Does federally subsidized rental housing depress neighborhood property values?

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. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Revitalizing inner‐city neighborhoods: New York city's Ten‐Year Plan

Abstract

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.     

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: An Atlas of the Politics–Administration Dichotomy

Recent years have seen attempts to make sense of the politics–administration dichotomy. Triangulating among historical research, empirical observations, new models of interaction between politicians and administrators, and the division of the literature into “schools,” novel ways of understanding and examining the dichotomy have developed. These have been largely thematic and have revealed the extent of a literature spanning more than 120 years. Because of its size, a complementary structural analysis of the literature now not only is conceivably useful but also can offer means for approaching it. This article offers an atlas—that is, a series of visual maps, accompanied by associated statistics and interpretations—that can assist researchers in their travels through the territory of the dichotomy. Ten ways of tackling the literature are presented, culminating in an initial reading list that covers the breadth of dichotomy research, thus providing an epistemological foundation for those who wish to enter the territory.     

Comment on Jack Goodman's “houses,apartments, and the incidence of property taxes”

Abstract

Goodman finds from his analysis of the 2001 Residential Finance Survey that multifamily housing bears a higher effective property tax rate (EPTR) than single‐family owner‐occupied housing and argues that much of the differential is associated with the lower average property value of apartments. We offer comments on how this important research can be enhanced and analyze the EPTR by using a different database, the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the decennial census.

Like Goodman, we find from the PUMS that the EPTR of multifamily housing is high relative to that of single‐family detached housing and that lower‐value multifamily housing has a higher EPTR relative to that of higher‐value multifamily units. We offer preliminary findings from the PUMS on the implications of the EPTR for development patterns (it may discourage smart growth), equity (the poor and minorities bear a higher tax burden), and housing (high EPTRs challenge affordability).     

Nineteenth century newspaper accounts of a murder committed by an inmate of a Scottish asylum

This study explores an incident from the late nineteenth century in which an inmate at the Royal Dundee Lunatic Asylum murdered a fellow patient while working in the hospital grounds. The incident was reported extensively in the local press in the days following the event. Analysis of these reports reveals a picture, which while recognisable to the twenty-first century newspaper reader, does however depart from contemporary media reporting in some important ways. We argue that while the image of the unpredictable dangerousness of the lunatic has a long history and is deeply embedded in popular conceptions of mental disorder, shaping public perceptions of those with mental illnesses, it is the manner in which this is presented by the media that has bearing upon how the case is understood by wider society.     

How HIV-Positive Aboriginal Women (PAW) Talk About Their Mothering Experiences With Child and Family Services in Ontario

Aboriginal families are disproportionately involved with Children's Aid Societies (or CAS), which is of concern given the history of colonization, assimilation, and child welfare policies that fail to recognize Indigenous practices within Canada. There is no historical data regarding HIV-positive Aboriginal women's (PAW) experiences and interactions with the child welfare system, despite a high degree of HIV-related stigma and discrimination by CAS staff coupled with lack of HIV knowledge and sensitivity to provide culturally appropriate care to PAW and their children. This article is relevant to local and international child welfare practices, and specifically to CAS agencies across Ontario.     

Nonprofit housing and neighborhood spillovers

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighbor‐hood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these impacts on neighborhoods. 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 slightly 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 non‐distribution constraint should lead nonprofits to invest more than for‐profits in developing and maintaining features that benefit the broader community. Meanwhile, the fact that scale makes a difference to nonprofit impacts may reflect the capacity constraints often faced by smaller nonprofits. ©2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management