At Zillow Research, our days are fully consumed with bringing you the best, most interesting and most actionable real estate research around.

But to that end, we also find time to read a variety of reports, news stories and investigations, on any number of issues, from social justice, to economics, to real estate and sports. We read them for education, for entertainment and out of pure curiosity – and each one helps us discover new questions we want to answer and helps identify new trends worth following.

Zillow Reading List is a regular roundup of these interesting pieces we come across, with some thoughts about each and how it ties into our existing research and/or has spurred new questions. We’ll post these roundups regularly, and of course will continue to strive to publish research that is as enriching, thought-provoking and useful as these pieces have been to us.

Enjoy!

Obama Takes on Segregation in Housing

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Binyamin Appelbaum in The New York Times

President Obama is trying to encourage affordable housing development in more desirable neighborhoods and improve the housing stock in lower-income areas, with the goal of reducing racial segregation in many communities. Critics might argue this is social engineering and will distort housing markets nationwide – and they are right. But it’s hard to imagine that any action taken at the federal level wouldn’t distort the housing market to some degree. And it is clear that our current approach to affordable housing is not working. This initiative appears prompted by noteworthy new research suggesting that moving families to better environments has enormous benefits for children that continue to pay off well into adulthood. The impulse towards NIMBYism is understandable here, but a more integrated society will benefit all of us in the long-term.

Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver?

Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone and Catherine Wolfram in the National Bureau of Economic Research

It is important to remember that government policies don’t always work out as planned, and that unintended consequences can often the doom even the most well-meaning policies. The federal Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), a large program meant to improve residential energy efficiency by helping finance certain energy-saving home improvements, is a good example. Eligibility for the program was based on a random lottery, enabling the authors of this study to get a clean read on the program’s efficacy – and the results are not encouraging. Actual energy savings were only half as high as projected, meaning the program actually cost more than its benefits could justify.

Blackstone Starts Selling

Heather Perlberg and John Gittelsohn in Bloomberg Business

During the depths of the recession, when everyone was selling homes, who was buying? Largely hedge funds, who swooped into distressed communities and bought homes en masse. Fast forward a few years, and it seems those same funds are deciding to exit those markets. Even at their height, these kinds of purchases represented only a small fraction of total sales. But institutional investors amassed a sizable portfolio of homes (turning many of those formerly owner-occupied homes into rentals), and we have been watching to see what their strategy will be with their portfolios. Will they continue to hold onto these homes, renting them out and hoping to ride appreciation towards returns? Or will they lock in the gains they have already seen and move to sell? With this announcement from Blackstone, among the largest of these institutional home buyers, we have a bit more clarity: The strategy seems to be a little of both. Their plan is to sell significant holdings in certain areas, particularly communities with lower home prices. Selling such a large portfolio of homes can be difficult, as sellers don’t want to overwhelm the market with too much supply, so we expect to see this unfold over an extended period of time. But this might be welcome news for folks in Atlanta, for example, looking for an affordable place to buy but frustrated by the current lack of supply on the market.

Seattle Contemplates Ditching Single-Family Zoning

Danny Westneat in The Seattle Times

In a story from our neck of the woods, it looks like some Seattle housing officials at least briefly considered a radical change to the housing landscape: Getting rid of single family zoning. The proposal, included in a leaked, early draft of affordable housing policy ideas, would replace all “single-family zones” with “low-density residential zones,” and broadly proposed upzoning the city to allow more density. This kind of proposal is wildly unpopular with locals who love the distinctly single-family character of many Seattle neighborhoods. Indeed, the final report presented to the mayor appears to have walked back some of the more drastic proposals. But citywide upzoning has real appeal. Selectively upzoning helps funnel housing development, especially affordable development, into certain neighborhoods. Broader upzoning allows housing demand itself to dictate where new units will be added.

Visualizing Rent Stabilization in New York

Zillow Economic Research is a sucker for a pretty map. And regardless of what you think of rent control, these maps certainly fit the bill. See the changing dynamics and geography of rent stabilized apartments in New York, and watch the flow of those units out of Manhattan over time and into Brooklyn and Queens.