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Latest rent research

A recent paper by UCLA researchers discusses 2019-20 literature on the relationship between new construction and rents. The article discusses five papers; four of them found that new housing consistently lowers rents in nearby buildings. For example, Kate Pennington wrote a paper on the relationship between new construction and housing costs in San Francisco.  What is unique about this paper is that while other papers focus on a broad sample of new construction, Pennington focuses on one subset of the market: “new construction caused by serious building fires.” Why?  Because most new construction is in high-demand areas.  Any study that focuses on such construction will be more likely to conclude that the new construction is related to high rents, when in fact the real cause of increased rents is increased demand for certain neighborhoods. Pennington found that rents actually decreased within 500 meters of new buildings- by 2.3 percent, compared to similar blocks without new buildings.   Pennington also found 17.1 percent less displacement (which she defines as moves to poorer zipcodes) near the new buildings, and found that landlords were less likely to evict rent-controlled tenants. One paper was a partial exception to the pro-supply trend of recent scholarship: a paper by Anthony Damiano and Chris Frenier found that new buildings in Minneapolis lowered rents for most nearby buildings, but increased rents for the cheapest buildings. But the UCLA researches point out that “Damiano and Frenier do not adjust the rents in their study for inflation, which is an unusual decision, and one that makes the rent increases they report look much larger than they actually were.” Adjusted for inflation, rents near new buildings declined by 7 percent overall, and increased by only 0.2 percent for the cheapest buildings. One point that the UCLA researches do not mention: although the […]

No, this study does NOT support refusal to build housing

A recent headline in the Forbes blog  screams: “Additional Housing Won’t Make City More Affordable, Says Fed Study.”  This blog post cites a Federal Reserve Study showing that adding 5 percent more housing in the most desirable urban neighborhoods would lower rents by only 0.5 percent. But if you read the study more carefully, it doesn’t stand for what the headline says it stands for.  First of all, it refers only to increasing housing supply in the most expensive neighborhoods.  But housing markets are citywide- so of course if you increase housing supply in just one or two neighborhoods, you are not going to get significant rent reductions.  If you raised housing supply by 5 percent everywhere, presumably you would get more than a 0.5 percent rent reduction. The study itself states: ” The papers that find large effects of regulation on house prices are not necessarily at odds with our findings in this paper, because regulations can have very large effects on the housing stock. For example, Jackson (2016) finds that an additional regulation reduces residential permits by 4 to 8 percent per year. Glaeser and Ward (2009) estimate even larger effects on supply. These effects on construction can accumulate into very large changes to the housing stock, especially when these regulations are in place for many years, as is often the case.” (p. 5)  In other words, the study admits that supply-limiting regulations do affect housing costs: precisely the opposite of what a careless reader might think from reading the Forbes headline. Second of all, 5 percent is not exactly a huge increase.  Even the author of the Forbes blog post concedes that more aggressive supply increases might lead to more aggressive rent reductions. Third, the study assumes a zero vacancy rate (p. 13) which seems to be an assumption that […]

Does Density Raise Housing Prices?

My last post, on urban geographic constraints and housing prices, led to an interesting discussion thread.  The most common counter argument was that because dense cities are usually more expensive, density must cause high cost.  But if this was true, cities would become cheaper as they became less dense. Most American urbanized areas have become less dense, not more, over time due to suburban sprawl.  Even where city populations have grown, much of that growth has been in areas that where undeveloped a century ago.  Thus, the developed part of even growing cities were, I suspect, more dense in 1917 than than they are today: for example, Manhattan’s population peaked at 2.3 million in 1910, about 40 percent more than its current population.   So rents should have come down.  Did they? Apparently not.  The Census date has statewide data showing that rents rose pretty much everywhere in real terms over the late 20th century.  In the District of Columbia, real rents increased from $346 to $612 in real dollars between 1950 and 1990, even as the city was losing population and the region was de-densifying.  If Washington is typical, it appears that lower density and higher rent went hand-in-hand.

Does Home-sharing Create Negative Externalities?

  A decade or two ago, a traveler who wished to stay in a city temporarily had no alternative to a hotel. Even if the owner of a house or condominium wished to rent out a room for a short period of time, the costs of advertising in a newspaper would have at least partially canceled out the financial benefits from renting. But the Internet has made home-sharing much more economical, through websites like Airbnb.com.  At first glance, the home-sharing industry seems highly beneficial: guests get a cheaper and/or more exotic vacation, home-sharing hosts get extra money to pay off mortgages, and their neighborhoods benefit from tourist revenue. Nevertheless, NIMBYs have attacked home-sharing.  One major argument is that home-sharing creates negative externalities.  For example, a recent law review article(1)  notes that some neighborhood activists in Silver Lake (a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood) sought to exclude home-sharing from their neighborhood on the ground that shared homes are “hotel-like room rentals”  and such a “commercial use [causes] the noise and traffic levels of the area [to] increase as a result of people coming and going, and the transient nature of the establishment can increase the crime rate.” As a result of these problems, home-sharing “brings nuisances to residential areas, thereby lowering the value of all homes in the neighborhood.” In other words, the “externalities” argument rests on the following chain of logic: Assumption 1: Home-sharing, as a commercial use, is no different from hotels. Assumption 2: Commercial uses bring down property values. Conclusion: Home-sharing brings down property values. But none of these claims has significant factual support.  First,  home-sharing is somewhat different from a large hotel. An individual hotel might have hundreds or thousands of guests on one block.  By contrast, home-shares tend to be spread out over a much larger space, […]

Are Billionaires To Blame?

One common argument I have read in various places is that the high rent of New York and other large cities is a result of globalization and inequality (English translation: rich foreigners).  According to this theory, rich people have created a surge of demand so overwhelming that no amount of construction could possibly meet it. It seems that if this argument were true, rent would be growing most rapidly in rich neighborhoods full of super-expensive skyscrapers, such as New York’s Upper East and West Sides. This week, NYU’s Furman Center helpfully came out with its latest report on housing in New York City. Page 6 of the report reveals that between 1990 and 2014, rent in the Upper East Side rose by 23 percent- about the same as the citywide average. Upper West Side rent rose by 38 percent- more than the citywide average, but less than ten of the city’s 50-odd other neighborhood clusters, including not only hipstery Greenpoint, but also not-so-nice areas like East Harlem. So this bit of data, although not conclusive, seems inconsistent with the “rich foreigners” theory.

Rent Control Part 3: Mobility, Regional Growth, Development and Class Conflict

Part One of this series was a refresher on the Microeconomics of Rent Control and touched on how it encourages hoarding Part Two discussed rent controls influence on the black market for apartments, rental property deterioration and housing discrimination. Here in Part Three, we will discuss how rent control hampers mobility, regional growth, tax revenue, apartment development, and becomes a catalyst for class conflict. Mobility As mentioned in Rent Control Part One, duration of residence in a rent-controlled apartment has been observed to be three times as long as duration at market-rate apartments. One can see that the incentive to hoard rent-controlled apartments is also disincentive to relocate. The mobility of both the tenants and newcomers are drastically hampered by rent control. Unless the tenant has the money to rent a second apartment (or Governor’s mansion), it will be difficult for him to relocate closer to better employment. The tenant may rather endure a very long commute in order to maintain the rent-controlled apartment. As Walter Block put it, "They are, in a sense, trapped by the gentle and visible hand that keeps them where they are rather than where they might do better." Difficulties are multiplied if the local economy takes a turn for the worse. A downturn in local employment would not be relieved by people relocating for jobs, thus making the unemployment and poverty situation worse. Employees looking to relocate in the city with rent control are hurt the worst as they will have a difficult time finding available apartments. The drawbacks to the local economy are discussed in the section on regional growth and adaptation. The reduction in mobility is especially burdensome on families with children, since public schools tend to be local. If the local school is under performing, a family under rent-control will lose […]

Rent Control Part 2: Black Market, Deterioration and Discrimination

With New York’s new Governor’s rent subsidized by his landlord and California debating the best ways to end rent control through Proposition 98, I thought it was a good opportunity to discuss the negative aspects of rent control. This post is the second in a four part series on the rent control. Read all four posts: Rent Control Part One: Microeconomics Lesson and Hording Rent Control Part Two: Black Market, Deterioration, and Discrimination Rent Control Part Three: Mobility, Regional Growth, Development, and Class Conflict Rent Control Part 4: Conclusion and Solutions Black Market and Deceptive Acts As current renters hoard their rent-controlled apartments, it is rare that new apartments become available. Sometimes, tenants would illegally sublet their units at higher rents. Landlords do under-the table deals or rent to friends and family. New York had to crack down on landlords charging “key fees” as high as several thousand dollars to new renters. Landlords will often find loopholes that will let them de-regulate a building, just to be released of the financial burdens. For example, in NY landlords will take their rent-controlled building and deregulate it by using the entire building as a residence for a certain number of years. This is space that could otherwise have been rented at a market rate. Deterioration of Existing Housing Stock Because of the disincentive to improve and maintain the property, landlords will often become slumlords and allow unhealthy conditions or activities to take place in the apartments. This lack of improvement not only is unpleasant to the current renter, but accelerates the end of the usable life of the aparment building. The Rand Corporation studied Los Angeles’ rent control law and found that 63 percent of the benefit of lowered rents was offset by a loss in available housing related to deterioration and […]

Rent Control Part 1: Microeconomics Lesson & Hoarding

This post has been released as the first in a four part series: Rent Control Part One: Microeconomics Lesson and Hoarding Rent Control Part Two: Black Market, Deterioration, and Discrimination Rent Control Part Three: Mobility, Regional Growth, Development, and Class Conflict Rent Control Part Four: Conclusion and Solutions Opposition to rent control among economists spans the political spectrum, including over 90% of American and Canadian economists.  In fact, Swedish socialist Economist Assar Lindbeck famously said, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing it.” (Assar Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 39) Without getting into the morality of restrictions on property rights, I will discuss the more subtle consequences of rent control over a series of posts. Quick Microeconomics Lesson: As stated by the National Multi Housing Council: Rents serve two functions essential to the efficient operation of housing markets: they compensate providers of existing housing units and developers of new units for the cost of providing shelter to consumers; and they provide the economic incentives needed to attract new investment in rental housing, as well as to maintain existing housing stock. In this respect, housing is no different from other commodities, such as food and clothing — the amount producers supply is directly related to the prevailing market price. Those of us who have studied microeconomics understand the near-universally accepted supply/demand consequence of rent-control: a decrease in the quality and supply of rental housing over time. But, for those who need a refresher or quick intro lesson, Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University and the popular Marginal Revolution blog explains the microeconomics of rent control in this video: When you have some spare time, watch this more […]

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