A radical rethinking of housing policy is needed to allow housing markets to operate freely--and to make housing affordable and plentiful for the middle class and the poor.

A radical rethinking of housing policy is needed to allow housing markets to operate freely--and to make housing affordable and plentiful for the middle class and the poor.

A dynamic linear rational equilibrium model in the tradition of Alonso, Rosen and Roback is consistent with many outstanding stylized facts of housing markets. These include: (a) that the markets are local in nature; (b) that construction persistence is fully compatible with mean reversion in...

Most of America’s largest cities in 1950 have declined since then. In these declining areas, most homes cost less than the cost of new construction. In 1990, nearly 60 percent of all owner-occupied single-unit residences in Midwest central cities were valued at less than the cost of...

This paper examines whether there is a housing affordability problem in America by comparing house prices to the costs of new construction. It then proceeds to investigate why prices far exceed construction costs in certain areas. In most of the country, home prices appear to be fairly close to...

Cities are physical structures, but the modern literature on urban economic development rarely acknowledges that fact. The elasticity of housing supply helps determine the extent to which increases in productivity will create bigger cities or just higher paid workers and more expensive homes. In...

This paper was presented at the conference "Policies to Promote Affordable Housing," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, February 7, 2002. It was part of Session 2: Affordable Housing and the Housing Market.

Cities are physical structures, but the modern literature on urban economic development rarely acknowledges that fact. The elasticity of housing supply helps determine the extent to which increases in productivity will create bigger cities or just higher paid workers and more expensive homes. In...

Like many other assets, housing prices are quite volatile relative to observable changes in fundamentals. If we are going to understand boom-bust housing cycles, we must incorporate housing supply. In this paper, we present a simple model of housing bubbles that predicts that places with more...