SEARCH FRICTIONS,UNEMPLOYMENT, AND HOUSING IN CITIES: THEORY AND POLICIES

We propose an urban search‐matching model with land development. Wages, unemployment, prices of housing and land are endogenously determined. We characterize the steady‐state equilibrium and then discuss the issue of efficiency. To explore interactions among markets, we implement comparative static analysis. We also consider three policies: an entry‐cost policy that reduces firms' entry, a transportation policy that reduces commuting costs, and a housing policy that decreases rental prices. We find that the transportation and housing policies are more efficient if the unemployment rate is low, while the entry‐cost policy is more efficient if the unemployment rate is high.     

THE EXCHANGEABILITY OF HEDONIC PROPERTY PRICE STUDIES*

ABSTRACT. Observations drawn from multiple markets are essential to the construction of indices of housing costs and to measures of demand for housing attributes. It is not evident when multiple markets exist or whether such markets exist for some attributes but not for others. We test for multiple markets by using Bayesian methods to assess the transferability (random exchangeability) of entire hedonic price expressions from one site and time to another, the transferability of hedonic price functions for particular attributes, and the degrees of similarity that hedonic price functions must have in order to be transferable. In our illustrations, price functions for structural housing attributes are generally transferable; prices for neighborhood attributes are not. Therefore, in our illustrations, the desired price indices and demand functions should be estimable for neighborhood attributes, but not for structural ones.     

TWO-EARNER FAMILIES IN THE HOUSING MARKET

The 1970's has been a period in which three trends have coincided: housing prices have been escalating, wives have continued to enter the labor force, and legislation prohibiting discrimination in mortgage markets on the basis of sex and marital status has been enacted. In this paper, we examine the role of the two-earner family–one in which both husband and wife work–in the housing market of the 1970's, and the interrelation of this household type with other factors shaping the current high demand for housing. We also speculate on the role of the two-earner family in the housing market of the 1980's. We conclude that two-earner families are in a position to increase their housing outlays in the future, that the continued growth in the number of two-earner families will add to future housing demand, but that many two-earner families may be divorced couples of the future. This suggests that, while there will be a strong impact on single-family home demand, there will also be some restructuring of demand toward rental housing and cooperative/condominium ownership.     

A Housing Crisis,a Failed Law,and a Property Conflict: The US Urban Speculation Tax

In 1978 the local government in the District of Columbia approved a measure to tax up to 70% of the profits made on residential speculation. The tax was the first of its kind in the USA. But, it was quickly overturned and deemed by supporters and opponents a failure. Based on 10 months of archival research and interviews in Washington, DC, this paper examines how property rights became a narrative barrier that tax supporters could not overcome. By narrative barrier, I mean the set of rules that shaped how speculation was discussed. Tax supporters did not publicly convey a counter‐hegemonic vision of how tenure security and economic wealth could be achieved for black residents through means other than private ownership and real estate investment. This paper contributes to understandings of housing markets, housing crises, and intersections between housing justice and property rights.     

THE IMPACT OF MIXED LAND USE ON RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY VALUES*

ABSTRACT Contemporary European urban planning policies aim to mix land uses in compact neighborhoods. It is presumed that mixing land uses yields socioeconomic benefits and therefore has a positive effect on housing values. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mixed land use on housing values using semiparametric estimation techniques. We demonstrate that a diverse neighborhood is positively valued by households. There are various land use types that have a positive impact on house prices, e.g., business services and leisure. Land uses that are incompatible with residential land use are, among others, manufacturing and wholesale. It appears that households are willing to pay about 2.5 percent more for a house in a mixed neighborhood. We also show that there is substantial heterogeneity in willingness to pay for mixed land use. For example, only apartment occupiers are willing to pay for an increase in diversity, whereas households living in other house types are not willing to pay for diversity.     

Artificial Scarcity in Housebuilding and the Impact on Affordability: The Return of Absolute Rent

The slow response of volume housebuilders to changes in demand has been cited as a contributing cause of a global crisis of housing affordability and allegations of land banking have persistently dogged the industry. This article reviews the supply responsiveness of speculative housebuilders in the United Kingdom and Australia through the neglected Marxian analytic category of absolute rent. Absolute rent directs attention to the relationship between the value of land and the cost of housing and models a market in which landowners may withdraw land from supply to inflate prices. Through the lens of absolute rent, the real estate practices of the housebuilding industry can be understood as a strategy of artificial scarcity straddling land and housing markets. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the insights to be gained by a return to absolute rent that valuably expand the current debate on the supply and cost of housing.     

COMMODIFYING DANISH HOUSING COMMONS

Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association‐based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this, we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in the context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non‐profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio‐spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification – and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association‐based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non‐profit housing as a housing commons.     

CONSTRUCTION COSTS AND THE SUPPLY OF HOUSING STRUCTURE*

ABSTRACT Construction costs account for the bulk of the price of new houses in most markets, but their study has been relatively neglected. We document that there are economically large differences in construction costs across U.S. housing markets. We also estimate a very elastic supply for physical structure; hence, differences in construction activity across markets do not explain the variation in costs. Supply shifters that collectively do account for differences in building costs include the extent of unionization within the construction sector, local wages, local topography in terms of the presence of high hills and mountains, and the local regulatory environment.     

External validity of hedonic price estimates: Heterogeneity in the price discount associated with having Black and Hispanic neighbors

We examined the hedonic price of neighborhood racial composition across a sample of 180 US housing markets and compared heterogeneity in results. Statistically significant estimated price elasticities calculated at the mean ranged from ?0.61 to 0.2 and ?0.26 to 0.21, for increases in Black and Hispanic neighborhood proportion, respectively. Hedonic price discounts for Black neighborhoods were greater when land supply was more inelastic, when the land value share of the housing cost was greater, and in the southern portion of the United States. Hedonic price discounts associated with Hispanic neighborhoods exhibited no patterns relative to geography or housing supply factors.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

Applying a Systematic Review to Land Use Land Cover Change in Northern Upland Vietnam: The Missing Case of the Borderlands

As Vietnam embraces the market economy, and a number of state policies promote reforestation and rural market integration, land use and land cover (LULC) changes are occurring in the country's northern uplands in increasingly complex and fragmented ways. Yet understandings of the degree and consequences of LULC changes in this diverse agro‐ecological region are incomplete. We conduct a systematic literature review of research reported in academic articles tracing and analysing LULC change in Vietnam's northern regions. We find that these studies have tended to take place away from the most mountainous, northern borderlands. The studies nonetheless highlight a diversity of land use land cover changes caused by numerous causes, making the distinction of overall trends difficult. To complement and extend this body of research, we introduce recent LULC change research we have completed in the mountainous border districts of Lào Cai province, on the Sino‐Vietnamese border. The heterogeneity of causes of LULC change in both the review articles and our case study points to the importance of adapting land use policies to local agro‐ecological and socio‐economic conditions and ethnic diversity, taking into account state–farmer relations, household livelihood decision‐making, and policy implementation at the commune and district levels.     

Putting the crisis to work: The real estate sector and London's housing crisis

The idea of ‘crisis’ plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ‘the (economic) crisis’, many have also experienced intense ‘housing crises’ and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of ‘crisis’ have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development.     

Variable Residential Density: Optimum Traffic Density and City Size

In this paper we derive the optimal allocation of land between transportation and housing uses in an outer ring of a circular city, where the net population density is a constant, an exponent-decaying, or a power-decreasing function. We are also able to show that, under these circumstances, at no point in the optimal solution is all the land allocated to transportation use, proof that is, unlike previous work, independent of the solution of the same problem in the inner ring (Central Business District).     

明代中原商路与商品经济

明中期以后,在商品经济日益繁荣的背景下,中原地区形成了四通八达的水陆交通商道。这些商道多以开封为中心向河南各地及周边省区辐射,为中原地区商品经济的发展提供了有利条件。同一时期,中原地区的商品生产有了较大增长,商业都市愈加繁荣,商业城镇不断兴起,集市贸易渐趋活跃,各地商贾纷纷前来进行交易。这其中,商道的畅通发挥了重要作用。在当时,中原地区的许多城镇分布在商路沿线,按其类型可划分为水陆兼备型、陆路型和水路型,这又从一个侧面表明便捷的水陆交通网与商品经济的发展具有密切的、相辅相成的关系。     

土地利用的八维空间解析

土地的本质是一定范围的空间,土地利用是在一定范围的空间内安排土地用途和土地功能的活动集合。解构土地利用空间维度,构建土地利用从低维到高维转变的土地利用思想,有利于拓展现代土地利用创新理念。基于主题分析法的研究表明：①土地利用存在八个维度的拓展方向,分别是聚点发展、轴线开发、平面发展、立体发展、分时利用、混合用途、功能叠加和空间共享;②土地利用维度可归纳为空间、时间和功能三个层面,并且各维度之间存在较强的关联性;③依据土地利用维度从低到高,以聚点发展为初始维,构建土地利用的八维空间理念。土地利用八维空间理念的明晰,有利于增益人们对土地用途和土地功能空间配置和组合的认知,从而有利于现代土地利用的创新实践。     

Single women and housing choices in urban Japan

Japan has experienced a particularly sharp decline in marriage in recent decades and a subsequent increase in ‘never-marrieds’ and single-person households. Social fragmentation has been associated with prolonged economic instability and neoliberalization that has restructured employment, housing and policy contexts. A particular social concern has been the difficulties facing those who do not follow conventional married life-courses. While marriage has been important to progress up a housing ladder and property asset ownership, singledom constrains housing choices and shapes very different life-chances over the life-course. This is especially true for single women who are disadvantaged in both housing and labour markets. This article examines the ongoing restructuring of housing opportunities that are helping reshape gender differences and experiences, as well as the new housing careers being followed by the growing number of urban single women in Japan. Based on interviews with female singles in metropolitan Tokyo, as well as secondary data from national surveys, the article considers how housing opportunities and choices are being renegotiated in regard to changing expectations of marriage, life-courses and home. We also reflect upon relationships between housing choices, social policy, single life-courses and processes of individualization.     

Mark Latham and the ideology of the ALP

This article focuses on Mark Latham's views on equality. Latham's emphasis on education and on overcoming suburban, spatial inequality draws on the Whitlamite tradition. However, his work also draws on neoliberal influences and on arguments regarding the impact of the information economy. Both these influences have contributed to a move away from more traditional Labor and social‐democratic views on class, racial and gender inequality. This article considers Latham's relationship with traditional Labor ideology as well as with Third Way politics. Latham's arguments regarding the role of elites and the implications that this has for his understandings of the city, capitalism and diverse forms of inequality are also addressed. Latham's earlier views still influence his speeches and electoral strategy as Labor Leader.     

SPATIAL BARRIERS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING IN HOUSING MARKETS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF THE CONNECTICUT RIVER ON HOUSING RETURNS

ABSTRACT. Relative to financial securities markets, information is a scarce commodity in real estate markets. If information diffuses quickly in real estate markets, then we can infer that telecommunications play an important role. On the other hand, spatial barriers such as rivers can slow down the assimilation of relevant information if face-to-face contacts are an important source of information. We examine whether and how the Connecticut River (along with bridges) alters the nature and strength of spatial diffusion of information on housing returns. We report strong evidence that the Connecticut River slows down the spatial diffusion of information and that its effects are consistent with face-to-face contact, as opposed to telecommunications.     

Regional Labor Market Dynamics, Housing, and Migration

Abstract.  This study explores the impact of plant‐level labor market dynamics and housing markets on gross migration flows. The internal and the external reorganizations of regional labor markets are shown to be related. An increase in internal turnover of jobs and workers in regional labor markets is found to increase net‐migration. This effect arises mainly from a reduction in out‐migration. Housing markets constitute constraints for migration. In particular, an increase in regional housing prices and a large share of owner‐occupancy housing discourages net‐migration to a region by reducing in‐migration. In contrast, the out‐migration rate remains largely unaffected by housing markets.