Research

Community Land Trusts and Neighborhood Outcomes with Omer Ali (Draft)

This paper studies the effect of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) on neighborhood composition and affordability. CLTs are non-profit organizations that buy and resell houses at subsidized prices with a unique feature: the trust retains ownership of the land and leases it to homeowners with long-term agreements to limit resale price and maintain affordability. CLTs have gained renewed attention as a possible solution to the shrinking stock of affordable housing, in part because they also create pathways from renting to homeownership. An important question is whether a CLT - aside from making the purchased dwelling permanently affordable - generates spillover effects on surrounding house prices through changes in neighborhood amenities. We create a novel dataset of CLT housing transactions from 2000 to 2016 and combine it with panel data on individual migration histories to estimate the effects of CLT purchases on home prices and displacement in the surrounding neighborhood. We find evidence that neighborhood housing values decrease in the vicinity of CLT properties and so does the probability of a household moving out of the neighborhood, especially for Black and Hispanic households. These results suggest that CLTs help current resident traditionally at higher risk of displacement to remain in their neighborhood.

Nonprofit Developers and Affordable Housing: Benefits and Weaknesses

In this paper, I study the role of non-profit housing developers in the provision of affordable housing. Since the 1980s, the federal government has increasingly delegated housing assistance to state and local governments, who have relied on either non-profit or for-profit private sector organizations to build and renovate affordable housing. The effectiveness of subsidizing non-profits for supplying affordable housing, as opposed to for-profits, is ex-ante ambiguous. On the one hand, non-profits typically face higher financing costs and have lower capacity. On the other hand, they are committed to keeping housing affordable indefinitely and have no desire to eventually charge market-rate rents. They also provide an array of supportive services such as employment counseling, childcare, and education, and sometimes are the only groups willing or able to work in the poorest urban neighborhoods. To study these trade-offs, I compiled a dataset of all non-profit housing developers in Philadelphia since 1990, where non-profits played a large role in developing vacant properties into affordable housing units. I study the effect of non-profit developers on the affordability and quality (as measured by local amenities) of the neighborhoods in which they operate, with a view towards understanding whether and when they serve as effective providers of affordable housing.