Gentrification and Neighborhood Housing Cycles: Will America's Future Downtowns Be Rich?

By Jan K. Brueckner, Stuart S. Rosenthal. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper identifies a new factor, the age of the housing stock, that affects where high- and low-income neighborhoods are located in U.S. cities. High-income households, driven by a high demand for housing services, tend to locate in areas of the city where the housing stock is relatively young. Because cities develop and redevelop from the center outward over time, the location of these neighborhoods varies over the city's history. The model predicts a suburban location for the rich in an initial period, when young dwellings are found only in the suburbs, while predicting eventual gentrification once central redevelopment creates a young downtown housing stock. Controlling for other determinants of where the poor live (e.g., proximity to amenities and public transit), empirical work indicates that if the influence of spatial variation in dwelling ages were eliminated, central-city/suburban disparities in neighborhood economic status would be reduced by up to 10 percentage points. Model estimates further predict that between 2000 and 2020, central-city/suburban differences in economic status will narrow in cities of all sizes, and especially in the larger metropolitan areas as American cities become more gentrified.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cfcbbf9b9676fdca046a6e0f15c298c84cb0e36

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Citations in the corpus

What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics? (2019, positive): “…dwellings are differentiated by age, the affluent are attracted by both suburban locations where they consume big land plots and by downtown locations where central redevelopment makes the housing stock young; this generates a U-shaped spatial income distribution (Brueckner and Rosenthal 2009).”
Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872 (2017, neutral): “It seems to be the replacement of buildings that drives changes in occupancy patterns (as in Brueckner and Rosenthal 2009), and so we focus on positive spillovers from higher quality buildings with the understanding that these spillovers may operate in part through associated changes in occupant…”
Depreciation of housing capital, maintenance, and house price inflation: Estimates from a repeat sales model (2007, background): “Recent papers by Brueckner and Rosenthal [ 2 ], Rosenthal [18] and Gyourko and Saiz [12]”
Accounting for central neighborhood change, 1980–2010 (2020, neutral): “These include highway construction (Baum-Snow, 2007), decentralization of low-skilled work (Kain, 1992), white flight from rising minority populations in cities (Boustan, 2010), rising incomes (Margo, 1992), Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance provision favoring the suburbs (Jackson, 1985) ”
Measuring environmental inequality (2016, methodology): “4 Census tracts have been used as proxies for neighborhoods in analyzing environmental disparities (Zwickl and Moser 2014), housing segregation (Brueckner and Rosenthal 2009), unemployment (Topa 2001) and subprime credit markets (Richter and Craig 2013).”
Crowd out effects of place-based subsidized rental housing: New evidence from the LIHTC program (2010, background): “This is because cities tend to develop and subsequently redevelop from the center outwards over time (e.g. Brueckner and Rosenthal (2009)).”