Search Results
Journal Article
Retrospective of the 1980s
Journal Article
Geographic patterns of mortgage lending in Boston, 1982-1987
Journal Article
The real estate cycle and the economy: consequences of the Massachusetts boom of 1984-87
The economy of Massachusetts is in a deep recession. What makes the downturn all the more painful is that it comes on the heels of a period of unprecedented prosperity. What happened? How could a state go from having the lowest unemployment rate in the United States to having the second highest in the space of less than four years? ; Some claim that the current recession is a natural and inevitable downturn after a prolonged expansion and that the region soon will return to a reasonable growth path. Others claim that the state is likely to experience a prolonged period of decline. The thesis ...
Briefing
The changing housing market: a bang or a whimper?
The U.S. housing market has had an extraordinary 15-year run in terms of prices, sales of existing homes, and new construction, especially on the East and West Coasts. Beginning in the spring of 2006, however, the housing market began to turn distinctly downward. We know that 2005 was a good year and that 2006 has not been such a good year, and we see indications that 2007 could be tough. To help understand why the market has shifted from hot to, at a minimum, cool, this paper, which is the first in a series of NEPPC policy briefs on housing, recaps some of the factors that contributed to ...
Journal Article
School quality and Massachusetts enrollment shifts in the context of tax limitations
Like most states, Massachusetts underwent a large shift in public school enrollment between the 1980s and 1990s, requiring a number of sizable fiscal and educational adjustments by individual school districts. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of students in kindergarten through grade 12 fell 21 percent, from 1.04 million to 825,000. As children of baby boomers reached school age, the picture changed and enrollments grew more than 90,000 over the next seven years. These aggregate trends gloss over even more marked shifts at the local level. This ...
Journal Article
The behavior of home buyers in boom and post-boom markets
Journal Article
The housing cycle in Eastern Massachusetts: variations among cities and towns
Numerous studies over the years have attempted to identify the impact of amenities on housing price levels within specific metropolitan areas. It is well know, for example, that local public goods, tax burdens, school quality, crime rates, and the like are capitalized into land values. This article divides the Eastern Massachusetts area into small groups of similar towns and examines the pattern of price changes across those groups during the boom, bust, and recovery periods. Since 1982, differences in appreciation rates across cities and towns have been particularly pronounces. The authors ...
Journal Article
The market for single-family homes in the Boston area
Journal Article
Chasing good schools in Massachusetts