Amerika

Recent research on housing supply seems to argue for moving diversity to the suburbs:

Using property-level data on tenants, home prices, rents, and acquisition timing, I show that increasing rental supply in American suburbs, where rentals are scarce and expensive relative to owner-occupied housing, reduces segregation by enabling lower-income, disproportionately non-White renters to move into neighborhoods where they otherwise could not afford to own. In response, nearby incumbent households are more likely to move out, perceiving renters as a disamenity. Large-scale landlords expand rental supply by converting owner-occupied homes into rentals, exploiting cost efficiencies from geographic concentration.

However, witness the punchline:

Reallocating owner-occupied homes to rentals lowers rents and benefits down payment-constrained households. However, the median household loses from forgone non-pecuniary homeownership benefits and endogenous amenities.

Bringing diversity into the suburbs lowers housing prices and the median household suffers as general quality of the neighborhood declines. Wait… was that what the “racists” said would happen? LOL

Tags: gentrification, ghetto, housing, research