Research

Papers

• The Problem Has Existed over Endless Years: Racialized Difference in Commuting, 1980–2019

  How have the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Black commuters spent 49 more minutes commuting per week in 1980 than White commuters; this difference declined to 22 minutes per week in 2019. Two factors account for the majority of the difference: Black workers are more likely to commute by transit, and Black workers make up a larger share of the population in cities with long average commutes. Increases in car commuting by Black workers account for nearly one quarter of the decline in the racialized difference in commute times between 1980 and 2019. Today, commute times have mostly converged (conditional on observables) for car commuters in small- and mid-sized cities. In contrast, differential job access today drives persistent differences of commute times, particularly in large, congested, and expensive cities.

• Re-Measuring Gentrification

  We develop an expectations-based measure of gentrification. Property values today incorporate market participants’ expectations of the neighbourhood’s future. We contrast this with present-oriented variables like demographics. To operationalise the signal implicit in property values, we contrast the percentile rank of a neighbourhood’s average house price to that of its average income, relative to its metropolitan area. We take as our signal of gentrification the rise of a neighbourhood’s house value percentile above its income percentile. We show that a gap between the house value and income percentiles predicts future income growth. We further validate our metric against existing approaches to identify gentrification, finding that it aligns meaningfully with qualitative analyses built on local insight. Compared to existing quantitative approaches, we obtain similar results but usually observe them in earlier years and with more parsimonious data. Our approach has several advantages: conceptual simplicity, communicative flexibility with graphical and map forms and availability for small geographies on an annual basis with minimal lag.

• The Effect of Racial Composition on Neighborhood Housing Prices: Evidence from Hurricane Katrina-Induced Migration

  Urban housing markets are characterized by racial sorting, but equilibrium prices respond to marginal buyers and thus may mask underlying preferences for segregation. Large migration shocks can make visible these otherwise infra-marginal preferences. We study the effects of Hurricane Katrina-induced displacement on housing markets in receiving neighborhoods in Texas, where 1 in 5 New Orleanians relocated. Using an event study design, we find that the relocation of 100 additional Katrina survivors to a receiving ZIP code is associated with a 2.2% decline in relative house prices five years after the storm. This effect is driven by responses to movers from predominantly Black origin blocks. We argue that our findings are best explained by a preference for segregation on the part of incumbent White residents. In this case, racial stratification in the effect of a disaster is followed by racial stratification in economic responses.

• Advancing Racial Justice Research In Architecture, Urban Planning, and Allied Fields

  Architecture, urban studies, planning, and allied fields are rife with extractive, colonial, racist, and otherwise harmful research activities that are complicit in, or actively support, white supremacy. Identifying a positive vision of research that supports racially just outcomes and differentiating it from efforts that simply study racialized difference are important steps for institutions seeking to better support anti-racist research (which may be described using a range of descriptors including e.g., ‘abolitionist,’ ‘emancipatory,’ or ‘decolonial’). Our research team conducted a mixed-methods study to identify: 1) characteristics and practices common across scholarly research that explicitly aims to advance racial justice, 2) institutional barriers to research that supports racially just outcomes, and 3) best practices to enable and support research practices and projects that advance racial justice. We identify foundational and supporting characteristics of anti-racist research as well as key challenges and supports for academics seeking to develop anti-racist research and pedagogy, resulting in preliminary guidelines for research.

• People or Parking?

  Car-based transportation networks (as in Phoenix) necessitate parking at origin and destination in order to establish a link––but the space devoted to parking lowers its ability to provide housing and consumer amenities. Walking and transit networks (as in Manhattan) have no such tradeoff, and a city reliant on them will be able to make fuller use of its land for productive purposes like amenities and housing. However, they hinder mobility in other ways: walking does not get you far, and using transit requires adhering to the routes and stops the city’s transit agency provides. In this paper, we develop and calibrate a spatial consumer city model to study what would happen if Phoenix banned cars, delineating the roles of parking conversion, of the light rail network, and of a last mile option. Together with a last mile option, Phoenix’s current light rail line would be able to sustain a meaningful (if smaller) population––but only if Phoenix converts its current parking to other uses. We then ask the reverse: what would happen if Manhattan required parking? The model indicates the island would essentially empty, as the declining capacity of each block lowers the vibrancy of the city, inducing still more residents to leave. Altogether, these model outcomes tell a story of agglomeration through com- plementarities. The transportation network and incumbent land use must ensure a high degree of access to jobs and amenities in order for enough people to choose to live in the city and thereby support those amenities.

• A Queer and Intersectional Approach to Fair Housing

  In this article, we will use queer theory to interrogate existing laws, zoning regulations, and planning and real estate practices to better understand the limits of current understanding of fair housing. We will reconceptualize ideas about identity and “protected classes,” adopting an intersectional lens; about “family” and “household,” considering nontraditional families and households; and about “housing” as it incorporates neighborhood conditions, not simply shelter, and interactions outside the market. Through this reconceptualization, we will center the experiences of the most marginalized groups.

• Urbanization in American Economic History, 1800–2000

  This chapter explores the economic forces that led the United States to become an urban nation. The urban wage premium in the United States was remarkably stable over the past two centuries, ranging between 15 and 40 percent. The wage premium rose through the mid-nineteenth century as new manufacturing technologies enhanced urban productivity, then fell from 1880 to 1940 (especially through 1915) as investments in public health infrastructure improved the urban quality of life, and finally rose sharply after 1980, coinciding with the skill- (and apparently also urban-) biased technological change of the computer revolution. Over the twentieth century, households and employment have relocated from the central city to the suburban ring. Rising incomes and falling commuting costs can explain much of this pattern, while urban crime and racial diversity also played a role.

• Optimal real estate capital durability and localized climate change disaster risk

  The durability of the real estate capital stock could hinder climate change adaptation because past construction anchors the population in beautiful and productive but increasingly-risky coastal areas. However, coastal developers anticipate that their assets face increasing risk and this creates an incentive to seek adaptation strategies. This paper models climate change as a joint process of (1) increasingly destructive storms and (2) a risk of sea-level rise that submerges coastal property. We study how forward-looking developers and real estate investors respond to the new risks along a number of dimensions including their choices of location, capital durability, capital mobility (modular real estate), and maintenance of existing properties. The net effect of such investments is a more resilient urban population.

• Is the Rent Too High? Aggregate Implications of Local Land-Use Regulation

  Highly productive U.S. cities are characterized by high housing prices, low housing stock growth, and restrictive land-use regulations (e.g., San Francisco). While new residents would benefit from housing stock growth in cities with highly productive firms, existing residents justify strict local land-use regulations on the grounds of congestion and other costs of further development. This paper assesses the welfare implications of these local regulations for income, congestion, and urban sprawl within a general-equilibrium model with endogenous regulation. In the model, households choose from locations that vary exogenously by productivity and endogenously according to local externalities of congestion and sharing. Existing residents address these externalities by voting for regulations that limit local housing density. In equilibrium, these regulations bind and house prices compensate for differences across locations. Relative to the planner's optimum, the decentraliz ed model generates spatial misallocation whereby high-productivity locations are settled at too-low densities. The model admits a straightforward calibration based on observed population density, expenditure shares on consumption and local services, and local incomes. Welfare and output would be 1.4% and 2.1% higher, respectively, under the planner's allocation. Abolishing zoning regulations entirely would increase GDP by 6%, but lower welfare by 5.9% because of greater congestion.

• Entrepreneurship, Information, and Growth

  We examine the contribution to economic growth of entrepreneurial marketplace information within a regional endogenous growth framework. Entrepreneurs are posited to provide an input to economic growth through the information revealed by their successes and failures. We empirically identify this information source with the regional variation in establishment births and deaths. To account for the potential endogeneity caused by forward-looking entrepreneurs, we utilize instruments based on historic mining activity. We find that the information spillover component of local establishment birth and death rates have significant positive effects on subsequent entrepreneurship and employment growth for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas.