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!
The Inequality in Credit Access
New York Federal Reserve Bank Consumer Credit Panel
To most, “credit” sounds like a good thing, while “debt” sounds like a bad thing. In reality, they’re essentially the same. Whatever you call it, this interactive tool from the Federal Reserve lays bare the inequality in access to credit/debt. We have been tracking this closely at Zillow and are encouraged by trends pointing towards the increased availability of mortgage loans for households (and we’re hopeful things will continue to improve). But while things are trending in the right direction, it is important to remember that large segments of the population might be getting left behind by this increase in credit availability. It is true that during the crisis, too-easy credit caused many hardships for families who received loans with little or no ability to pay them back. But at its best, credit can be a powerful force to help low-income families smooth over any financial bumps in the road they may encounter.
The Cost of Housing Supply Constraints
Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti in The National Bureau of Economic Research
In this paper, the authors try to answer a fascinating question: How much better off would the country be if housing supply was less constrained? They find an enormous effect, suggesting the nation’s GDP would be almost 10 percent higher if places like New York, San Francisco and San Jose could only build housing as easily as the average city in the U.S. They believe that with more (affordable) housing in those places, people would flock there and take advantage of higher wages in those markets. But we can’t help but wonder about the source of those building constraints and the reasons they might exist in the first place. It is hard to imagine that if the population of New York were to increase by almost 900 percent (as the authors suggest), there wouldn’t also be massive consequences and impacts on infrastructure, transportation, etc., beyond those considered in the study.
Emily Badger in The Washington Post
There’s one aspect of development that doesn’t get much attention – as more high rises go up, sunlight becomes more scarce. Those amazing views for penthouse apartments come at a cost for the rest of us, as taller buildings cast ever-longer shadows on parks and sidewalks. Is sunlight a public good, worthy of being regulated and protected? Or does trying to use regulation to account for every possible impact of new development risk deepen the tyranny of small decisions? Either way, work on your tan while you still can.
Doubling Up, and the Great Recession
Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes in the American Economic Review
Doubling-up is a phenomenon Zillow is keenly interested in – especially as a strategy for coping with a worsening rental affordability crisis. Doubling-up and moving back with your parents can also be a strategy to help people deal with recession and potential job loss, serving as an informal safety net or insurance. This paper examines the prevalence of this “insurance” strategy, and finds that the Great Recession actually looks fairly similar to prior recessions in this light, and is not an outlier by any means.
