Despite their importance as investment vehicles and as housing, very little analysis of multifamily markets has been undertaken to date. The literature that has been produced has, with few exceptions discussed below, focused on the aggregate national market, or occasionally on the regional market. But housing markets are well known to be local and diverse. The purpose of this paper is to examin...

This paper studies residential real estate investors and their relationship with local house price movement using several comprehensive micro data on mortgage application and performance. The paper makes two contributions to the growing literature on the recent boom and bust of the US housing market. First, using mortgage application data, we document the important role played by real estate in...

This article assesses the impact of public investment in supportive housing for homeless persons with severe mental disabilities. Data on 4,679 people placed in such housing in New York City between 1989 and 1997 were merged with data on the utilization of public shelters, public and private hospitals, and correctional facilities. A series of matched controls who were homeless but not placed in...

The rate at which physical capital depreciates is fundamental to investment in the economy. Nevertheless, although housing capital accounts for one-third of the total capital stock, the rate at which housing capital depreciates has only rarely been directly estimated, in part because prior studies do not control for maintenance. For that same reason, widely publicized measures of house price ap...

H ousing is a commodity with unique features and its market, especially in urban areas, is characterized by unique business cycles that differentiate it from other commodities. On one hand, housing market can be deeply influenced by economic shocks, and on the other hand, the sheer size of housing investments makes the economy particularly vulnerable to any shock in this market. Henc...

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that the positive link between homeownership and individual social capital investment is largely confined to more built-up neighborhoods (with more inelastic supply of new housing). T...