Research
Job Market Paper
This paper provides new evidence on the impact of natural disasters on rental markets and the role of existing rental subsidies through the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program in the wake of such destructive events. Combining a novel data set of asking rents in New York City with spatial data on flooding incurred by Hurricane Sandy, I first estimate the rental impact of the storm in affected neighborhoods using a difference in differences design. In contrast to the literature on home prices, I find initial negative impacts on rents rebound quite quickly. I also find evidence of heterogeneity by neighborhood income: asking rents in above median income neighborhoods increased by 5%, while asking rents in lower income neighborhoods decreased by 5%, effects that appear to be driven by disparate neighborhood resources for recovery. Examining the rental impacts in the voucher market supports this theory. Voucher rents increased by over 5%, driven by voucher landlords' ability to renovate their buildings earlier than other low-income landlords. Programmatic features allowed for th eincidence of these increases to fall nearly entirely on the government, providing a sort of insurance for voucher landlords and tenants. These results underscore the importance of examining the impact of disasters on rental markets for understanding the distribution of disaster recovery and it simplications for equity. They also highlight a trade-off inherent in existing rental subsidies: while subsidies may fill gaps left by traditional disaster assistance, they may also create implicit incentives to house vulnerable populations in high-risk areas.
Publications
An elusive goal of the Housing Choice Voucher program is to provide more—and better—locational choices for recipient households. Yet landlord discrimination can be a barrier, particularly in areas of greater opportunity. Using a difference-in-difference design with different comparison groups, we evaluate the effectiveness of source-of-income discrimination laws in 31 jurisdictions enacting such laws between 2007 and 2017 in improving locational outcomes for voucher households. We find evidence that such laws lead to more upwardly mobile moves (or greater improvement in neighborhoods) among existing voucher holders who move. Specifically, existing voucher holders who move post enactment experience greater reductions in neighborhood poverty rates and in voucher household shares. We also find that after SOI laws pass, voucher holders move to neighborhoods with larger white population shares than their original neighborhoods. Effects are modest, but they hold for households whose head is Black as well as for families with children, two groups who may face greater challenges in housing markets. We do not find any change in the characteristics of the neighborhoods where new voucher holders lease up after the passage of SOI laws, but this may be confounded by compositional change in the neighborhoods where successful voucher holders originate.