We present the results of a new survey of US home-buyers in 2002. The most important finding is that the survey suggests that home-buyers’ expectations are substantially affected by recent experience. Even after a long boom that has taken prices to very high levels, home-buyers typically...

No economist studying the spatial economy of urban areas today would ignore the effects of race on housing markets and labor market opportunities, but this was not always the case. John Kain developed much of urban economics but, more importantly, legitimized and encouraged scholarly...

Owner occupied housing facilitates household wealth accumulation and the stability of consumption in developed countries. It also contributes to other social goals. But owner-occupied housing is also a risky investment. This paper synthesizes existing knowledge about the riskiness of housing...

Almost thirty years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences asked John Meyer to organize an exploration of the links between transportation and poverty. During the spring of 1968, a dozen papers were commissioned, in collaboration with Harvard’s Program on Regional and Urban...

This paper considers residential segregation by race and by type of household in 1970 and 1980. The paper presents entropy indices of segregation for the San Francisco Bay Area and its five metropolitan areas. The methodology permits an investigation of the effects of group definition upon...

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area’s heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of...

The residential sector accounts for one-fifth of global energy consumption, resulting from the requirements to heat, cool, and light residential dwellings. It is therefore not surprising that energy efficiency in the residential market has gained importance in recent years. In this paper, we...

Among the many sorting functions provided by institutions of higher education, there is a geographic dimension. During the years spent as students and residents of local communities, students develop specific networks and contacts, and perhaps their tastes change as well. After graduation, these...