This paper assesses whether growth in the immigrant population over the past two decades has adversely affected the housing consumption opportunities of native renter households. We find that the monthly housing expenses of native renters are higher in metropolitan areas with larger immigrant...

Land-use regulation is undertaken by units of local government and is notoriously hard to measure. This paper assembles and reports the results of five complementary and overlapping surveys of local regulation in the San Francisco Bay Area. We compile measures derived from surveys of public...

Recent California legislation extends the application of prevailing wage regulations to subsidized low-income residential construction projects. This paper estimates the cost and supply effects of this legislation. Econometric evidence based on recently completed tax-credit projects in...

This paper reviews trends in housing affordability in the U.S. over the past four decades. There is little evidence that owner-occupied housing has become less affordable. In contrast, there have been modest increases in the fraction of income that the median renter household devotes to housing....

When interest rates vary, the value to a homeowner of a mortgage at a fixed interest rate varies as well. In particular, if mortgages are not fully assumable, then when interest rates increase, the value of a preexisting mortgage contract increases as well. Thus, homeowners have an incentive to...

An unusually rich source of data on housing prices in Stockholm is used to analyze the investment implications of housing choices. This empirical analysis derives market-wide price and return series for housing investment during a 13-year period, and it also provides estimates of the...

It is generally believed that the increased incidence of homelessness in the United States has arisen from broad societal factors, such as changes in the institutionalization of the mentally ill, increases in drug addiction and alcohol usage, and so forth. This paper presents a comprehensive...

The most significant and most expensive housing policy in the United States is the treatment of owner-occupied housing for tax purposes. This treatment of housing under the tax code is analogous to that in many other countries (for example, Sweden), but certainly not in all developed countries...