Advisory Center for Affordable Settlements & Housing

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Edited By Tabassum Rahmani
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USA – The External Effects of Place-Based Subsidized Housing

Prior research has provided little evidence that subsidized housing investments generate significant external benefits to their neighborhoods. This paper revisits the external effects of subsidized housing, exploring the case of New York City. Relying on geocoded administrative data, we estimate a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find significant and sustained external benefits. Spillovers increase with project size, and decrease with distance from the project sites and with the proportion of units in multi-family, rental buildings. Our results are robust to alternative specifications. Some of the benefit appears due to the effect of the replacement of existing disamenity. This paper examines such external effects. While prior research has left economists skeptical, estimating the external effects of subsidized housing investment – and disentangling the direction of causality in complex urban housing markets – is difficult, requiring plentiful geographically detailed data, a large range of housing investments, and a plausibly exogenous set of site choices. Earlier research has not had access to these data or circumstances. In this paper, we make use of the opportunity afforded by New York City’s unparalleled investment in subsidized housing between 1987 and 2000, which resulted in the creation of 66,000 new subsidized housing units.

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