Search Results
Working Paper
Rural Affordable Rental Housing : Quantifying Need, Reviewing Recent Federal Support, and Assessing the Use of Low Income Housing Tax Credits in Rural Areas
Recently, there has been significant interest in the high levels of rental cost burden being experienced across the United States. Much of this scholarship has focused on rental cost burdens in larger urban areas, or at the national level, and has not explored differences in the prevalence of rental cost burden in urban versus rural communities. In this paper, I find that rental cost burdens are a challenge facing both urban and rural communities. However, despite the need for affordable rental housing in rural communities identified, I find the amount of resources made available by the ...
What Are the Long-run Trade-offs of Rent-Control Policies?
While rent-control policies can mean more affordable housing for some, research shows they can also lead to a decline in the supply and quality of rental housing.
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Multiple blog posts.
Working Paper
Can More Housing Supply Solve the Affordability Crisis? Evidence from a Neighborhood Choice Model
We estimate a neighborhood choice model using 2014 American Community Survey data to investigate the degree to which new housing supply can improve housing affordability. In the model, equilibrium rental rates are determined so that the number of households choosing each neighborhood is equal to the number of housing units in each neighborhood. We use the estimated model to simulate how rental rates would respond to an exogenous increase in the number of housing units in a neighborhood. We find that the rent elasticity is low, and thus marginal reductions in supply constraints alone are ...
Discussion Paper
Unlocking Housing Supply: What Can We Learn About Recent Construction and Permitting Patterns in Our Region?
Since 2020, housing has become increasingly unaffordable for many families throughout the United States. Nationally, home prices have risen more than 40 percent, on average, and rent has increased by around 22 percent. While heightened demand likely fueled the rapid buildup in home prices since the COVID-19 pandemic, a chronic undersupply of housing from underbuilding in the 2010s also contributes to current housing affordability challenges.Recent rates of new residential construction have varied considerably across communities due in part to differences in the availability and cost of ...
Working Paper
Housing Supply and Affordability: Evidence from Rents, Housing Consumption and Household Location
We examine how housing supply constraints affect housing affordability, which we define as the quality-adjusted price of housing services. In our dynamic model, supply constraints increase the price of housing services by only half has much as the purchase price of a home, since the purchase price responds to expected future increases in rent as well as contemporaneous rent increases. Households respond to changes in the price of housing services by altering their housing consumption and location choices, but only by a small amount. We evaluate these predictions using common measures of ...
Working Paper
Land development and frictions to housing supply over the business cycle
Using a novel data set of U.S. residential land developments, we document that the average time to develop residential properties-which includes both the time spent preparing land infrastructures and construction-is about three years, consistent with sizable lags in housing investment projects. We show that the time to develop is highly dispersed across locations, a finding that helps quantify the housing supply elasticity that is relevant for assessing local housing variations over the business cycle. We also show that incorporating long and dispersed time to develop into an otherwise ...
Working Paper
Report on the Potential Impacts of Property Tax Abatement on Rental Housing Construction in Boston
Boston’s high housing costs reflect a historic failure to build enough units to satisfy demand. Interest rates and construction costs have risen recently, and the flow of new market-rate residential housing projects has slowed. To spur more construction, the City of Boston is considering various policy options. Our committee was asked by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to assess the market impacts of one of these options: real estate tax abatements. This report presents our analysis of the likely effects on the number of units constructed and the costs to taxpayers of various tax abatement ...