Following World War II, many large U.S. cities began to rapidly lose population. This urban decline climaxed during the 1970s when New York City, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Atlanta each lost more than 10 percent of their population. The sharp declines of these and numerous other U.S....

From 1971 through mid-2007, the nominal national sales price of housing grew almost eightfold. Controlling for inflation, this represented a near doubling in the relative price of housing. The retrenchment in prices that began in 2007 has so far remained small compared to the earlier increase. ;...

For more than 50 years, suburbs throughout the United States have prospered, while many of the large cities they surround have stagnated. Hence, many people perceive that cities and suburbs tend to grow at each other’s expense—and thus compete for residents and jobs. While there is some...

Over the last few decades the number of U.S. metropolitan areas large enough to host a franchise from one of the four major professional sports leagues has soared. Even as major league baseball, football, basketball and hockey have expanded to include more franchises, demand by metro areas...

In recent years, the United States, like many other industrialized nations, has experienced wide swings in the growth rate of housing prices. To understand the behavior of housing prices and their influence on the economy, it is crucial to have an accurate measure of aggregate housing prices. In...

The crash of the U.S. housing market triggered the worst U.S. recession since the 1930s. Beginning in late 2009, multifamily construction rebounded strongly. Beginning in mid-2011, single-family construction began to rebound as well. But during the first half of 2013, growth of both types of...

The recent economic and financial crisis and the current slow recovery highlight that homeownership plays a critical role in the U.S. economy. The estimated “equivalent rent” implicitly paid by homeowners accounts for more than 8 percent of gross domestic product. Investment in single-family...

Unemployment rates differ widely and persistently across U.S. metro areas. Metros that have experienced high or low unemployment rates in one year have tended to stay that way 10 years and even 20 years later. ; Such variation and persistence raises questions: Why don’t households move from...