. In addition, housing market causes and consequences for local economic activity are under researched. We expand on each of these, finishing with some suggestions on how newly available data, with improved spatial identifiers, may enable regional scientists to answer some of these research questions.

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.

In 2005, immigrants exceeded 12% of the US population, with the highest concentrations in large metropolitan areas. While considerable research has focused on how immigrants affect local wages and housing prices, less research has asked how immigrants fare in US urban public schools. Previous studies find that foreign-born students outperform native-born students in their elementary and middle school years, but urban policymakers and practitioners continue to raise concerns about educational outcomes of immigrants arriving in their high school years.

The authors use data on a large cohort of New York City (NYC) public high school students to examine how the performance of students who immigrate during high school (teen immigrants) differs from that of students who immigrate during middle school (tween immigrants) or elementary school (child immigrants), relative to otherwise similar native-born students. Contrary to prior studies, their difference-in-difference estimates suggest that, ceteris paribus, teen immigrants do well compared to native-born migrants, and that the foreign-born advantage is relatively large among the teen (im)migrants. That said, their findings provide cause for concern about the performance of limited English proficient students, blacks and Hispanics and, importantly, teen migrants. In particular, switching school districts in the high school years - that is, student mobility across school districts - may be more detrimental than immigration per se. Results are robust to alternative specifications and cohorts, including a cohort of Miami students.

This report focuses on the effect of the recession and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on economically marginalized communities. The Network highlights four key areas of impact for women of color and their families: job creation and employment, housing and social services, education, and tax cuts to individuals.

This study examines whether the likelihood that borrowers of different races received a subprime loan varied depending on the level of racial segregation where they live. It looks both at the role of racial segregation in metropolitan areas across the country and at the role that neighborhood demographics within communities in New York City played.

This article describes an innovative means of identifying a neighborhood typology that can be used for analyses of individual-level data that were not obtained through neighborhood-based sampling. A two-step approach was employed. First, exploratory factor analysis was used to reduce the number of neighborhood indicators to five clear factors of neighborhood characteristics. Second, a cluster analytic procedure was used to identify neighborhood types based on the five factors. These analyses resulted in a parsimonious solution of five distinct neighborhood clusters, or types, that constituted a manageable number of categories that could be used for future analyses of individuals grouped within neighborhood types. This method is a promising way to conduct neighborhood impact analyses that maximize the ability of researchers to characterize neighborhoods accurately (without sampling at the neighborhood level) while retaining the ability to conduct analyses of participants grouped within types of neighborhoods.

There is a lack of consensus as to whether the relationship between the built environment and travel is causal and, if it is, the extent of this causality. This problem is largely caused by inappropriate research designs adopted in many studies. This paper proposes a new method (based on path choice) to investigate the causal effect of the pedestrian environment on the utility of walking. Specifically, the paper examines how the pedestrian environment affects subway commuters' egress path choice from a station to their workplaces in downtown Boston. The path-based measure is sensitive enough to capture minor differences in the environment experienced by pedestrians. More importantly, path
choice is less likely to correlate with job and housing location choices, and therefore largely avoids the self-selection problem. The results suggest that the pedestrian environment can significantly affect a person's walking experience and the utility of walking along a path.

The timing of this volume could not be more opportune. It is based on a 2007 conference to honor the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy. The chapters analyze risk in the housing market, the regulation of housing markets by government, and other issues in U.S. housing policy. Chapters investigate derivative markets; the role that home equity insurance can play in reducing risk; the role that the regulation of government-sponsored enterprises has played in extending credit to home purchasers in low-income neighborhoods; and the growth in the market for subprime mortgages. The impact of local zoning regulations on housing prices and new construction is also considered. This is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation’s system of housing finance.

Segregation: The Rising Costs for America documents how discriminatory practices in the housing markets through most of the past century, and that continue today, have produced extreme levels of residential segregation that result in significant disparities in access to good jobs, quality education, homeownership attainment and asset accumulation between minority and non-minority households.The book also demonstrates how problems facing minority communities are increasingly important to the nations long-term economic vitality and global competitiveness as a whole. Solutions to the challenges facing the nation in creating a more equitable society are not beyond our ability to design or implement, and it is in the interest of all Americans to support programs aimed at creating a more just society.The book is uniquely valuable to students in the social sciences and public policy, as well as to policy makers, and city planners.

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.

Leading housing researchers build upon decades of experience, research, and evaluation to inform our understanding of the nations rental housing challenges and what can be done about them. It thoughtfully addresses not only present issues affecting rental housing, but also viable solutions.

Developing community capacity to improve health is a cornerstone of community-based public health. The concept of community capacity reflects numerous facets and dimensions of community life and can have different meanings in different contexts. This paper explores how members of one community identify and interpret key aspects of their community's capacity to limit the availability and use of tobacco products. Particular attention is given to examining the interrelationship between various dimensions of community capacity in order to better understand the processes by which communities are able to mobilize for social change. The study is based on qualitative analysis of 19 in-depth interviews with key informants representing a variety of community sectors in Harlem, New York City. Findings indicate that the community is viewed as rich in human and social resources. A strong sense of community identity and connectedness underlies this reserve and serves as a catalyst for action.

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short-term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods.

To analyze long-term consequences of homelessness, the authors compared 388 formerly homeless children 55 months after shelter entry with 382 housed peers, birth to 17, using mother- and child-reported health, mental health, community involvement, cognitive performance, and educational records. Both groups scored below cognitive and achievement norms. Small group differences favored housed 4- to 6-year-olds on cognition and 4- to 10-year-olds on mental health only. Child care and recent stressful events, which were high, were as or more important than prior homelessness. Only children living with mothers were included, potentially biasing results. Policy implications are discussed.

To analyze long-term consequences of homelessness, the authors compared 388 formerly homeless children 55 months after shelter entry with 382 housed peers, birth to 17, using mother- and child-reported health, mental health, community involvement, cognitive performance, and educational records. Both groups scored below cognitive and achievement norms. Small group differences favored housed 4- to 6-year-olds on cognition and 4- to 10-year-olds on mental health only. Child care and recent stressful events, which were high, were as or more important than prior homelessness. Only children living with mothers were included, potentially biasing results. Policy implications are discussed.

How fair are this country's urban housing markets and how effective has the government been at what it is charged to do in ensuring open and diverse housing options for this country's minority groups? Fragile Rights within Cities: Government, Housing, and Fairness offers a rich, multi-disciplinary assessment of the complex interface of housing, fairness, and government programs aimed at enforcing one of this nation's hallmark civil rights laws - the right to fair and open housing.

What determines how many adults live in a house? How do people divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In this paper, we describe how a variety of government policies affect living arrangements, intentionally or not. Using data from a survey of households in New York City, we find that these incentives appear to have an impact. Specifically, households receiving these housing and income subsidies are smaller on average (measured by number of adults). The impacts appear to be considerably larger than those that would occur if the programs were lump-sum transfers. Small average household size can be extremely expensive in terms of physical and environmental resources, higher rents, and possibly homelessness. Thus, we encourage policymakers to pay greater heed to the provisions built into various social policies that favor smaller households.

Few communities welcome federally subsidized rental 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. We find that federally subsidized developments have not typically led to reductions in property values and have, in fact, led to increases in some cases. Impacts are highly sensitive to scale, though patterns vary across programs.

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 the  objective, credible information they need 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 14,000 units of supportive housing created in New York City over the past twenty five years have had on their host neighborhoods over time.

In a preliminary analysis, we find little evidence that supportive housing facilities diminish the value of surrounding properties. We find evidence that prices of properties surrounding supportive housing facilities are lower than comparable properties in the same neighborhood prior to the opening of the facility, and that this gap tends to narrow following the opening of a facility. Specifically, the preliminary analysis suggests that modestly-sized supportive housing developments (which are typical in New York City) may have small, positive impacts on neighboring property values, though these positive impacts decline as project size increases. Very large facilities may have negative impacts on the surrounding neighborhood.

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 neighborhood impacts. 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. We find that both nonprofit and for-profit projects generate significant, positive spillover effects. This finding in itself is significant, given the widespread skepticism about the impact of subsidized housing on neighborhoods. We also find some differences across sectors. First, the impact of nonprofit housing remains stable over time, whereas the effect of for-profit housing declines with time. Second, while large for-profit and nonprofit developments deliver similar benefits, in the case of small projects, for-profit developments generate greater impacts than their nonprofit counterparts. These differences are consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, in the presence of information asymmetries with respect to housing quality, the nondistribution constraint should lead nonprofits to deliver more durable housing, by softening incentives to shirk on quality and maintenance. Meanwhile, the fact that scale makes a difference to nonprofit impacts may reflect the capacity problems often faced by smaller nonprofits.

Declining birthrates, increasing longevity and growing urbanization have created a new challenge for cities: how to respond to an aging population. The World Cities Project was designed to examine whether the four largest cities among the wealthiest nations of the world - New York, London, Paris and Tokyo - offer a model of what other cities will someday resemble as their populations grow older.

Perhaps the four world cities examined here will always be regarded as special cases; however, they share in common a host of important characteristics. Within them live the largest number of older people in their countries and in some neighborhoods the percent of elders 65 or older far exceeds what the census demographers project for their nations in 2030. Thus, these great cities may serve as laboratories to inquire about the implications of demographic change for health and quality of life, living arrangements and housing, and the provision of long-term care to older adults when they eventually become frail.

A broad range of interests - from affordable housing advocates to businesses worried about their workforce - are increasingly concerned that housing affordability in the City is declining rapidly, and that at least one of the causes of that decline is a shortage of housing in the City. In this chapter we use the most recent data from the 2005 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) to assess these concerns. First, we examine changes in affordability over the last three years, and do find a striking decrease in the number of units that are affordable to lower-income City residents. Second, we analyze the balance between the demand for, and supply of, housing in the City by looking at the extent to which the housing stock has grown relative to changes in population in recent years. After looking at those trends, we offer a snapshot assessment of the size of the
imbalance between housing demand and supply as of 2005.

The attack on the World Trade Center reinforced a process of change in lower Manhattan that had been under way for at least the past fifty years. The public and private responses to the destruction wrought on September 11 have provided the funds, organizational capacity, and public commitment to do what a previous generation of municipal planners tried to accomplish, with only partial success: creating a mixed residential and office community in what was once New York City's dominant financial and business district. Federal aid to rebuild lower Manhattan has been the catalyst for modernizing and expanding its mass transit systems and facilities, providing low-cost financing for converting obsolete office buildings into housing, improving pedestrian movement, investing public funds in parks and cultural institutions, and subsidizing the creation of new public schools. This chapter examines the key public and private organizations that have shaped this redevelopment and the implications for the future of lower Manhattan and for office development in the rest of New York City.

Prior research has provided little evidence that subsidized housing investments generate significant external benefits to their neighborhoods. This paper revisits the external effects of subsidized housing, exploring the case of New York City. Relying on geocoded administrative data, we estimate a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find significant and sustained external benefits. Spillovers increase with project size, and decrease with distance from the project sites and with the proportion of units in multi-family, rental buildings. Our results are robust to alternative specifications. Some of the benefit appears due to the effect of the replacement of existing disamenity.

In a festschrift to Netzer-a public finance economist well known for his research on state and local taxation, urban public services, and nonprofit organizations-eight chapters apply microeconomics to problems facing urban areas and use statistical analysis to gain insight into practical solutions. The essays look at alternative methods of financing urban government, such as a land value tax and the impact of sales and income taxes on property taxation; at government expenditures, including housing subsidies; and at subsidies to nonprofit arts groups as well as the role of the nonprofit sector in providing K-12 education. Of interest to the fields of public finance, urban economics, and public administration.

The Burlington Community Land Trust has a radical vision: to secure housing as a basic right, not as a commodity to be bought and sold. The Trust enables low-income families to buy homes on land it owns, controls and keeps perpetually affordable. Founded over 20 years ago, the Trust uses the following approaches: Pursue a Practical Approach: Low-income people receive subsidies from the Trust to buy their homes. The Trust also buys the land on which the home sits, and leases it to the homebuyers. When the homeowners sell, they receive 25% of the increased equity. The Trust gets 75% and uses this to keep the housing permanently affordable. Build a Grassroots Base: The Trust cultivates a membership of 2,400 people. The organization conducts a membership drive and holds neighborhood meetings before taking on a new project in a community. Institutionalize Democratic Leadership: All members have voting rights. The community-based board makes all substantive program decisions. Balance Opposing Opinions: The organization maintains a diverse mix of grassroots and conservative interests on its board as well as among its membership and supporters. The Trust encourages debate. According to one member, disagreement actually serves as a bond: “We have to get it right.”

In a festschrift to Netzer a public finance economist well known for his research on state and local taxation, urban public services, and nonprofit organizations eight chapters apply microeconomics to problems facing urban areas and use statistical analysis to gain insight into practical solutions. The essays look at alternative methods of financing urban government, such as a land value tax and the impact of sales and income taxes on property taxation; at government expenditures, including housing subsidies; and at subsidies to nonprofit arts groups as well as the role of the nonprofit sector in providing K-12 education. Of interest to the fields of public finance, urban economics, and public administration.

 At any given moment, about 3 million American women, men, and children are homeless. And another 5 million Americans spend over 50% of their incomes on housing, meaning that one missed paycheck, one health crisis, or one unpaid utility bill can push them out the door into homelessness. Homelessness is one of the major social problems and personal and family tragedies of the contemporary world. No community, city, or nation is immune and the lack of affordable housing and a decline in secure, well-paying jobs means that the problem will only get worse. The Encyclopedia of Homelessness is the first systematic effort to organize and summarize what we know about this complex topic that impacts not only the homeless but all of society. The Encyclopedia focuses on the current situation in the United States with a comparative sampling of homelessness around the world.

At any given moment, about 3 million American women, men, and children are homeless. And another 5 million Americans spend over 50% of their incomes on housing, meaning that one missed paycheck, one health crisis, or one unpaid utility bill can push them out the door into homelessness. Homelessness is one of the major social problems and personal and family tragedies of the contemporary world. No community, city, or nation is immune and the lack of affordable housing and a decline in secure, well-paying jobs means that the problem will only get worse. The Encyclopedia of Homelessness is the first systematic effort to organize and summarize what we know about this complex topic that impacts not only the homeless but all of society. The Encyclopedia focuses on the current situation in the United States with a comparative sampling of homelessness around the world.

As the centerpiece of policymakers' efforts to "deconcentrate" poverty in urban America, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project gave roughly 4,600 volunteer families the chance to move out of public housing projects in deeply impoverished neighborhoods in five cities-Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Researchers wanted to find out to what extent moving out of a poor neighborhood into a better-off area would improve the lives of public housing families. Choosing a Better Life? is the first distillation of years of research on the MTO project, the largest rigorously designed social experiment to investigate the consequences of moving low-income public housing residents to low-poverty neighborhoods. In this book, leading social scientists and policy experts examine the legislative and political foundations of the project, analyze the effects of MTO on lives of the families involved, and explore lessons learned from this important piece of U.S. social policy.

This comprehensive volume of essays by respected scholars in economics and public finance explores the connections among the property tax, land use and regulation. The authors examine the idea that the property tax is used as a partial substitute for land use regulation and other policies designed to affect how land is utilized. Like many economists, the contributors see some type of property taxation as a more efficient means of helping to shape land use. Some of the essays analyze a conventional property tax, while others consider radically different systems of property taxation.

Following an introduction by the book's editor Dick Netzer, the first paper sets the stage by modeling taxes on land and buildings in the context of a dynamic model of real estate markets. The remaining papers examine how various tax mechanisms and non-tax alternatives to regulating and determining land use, such as zoning and private neighborhood associations, complement or substitute for one another. Urban planners and economists interested in local public finance will welcome this wide-ranging review and analysis.

Dick Netzer, a leading public finance economist specializing in state and local issues and urban government, is professor emeritus of economics and public administration at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. He organized a conference sponsored by the Lincoln Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January 2002 and edited the papers presented at that conference for this volume.

We examined the incidence, characteristics, and predictors of separations of children from mothers in 543 poor families receiving public assistance, 251 of whom had experienced homelessness during the previous 5 years. Forty-four percent of the homeless mothers and 8% of housed mothers were separated from one or more children. A total of 249 children were separated from 110 homeless families and 34 children from 23 housed families. Children were placed with relatives and in foster care but were rarely returned to their mothers. Maternal drug dependence, domestic violence, and institutionalization predicted separations, but homelessness was the most important predictor, equivalent in size to 1.9 other risk factors. We infer that policies regarding child welfare and substance abuse treatment should be changed to reduce unnecessary placements. Studies of homeless children who remain with families may be biased if separated children are excluded.

This article examines the impact of two New York City homeownership programs on surrounding property values. Both programs, Nehemiah Program and the Partnership New Homes program subsidize the construction of affordable owner-occupied homes in distressed neighborhoods. We use a geocoded data set that includes every property transaction in the City from 1980 to 1999.

Our analysis relies on a difference-in-difference approach. Specifically, we compare the prices of properties in small rings surrounding the Partnership and Nehemiah sites with prices of comparable properties that are in the same ZIP code but outside the ring. We then examine whether the magnitude of this difference changes after the completion of a homeownership development. Our results show that during the past two decades prices of properties in the rings surrounding the homeownership projects have risen relative to their ZIP codes. Results suggest that part of that rise is attributable to the affordable homeownership programs.

This article examines the impact of New York City's Ten-Year Plan on the sale prices of homes in surrounding neighborhoods. Beginning in the mid-1980s, New York City invested $5.1 billion in constructing or rehabilitating over 180,000 units of housing in many of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. One of the main purposes was to spur neighborhood revitalization.

In this article, we describe the origins of the Ten-Year Plan, as well as the various programs the city used to implement it, and estimate whether housing built or rehabilitated under the Ten-Year Plan affected the prices of nearby homes. The prices of homes within 500 feet of Ten-Year Plan units rose relative to those located beyond 500 feet, but still within the same census tract. These findings are consistent with the proposition that well-planned project based housing programs can generate positive spillover effects and contribute to efforts to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods.

Microfinance was pioneered in the developing world as the lending of small amounts of money to entrepreneurs who lacked the kinds of credentials and collateral demanded by banks. Similar practices spread from the developing to the developed world, reversing the usual direction of innovation, and today several hundred microfinance institutions are operating in the United States.

Replicating Microfinance in the United States reviews experiences in both developing and industrialized countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance.

This book reviews experiences in both developing and industrial countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance, concentrating especially on previously underserved households and their communities.

Much research has shown that even after controlling for income, African Americans suffer from drastically lower net worths than their white counterparts; these differences in net worth have important implications for the overall well-being of blacks and whites. If not directly from labor market disadvantages-i.e., income differentials-then from what does this racial gap in wealth arise? The current study assesses two complementary accounts of this race difference in asset holdings. The first, the historical legacy thesis, suggests that net wealth differences in the current generation are largely a result of discrimination in past generations; that is, they can be traced to the "head start" that whites have enjoyed in accumulating assets and passing them on. The second theory, the contemporary dynamics thesis, holds that current dynamics of institutional racism in the housing and credit markets are more responsible for the gap. The current study tests the relative impact of multi-generational forces and contemporary property and credit dynamics by using two-generational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It finds that parental wealth and income levels and inheritance all have a significant impact on the wealth levels of the current generation net of respondent socioeconomic characteristics; however, parental wealth and inheritance fail to explain the black-white gap. Further, this study shows that even predicting net worth from that same family's net worth five years prior (also controlling for savings during the interim), there remains a significantly negative effect of African American race. However, breaking out initial net worth into asset types shows that it may be different investment types and returns that explain the difference in asset accumulation over a five-year period.

In this article, we focus on the distributional impact of a shift to charging for water and sewer service based entirely on actual water use measured by meters. In particular, we examined what the impact of universal metering in New York City would be on low- and moderate- income housing. We found that, despite its possible positive effects on conservation, universal water metering would have a substantial and regressive impact on both the providers and consumers of the city's low-income housing.

This paper outlines the race-based, neighbourhood projection hypothesis which holds that, in choosing neighbourhoods, households care less about present racial composition than they do about expectations about future neighbourhood conditions, such as school quality, property values and crime. Race remains relevant, however, since households tend to associate a growing minority presence with structural decline. Using a unique data-set that links households to their neighbourhoods, this paper estimates both exit and entry models and then constructs a simple simulation model that predicts the course of racial change in different communities. Doing so, the paper concludes that the empirical evidence is more consistent with the race-based projection hypothesis than with other common explanations for neighbourhood racial transition.

During the past decade, federal housing policy has shifted to recognize a key role for nonprofit housing providers in providing affordable housing. Two federal programs, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and HOME, are now the primary federal housing production programs, and the legislation governing both programs provides explicit support for nonprofit providers of new housing. This article focuses on these two programs to document the change in emphasis, looking at the extent to which resources flow to nonprofit providers. We explicate the rationale for this shift and speculate on future federal policy toward nonprofits.

We find that both programs channeled sizable shares of their funding to nonprofits throughout the 1990s, in patterns consistent with program design. It is also possible that the scale and form of funding itself has affected the nonprofit sector. Changes in the funding of nonprofits have not been uniform spatially, and the nonprofit sector's share of such funding appears to have leveled off. As currently structured, these programs do little to simplify the complicated financial dealings and multiple sources of funding common among nonprofit housing providers. Shifts in policy priorities and emerging financial stresses may necessitate changes in federal policy toward the nonprofit sector.

When individuals or families make retirement planning decisions, including asset allocation choices, it is important for them to consider how all of the assets they own fit together to form an overall portfolio of house-hold wealth. Surprisingly often, one of the most important household assets is left out of retirement planning discussions completely: the family home.

This issue of Research Dialogue examines in detail the central role that residential housing plays in household asset portfolios in the United States. Currently, families don't have much choice regarding the amount of wealth they must "allocate" to their home: either they own their residence or they do not. This stark choice generally leaves homeowners overexposed to significant financial risks that most would prefer not to take. The authors of this article describe financial innovations that, if developed and adopted, would provide families far greater choice regarding how much to invest in a home. The authors show that this greater flexibility could lead to as much as 20% greater wealth at retirement through better diversification of the wealth that homeowners currently must hold in the form of housing.

The extraordinary growth in the stock market over the past several years has significantly increased wealth in the US household sector. The Flow of Funds Accounts data indicate that in the second quarter of 1998 corporate equity holdings in the household sector amounted to $9.4 billion dollars or 28 percent of total household assets. This represents an astounding increase of $5.3 billion over the past five years. For only the second time since the mid-1940s have equity holdings surpassed all other classes of assets in the household sector (although real estate comes close at 27 percent).

This study examined predictors of entry onto shelter and subsequent housing stability for a cohort of families receiving public assistance in New York City. Methods. Interviews were conducted with 266 families as they requested shelter and with a comparison sample of 298 families selected at random from the welfare caseload. Respondents were reinterviewed 5 years later. Families with prior history of shelter use were excluded from the follow-up study. Results. Demographic characteristics and housing conditions were the most important risk factors for shelter entry; enduring poverty and disruptive social experiences also contributed. Five years later, four fifths of sheltered families had their own apartment. Receipt of subsidized housing was the primary predictor of housing stability among formerly homeless families (odd ratio [OR] = 20.6, 95% confidence interval [CI]= 9.9, 42.9). Conclusions. Housing subsidies are critical to ending homelessness among families.

A revolutionary housing finance concept can help many more Americans buy the homes of their dreams, while simultaneously furnishing vast, new investment opportunities for financial institutions and investors. The idea: enable consumers to purchase part of a home through a new type of financing called Housing Partnership agreements.

Housing Partnerships: A New Approach to a Market at Crossroads provides a blueprint for the development of this alternative housing finance market, and offers a new and compelling housing finance option: instead of the existing two housing options -- renting or buying an entire dwelling -- would-be home owners can finance a percentage of a property, while the other portion is financed by institutional investors, who provide capital for the house in exchange for a proportion of the final sale price.

The home buyer (Managing Partner) and a financial institution (Limited Partner) would each own a fixed proportion of the home, resulting in co-ownership of the property. The Managing Partner would live in the entire home and when the house is sold, potential proceeds are split with the Limited Partner.

Housing Partnerships: A New Approach to a Market at a Crossroads proposes adapting the same legal form used successfully by commercial enterprises for the residential housing market. Why can't individual home owners, just like businesses, avail themselves to the benefits of this type of ownership? Why is the U.S. housing market the only one in which there is no way to sell any part of the return stream to other investors?

Housing Partnerships: A New Approach to a Market at a Crossroads has ideas to interest a range of readers, from prospective home buyers to realtors, from financial investors to those interested in housing and social policy development.

This article synthesizes findings from a wide range of empirical research into how neighborhoods affect families and children. It lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how neighborhoods may affect people at different life stages. It then identifies methodological challenges, summarizes past research findings, and suggests priorities for future work.

Despite a growing body of evidence that neighborhood conditions play a role in shaping individual outcomes, serious methodological challenges remain that suggest some caution in interpreting this evidence. Moreover, no consensus emerges about which neighborhood characteristics affect which outcomes, or about what types of families may be most influenced by neighborhood conditions. Finally, existing studies provide little empirical evidence about the causal mechanisms through which neighborhood environment influences individual outcomes. To be useful to policy makers, future empirical research should tackle the critical question of how and for whom neighborhood matters.

Public policies for urban development have traditionally emphasized investment in physical infrastructure, the development of large-scale commercial facilities, the construction of new housing, and the renewal of existing neighborhoods. Most efforts to revitalize central cities by building new facilities for visitors have focused on suburban commuters and tourists. At the same time, many housing initiatives in central cities have concentrated on low-income communities because outlying suburban areas have attracted traditional middle-income households.

This article argues that emerging demographic and cultural trends - combined with changes in the structure of business organizations and technological advances - provide new opportunities for cities to retain and attract middle-class households. Using gay and lesbian populations as an example, it focuses on the role that nontraditional households can play in urban redevelopment. In light of the rise of nontraditional households and the growth of self-employment and small businesses, cities should adopt policies that make them attractive places in which to live and work.