Essays on Housing Insecurity, Real Estate, and Urban Inequality

Abstract

Access to affordable housing has emerged as a generational policy issue in the United States. In this dissertation, I conducted three unique projects to better understand how unaffordability influences housing insecurity, household formation, and decision-making among housing suppliers. In the first study, I use longitudinal data from the PSID to understand how the increasingly common housing arrangements of cost burdens, overcrowding, and doubling-up influence future residential moves among families with children. I find that, contrary to popular narratives, only severe cost burdens and doubling-up with non-kin lead to moves of insecurity (i.e., reactive or frequent residential mobility). However, each type of housing arrangement increases the likelihood of a set of moves that represent purposive adjustments to housing consumption (i.e., moves to reduce costs, access more space, or establish and independent home). This finding suggests that scholars and policymakers interested in providing housing resources to families experiencing insecurity must reach establish alternatives to cost burdens, overcrowding, and doubling-up to identify target populations. In the second study, I ask how dynamic changes to properties that are associated with changes to affordability—property sales, renovations, and demolitions—influence residential mobility, school switching, and destinations for families with children. Using a novel linked administrative dataset, I find that children are more likely to move when their rental home is sold to a new owner or is demolished, but these children are no more likely to switch schools. This finding implies that families may limit their residential searches to nearby homes or these families are tapping into public policies that provide transportation and enrollment support that allow students to remain at their school of origin when experiencing housing insecurity. In the third study, I ask how real estate investors make decisions about the properties they buy and sell, and how these decisions influence housing affordability. I find that investors often work with distressed property, and their decisions about the maintenance or transformation of these properties are central to the future affordability of single-family homes. Together, this work demonstrates how housing markets influence residential mobility and insecurity experienced by renting families in U.S. cities, with implications for policies that aim to direct resources to vulnerable families and promote the development of affordable housing.