We decompose the break-even rents of new multifamily housing into three cost components — land prices, construction costs, and financial capital — for 50 of the largest cities in the United States from 2012 to 2020. This is accomplished by combining existing data on land prices and income capitalization rates with a new data series on local historical pricing of required construction components of complete buildings called “assemblies”. For both 3-story, wood-framed buildings and 12-story, steel-framed buildings, we find that construction costs contribute significantly to the growth of break-even rents, and the relative contribution of construction costs exceeds that of land values for the taller buildings. Meanwhile, cap rates have declined, mediating the effect of development costs on the rents borne by tenants. Overall, there is significant variation in rent growth across cities that can be explained by these three cost factors.
Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) support residential mobility to reduce economic segregation. One design feature of HMPs requires identifying areas to which moving will most improve outcomes. We show that ranking neighborhoods’ effects using current residents’ outcomes has strengths over using previous residents’ outcomes due to statistical uncertainty, bias from sorting over time, and lack of support. We simulate how the choice of neighborhood ranking and others affect an originally-intended outcome of HMPs: reducing racial segregation. HMP success on this dimension depends on the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and the range of neighborhoods targeted.
This paper shows that skills acquired by early adulthood affect homeownership levels achieved later in life in important ways. The paper examines three sets of skills—cognitive skills, as measured by the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score; non-cognitive skills (specifically, the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives), measured by the Rotter score; and social skills, using a Social score based on Deming (2017). Mediation analysis is used to identify both the direct and indirect effects of these skills, as captured by the three different types of scores, on homeownership. We show that the AFQT score measuring cognitive skills not only captures direct effects on the homeownership rate, but even larger indirect effects through the mediator variables—education and income. AFQT scores in early adulthood are shown to be highly predictive of homeownership outcomes, explaining roughly one-quarter to one-third of the disparate outcomes between White, Black, and Hispanic households. We also examine the degree to which the AFQT, Rotter, and Social scores explain variation in homeownership rates over an individual's life cycle. The findings suggest that reducing disparities in educational outcomes would meaningfully contribute to reducing minority homeownership gaps.