Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Developments and Neighborhood Property Conditions

Abstract

Public housing has long been a contentious issue for cities and regions. On one hand, there is an acute need for affordable housing in low-and moderate-income communities. But the massing of public or otherwise subsidized housing in disadvantaged neighborhoods has given rise to concerns that "public housing" has led to decay in these communities. The purpose of this paper is to use analytical tools to evaluate the "conventional wisdom" that lower-income housing developments lead to decay the lower-income communities in which they generally are placed. I use a highly unique dataset on property conditions for tens of thousands of individual land parcels and an approach for estimating count data models based on the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (CMP) distribution. The CMP is useful for estimating models with underdispersed data, which is uncommon. Results suggest that while large rehab developments tend to enhance property conditions nearby, the effects of other types of developments generally are negative.