Working Papers
Revise and resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics. Link, Save
Media: Atlanta Business Chronicle, CityLab, Detroit Free Press, The Economist, Financial Times, New York Magazine, Next City, Philadelphia Inquirer (original) (editorial board), Seattle Times, WHYY
Gentrification is associated with large changes in neighborhood demographic, housing, and labor market characteristics. Whether these changes are driven by impacts on incumbents or by in-migration matters for understanding welfare consequences and the design of potential policy responses. We study these questions with longitudinal census microdata. Gentrification increases incumbent out-migration and rents modestly, increases incumbent house values, and does not affect incumbent employment or incomes. Neighborhood changes are instead driven by differential in-migration: as more college-educated, higher-income people paying higher rents move in, fewer less-educated people move in.
Eviction and Poverty in American Cities (with Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk)
Conditionally accepted, Quarterly Journal of Economics. Link, Save
Media: The Economist
More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two large cities. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends are more pronounced for tenants who are evicted, which poses a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness, and reduces earnings, durable consumption, and access to credit. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants.
Publications
Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas (with Brian Asquith and Evan Mast)
Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics. Link, Save
Media: Bloomberg, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, New York Times
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 rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially. If buildings improve nearby amenities, the effect is not large enough to increase rents. Amenity improvements could be limited because most buildings go into already-changing neighborhoods, or buildings could create disamenities such as congestion.
Journal of Housing Economics, 2019, volume 46, article 101636. Final
Media: New York Times
Since the early 1990s, central city crime has fallen dramatically in the United States. We explore the extent to which this trend may have contributed to gentrification. Using confidential census microdata, we show that reductions in central city violent crime are associated with increases in the probability that high-income and college-educated households move into central city neighborhoods, including low-income neighborhoods, instead of the suburbs. We then use neighborhood-level crime and home purchase data for five major U.S. cities and find that falling neighborhood crime is associated with increasing numbers and shares of high-income movers choosing low-income central city neighborhoods.