Essays On Neighborhood Transition And Housing Markets

Author : Mia Goodnature
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (131 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Demographic and Environmental Changes on Home Sales written by Mia Goodnature and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gentrification occurs when low-income areas transition into higher-income neighborhoods. Chapter 1 examines one possible driver of gentrification: the influx of same-sex couples into a community. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a relationship between same-sex couples and gentrification, but this could be because these couples sort into neighborhoods that are more likely to gentrify. To address the endogeneity problem, we employ an instrumental variables strategy using voting results for the state-level equivalent of the Defense of Marriage Act in Ohio as an instrument for the change in the number of same-sex couples. We find that areas with a higher change in the number of same-sex couples are more likely to experience gentrification. In addition, using semi-parametric techniques, we find there is a tipping point after which gentrification is more likely to occur. Overall, our results suggest that same-sex couples can initiate gentrification, but there is a threshold that has to be met for neighborhood change to be more likely to occur. These findings are important for policy makers because understanding the drivers of gentrification is crucial to designing effective policy to revitalize urban neighborhoods and address any problems attributed to gentrification. Chapter 2 identifies same-sex couple households who purchase homes together and evaluates the concentration of their residential location. We draw upon a novel data set of real estate transactions from Miami-Dade County, Florida; Franklin County, Ohio; and King County, Washington. We are able to separately identify male same-sex couple homebuyers and female same-sex couple homebuyers at the property level by predicting the homebuyers' sex based on homebuyers' full names. To show that the method suggested in this paper to identify members of the LGBTQ+ community is identifying same-sex couple homebuyers, we compare distributions from the Decennial Census and look at summary statistics of houses purchased by same-sex couples. As hurricane destruction has become more frequent and more dramatic, it is important to understand how communities respond to this damage. Chapter 3 explores how the selling price of houses responds to spillover effects of living near houses with hurricane-induced damages and repairs. These spillover effects are investigated in Punta Gorda, Florida, which was hit by Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 hurricane, in August 2004. Results indicate that house prices temporarily increase after the hurricane. Nearby damaged houses have no statistically significant effect. Nearby houses that were repaired to a larger square footage have a positive spillover effect while all other repaired houses, like those that do not increase their square footage, have a negative spillover effect on housing prices.