Does a more centralized urban form raise housing prices?

Journal of Urban Economics, 2006

This article attempts a formal analysis of the connection between property tax and urban sprawl in U.S. cities. We develop a theoretical model that includes households (who are also landlords) and land developers in a regional land market. We then test the model empirically based on a national sample of urbanized areas. The results we obtained from both theoretical and empirical analyses indicate that increasing property tax rates reduces the size of urbanized areas.

Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl

The chapter explains how government regulation prices Americans out of the most desirable cities, causing some households who prefer city living to choose cheaper suburbs. The chapter goes on to suggest zoning reforms that would reduce urban housing costs. Keywords NIMBY Á Housing Prices Á Housing Costs Á Rent Á Rezoning The last chapter focused on why American cities became less desirable in the late twentieth century. However, a few cities now suffer from a very different problem: as they have recovered, their most desirable neighborhoods have become so expensive that some people feel priced out of cities and instead chosen suburbia. Population-losing cities tend to be cheaper than their suburban neighbors. For example, the median gross rent in St. Louis is $720, almost 30 percent lower than the $985 median rent in University City (a suburb bordering that city). 1 But in more prosperous cities, there is not enough housing to go around. For example, in San Francisco, the rental vacancy rate 1 See City Data, www.city-data.com. For City Data facts on an individual city, county, zip code or neighborhood, go to the main City Data page and enter the place name or zip code on the website's individual search engine.

Journal of Regional Science, 2006

A hybrid conditional logit choice model is estimated using data on the characteristics and destination of homeowners who engaged in intrametropolitan moves among 17 school districts within the Columbus, Ohio area in 1995. The model is used to test the relative influence of local fiscal and public goods versus household-level characteristics in determining household location choices across central city and suburban school districts. Results provide evidence of both a ''natural evolution'' of households to the suburbs, due to job location, residential filtering, and household income and lifecycle effects, and ''flight from blight,'' due to lower school quality, higher crime levels, and lower average income levels in the city. In comparing the magnitudes of these variables, we find that school quality exerts the strongest influence: a 1-percent increase in the school quality of the city district increases the probability of choosing a city residence by 3.7 percent. In contrast, the effects of household income and other individual characteristics are relatively modest. The findings provide support for a ''flight from blight'' suburbanization process that is dominated by differences in neighborhood quality between the city and suburbs. An implication is that investments that promote central city development and reduce suburbanization are justified on efficiency grounds if negative externalities are generated by increased concentration of poverty, crime, and low school quality.

Journal of Housing Economics, 2012

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Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2002

We investigate the impact of the tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on urban form in an economy in which high-and low-income households choose between city and suburban communities. Because housing tax policies differentially affect the relative after-tax price of housing for high-and low-income households, and because the extent of capitalization of housing tax policies can differ across city and suburban communities, our analysis finds that housing tax policies can affect not only the density of the metropolitan area but also can influence where rich and poor households choose to live.

2011

Property owners often resist the idea of siting public or subsidized housing in their neighborhood. The notion that subsidized housing exerts a negative externality effect on adjacent properties has been investigated elsewhere in the US, particularly in the Northeast, with inconclusive findings. In the first two chapters of this dissertation,

2009

The tyranny of distance in terms of its effect on median earnings and housing costs is examined for rural and urban US counties. First, we develop a series of distance metrics for an area's remoteness from multiple tiers of the urban hierarchy. Second, we consider geographical access of buyers and sellers through market potential measures typical of those used in empirical studies of the New Economic Geography.

Journal of Urban Economics, 1983

Economic Development Quarterly, 2021

The price of a new home is greater if the land to put it on costs more. In many U.S. metropolitan areas, this generates the widely acknowledged equity concern that low-to moderate-income households spend disproportionately on housing. But high residential land prices translating into high single-family home prices may also generate the efficiency concern of discouraging new workers' entry into such areas or encouraging existing workers' exit. The result could be a decrease in economic activity. This research offers panel-data regression evidence in support of the existence of this adverse outcome. Perhaps these findings can raise the saliency of the needed state or federal government intervention to curtail the stringency of local residential land-use regulations. NIMBYs see these land-use regulations as in their jurisdiction's best interest, but as demonstrated here, such restrictions impose additional metro-wide economic concerns.

2005

We primarily focus on explaining housing prices and predicting housing price gradients in a Norwegian region with one dominating center (Stavanger). For such a geography spatial separation can be represented in a hedonic regression equation by a function of traveling distance from the city center. Several functions are tested, and some alternatives provide both a satisfying goodness-to-fit, consistent coefficient estimates, and intuitively reasonable predictions of housing price gradients. Still, not all commonly used functions are recommended. Spatial autocorrelation is removed when the hedonic function is properly specified.