Neighborhood Effects of Rental Housing

Julia Koschinsky (julia.koschinsky@asu.edu)

Urban Affairs Association, Baltimore, April 23-26, 2008

A large body of urban research assesses the impacts of subsidized
rental housing on nearby property values of single-family homes. This
paper addresses two important research gaps in this literature related
to subsidy status and zoning context. 1) Almost no research compares
the possible impacts of subsidized rental housing to those of
unsubsidized rentals. This gap is relevant since homeowners often fail
to accurately distinguish nearby subsidized from unsubsidized rental
units, apartment buildings frequently contain both types of units and
tenants, and subsidized units only make up a small portion of the
low-income rental market. The motivating question is the extent to
which impacts of subsidized rental units are driven by differences
between renter and owner housing, more so than by differences in
subsidy status. This paper addresses this research gap, applying
different types of traditional and spatial hedonic regression models to
a comprehensive set of parcel data for the city of Seattle (1987-97).
2) Another gap in the literature is an analysis of rental spillovers in
the context of zoning.This paper addresses this gap by assessing
whether rental spillovers in single-family zones differ from those in
multi-family/commercial zones. This analysis is relevant for planning
purposes since it identifies conditions under which rental spillovers
occur that can be influenced by housing planners.