Modeling Housing Appreciation Dynamics in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods

Abstract

There is long-standing interest in predicting if and when less advantaged urban neighborhoods will experience upsurges in their housing prices, yet little research has investigated year-to-year neighbor hood price dynamics. The authors advance knowledge in this realm by employing anually updated, readily available indicators created from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and assessor's data from Washington, D.C., census tracts for 1995 to 2005 to estimate a hazard model of the year when consistent, substantial, and sustained housing price appreciation starts in disadvantaged neighborhoods, based on predictors measured one and two years in advance. The results suggest that proximity to stronger neighborhoods, a robust metropolitan housing market, and inflows of higherstatus home buyers are key predictors of appreciation onset in disadvantaged neighborhoods, but replications and refinements are needed before firm generalizations about this process can be made.

Neighborhood Disinvestment, Abandonment, and Crime Dynamics

“…This analytical framework has spawned numerous multivariate statistical studies, each addressing a specific aspect of neighborhood change. Outcomes investigated include housing prices (Galster & Tatian, 2009;Li & Rosenblatt, 1997), population density (Guest, 1972(Guest, , 1973, income or social class (Carter, Schill, & Wachter, 1998;Dewar, Basmajian, Alter, & Law, 2005;Galster & Mincy, 1993;Galster, Mincy, & Tobin, 1997;Galster & Peacock, 1985;Guest, 1974;Wyly & Hammel, 1999, home ownership rates (Baxter & Lauria, 2000), female headship rates (Krivo, Peterson, Rizzo, & Reynolds, 1998), dwelling vacancy rates (Dewar et al, 2005), and racial composition (Baxter & Lauria, 2000;Crowder, 2000;Ellen, 2000;Denton & Massey, 1991;Galster, 1990aGalster, , 1990bLauria & Baxter, 1999;Lee & Wood, 1991;Ottensmann & Gleeson, 1992;Ottensmann, Good, & Gleeson, 1990;Schwab & Marsh, 1980 ). Unfortunately, measures of crime have not been employed as a predictor in the aforementioned neighborhood change empirical literature.…”

Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using Multilevel Selection Theory

“…Crucially, there is a need for a multilevel framework of neighborhood change that produces testable hypotheses and thus facilitates empirical analysis at multiple geographic scales (Pitkin 2001). Empirical studies at the individual scale are especially needed, insofar as data availability issues typically necessitate research based on aggregated geographical units (Galster, Hayes, and Johnson 2005;Galster and Tatian 2009).…”

Deprived neighbourhoods in transition: Divergent pathways of change in the Greater Manchester city-region

“…It has been suggested elsewhere that understanding narratives and personal histories of residents and stakeholders within a neighbourhood might offer more fruitful avenues for neighbourhood change research than approaches that aim "…to unlock causal paths or, in another familiar exercise, seek to derive neighbourhood "typologies" from an array of statistical indicators of various kinds" (Cole, 2013: 80). However, the analyses in this paper and elsewhere suggest that typological and modelling approaches can offer equally important insights into patterns of neighbourhood change and their underlying dynamics (Galster et al, 2007;Galster and Tatian, 2009;Huwang and Simpson, 2014;Hincks, 2015). Prospective studies should focus on mobilising multimethod frameworks that combine the narrative approach advocated by Cole and the transition approach adopted here and elsewhere.…”

“…The second contribution is by testing the thesis that the more deprived a neighbourhood is, the more likely it is to respond with greater volatility to short-run shocks when compared with less-deprived neighbourhoods. Whilst this corresponds to broader interpretations of the vulnerabilities of disadvantaged neighbourhoods to changing endogenous and exogenous effects (Atkinson and Kintrea, 2001;Cole, 2013;Hwang and Sampson, 2014;Kearns and Parkes, 2003), there remains little understanding of how disadvantaged and vulnerable neighbourhoods respond to shocks in the short-run (Galster and Tatian, 2009). The approach used to analyse change and transition in this paper consists of several components.…”