UCLA Housing Voice

In recent years, many cities have turned to real estate transfer taxes to capture a share of price appreciation and generate revenues for public purposes. Transfer taxes are relatively popular with voters, and they are easy to collect, but they also have disadvantages compared to property taxes and land value taxes. (Shane has also endorsed higher, more progressive transfer taxes in Los Angeles.) Professor Tuukka Saarimaa joins us to discuss one such drawback from his research in Helsinki, Finland: by increasing the cost of moving, transfer taxes may reduce household mobility, making it less likely that people will live in the housing best suited to their needs. But while imposing taxes can discourage socially beneficial activities, spending them can also improve people’s lives, and we consider how this balance is met with housing transfer taxes in particular.

Show notes:

• Eerola, E., Harjunen, O., Lyytikäinen, T., & Saarimaa, T. (2021). Revisiting the effects of housing transfer taxes. Journal of Urban Economics, 124, 103367.
• Phillips, S. (2020). A Call For Real Estate Transfer Tax Reform. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
• Martin-Straw, J. (2022 May 20). City Budget Sessions – Property Transfer Tax Debuts as 3rd Largest Income Source. Culver City Crossroads.
• Wagner, D. (2021 Dec 17). Ballot Initiative Aims To Fight LA Homelessness By Taxing Top-Dollar Property Deals. LAist.
• Blanchflower, D. G., & Oswald, A. J. (2013). Does high home-ownership impair the labor market? (No. w19079). National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Freemark, Y. (2020). Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a zoning reform on property values and housing construction. Urban Affairs Review, 56(3), 758-789.
• Saarimaa, T., & Tukiainen, J. (2014). I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member: empirical analysis of municipal mergers. Political Science Research and Methods, 2(1), 97-117.
• Bratu, C., Harjunen, O., & Saarimaa, T. (2021). City-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains. VATT Institute for Economic Research Working Papers, 146.

When eviction cases go to court, it’s typical for more than 90% of landlords to have legal representation, but less than 10% of tenants. This puts tenants at a considerable disadvantage, and helps to explain why few renters win their eviction cases; many don’t bother showing up for court hearings at all. Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel” — would reduce evictions, but there have been few opportunities to study it in an experimental setting. Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU joins us to talk about the impacts of the policy in New York City, the first U.S. city to adopt a right to counsel, starting with 10 ZIP codes in 2017 and expanding in subsequent years. We learn how the program has affected eviction filings, the share of tenants who receive legal representation, and the number of evictions executed by the court, and we discuss the wider context of housing instability and eviction — including the limitations and harder-to-measure benefits of a lawyer-based eviction reduction strategy.

Show notes:

• Ellen, I. G., O’Regan, K., House, S., & Brenner, R. (2021). Do lawyers matter? Early evidence on eviction patterns after the rollout of universal access to Counsel in New York City. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 540-561.
• The New York City Tenement Museum website.
• UCLA Housing Voice episode 29 on landlords, discrimination, and serial eviction filings with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden.
• Abramson, B. (2021). The Welfare Effects of Eviction and Homelessness Policies. Job market paper.
• Cassidy, M. T., & Currie, J. (2022). The Effects of Legal Representation on Tenant Outcomes in Housing Court: Evidence from New York City's Universal Access Program (No. w29836). National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Collinson, R and Reed, D. (2018). The Effects of Evictions on Low-Income Households.
• Hoffman, D. A., & Strezhnev, A. (2022). Longer Trips to Court Cause Evictions. U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 22-29.
• Lens, M. C., Nelson, K., Gromis, A., & Kuai, Y. (2020). The neighborhood context of eviction in Southern California. City & Community, 19(4), 912-932.
• Nelson, K. R. (2022). Litigating the Housing Crisis: Legal Assistance and the Institutional Life of Eviction in Los Angeles. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
• Nelson, K., Gromis, A., Kuai, Y., & Lens, M. C. (2021). Spatial concentration and spillover: Eviction dynamics in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, 2005–2015. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 670-695.
• 2021 press release on NYC program expansion: New York City's First-in-Nation Right-to-Counsel Program Expanded Citywide Ahead of Schedule.

“We are at a point in Los Angeles and California, where we are seeing the population plateau or even decline for the first time since the 18th century. That is not only a statistical change it is a shift in how we define ourselves and our civic identity.” So says Christopher Hawthorne, one of many housing experts interviewed for a recently report published by the California 100 initiative. What are we going to do about it? In this final episode of season one, Shane is joined by Dana Cuff of UCLA cityLAB and Carolina Reid of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center to talk about their new report (co-authored with the Lewis Center). It outlines the facts that define California’s housing crisis, the history that got us here, and a vision for a more affordable, inclusive, socially and environmentally just future. The report calls for increased homebuilding and a greater emphasis on housing’s role in promoting the public good, not just private gain. Without both, California will fall short of its aspirations, and the rest of the U.S. may follow it down a path to worsening affordability, rising housing instability and homelessness, and declining economic and environmental sustainability.
Show notes:

• Report with Policies and Future Scenarios: Phillips, S., Reid, C., Cuff, D., & Wong, K. (2022). The Future of Housing and Community Development: A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios. California 100 Initiative.
• Full report on Facts, Origins, and Trends: Phillips, S., Reid, C., Cuff, D., & Wong, K. (2022). The Future of Housing and Community Development: An In-Depth Analysis of the Facts, Origins and Trends of Housing and Community Development in California. California 100 Initiative.
• Roadmap and Summary of report (four pages).
• Visual representation of the four scenarios, created by cityLAB.
• A Terner Center report on the likely impacts of Senate Bill (SB) 9.
• Baldassare, M., Bonner, D., Dykman, A., & Lopes, L. (2018). Proposition 13: 40 Years Later. Public Policy Institute of California.
• Update: Project Homekey expanded in 2022.
• See more of the Terner Center’s work.
• See more of cityLAB’s work.

Skyscrapers! We can’t help but find them fascinating. Some cities are full of skyscrapers, and others have none. Developers built a 70-story tower on that parcel, but the proposed building just down the street is only 30 stories. How do developers decide where to build skyscrapers and how tall they should be? And are they really a profitable investment, or simply a monument to individual power and ego? Gabriel Ahlfeldt joins us from the London School of Economics to talk about his research on skyscrapers, a comprehensive analysis that catalogs nearly every 150-meter-plus building in the world. We discuss how skyscrapers influence the built form of cities, far beyond their typical boundaries within the central business district, and what the data can tell us about their profitability, their appeal to residents and workers, and the role that planners play in shaping where they’re found and how tall they go. Skyscrapers!

Show notes:

• Ahlfeldt, G. M., & Barr, J. (2022). The economics of skyscrapers: A synthesis. Journal of Urban Economics, 129, 103419.
• Ahlfeldt, G. M., Redding, S. J., Sturm, D. M., & Wolf, N. (2015). The economics of density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall. Econometrica, 83(6), 2127-2189.
• Cheshire, P. C., & Dericks, G. H. (2020). ‘Trophy Architects’ and Design as Rent‐seeking: Quantifying Deadweight Losses in a Tightly Regulated Office Market. Economica, 87(348), 1078-1104.
• Ahlfeldt, G. M., & McMillen, D. P. (2018). Tall buildings and land values: Height and construction cost elasticities in Chicago, 1870–2010. Review of Economics and Statistics, 100(5), 861-875.
• Barr, J. (2013). Skyscrapers and skylines: New York and Chicago, 1885–2007. Journal of Regional Science, 53(3), 369-391.

Cities have lived with exclusionary zoning for decades, if not generations. Is inclusionary zoning the answer? Inclusionary zoning, or IZ, requires developers to set aside a share of units in new buildings for low- or moderate-income households, seeking to increase the supply of affordable homes and integrate neighborhoods racially and socioeconomically. But how well does it accomplish these goals? This week we’re joined by the Mercatus Center’s Dr. Emily Hamilton to discuss her research on how IZ programs have impacted homebuilding and housing prices in the Washington, D.C. region, and the ironic reality that the success of inclusionary zoning relies on the continued existence of exclusionary zoning. Also, Shane and Mike rant about nexus studies.

Show notes:

• Hamilton, E. (2021). Inclusionary zoning and housing market outcomes. Cityscape, 23(1), 161-194.
• Manville, M., & Osman, T. (2017). Motivations for growth revolts: Discretion and pretext as sources of development conflict. City & Community, 16(1), 66-85.
• Bento, A., Lowe, S., Knaap, G. J., & Chakraborty, A. (2009). Housing market effects of inclusionary zoning. Cityscape, 7-26.
• Li, F., & Guo, Z. (2022). How Does an Expansion of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Affect Housing Supply? Evidence From London (UK). Journal of the American Planning Association, 88(1), 83-96.
• Schleicher, D. (2012). City unplanning. Yale Law Journal, 7(122), 1670-1737.
• Phillips, S. (2022). Building Up the" Zoning Buffer": Using Broad Upzones to Increase Housing Capacity Without Increasing Land Values. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
• Background on the inclusionary zoning program in Los Angeles (struck down in court, but later enabled by the state legislature).
• More on housing voucher policy in our interview with Rob Collinson.
• More on minimum lot size reform in our interview with M. Nolan Gray.
• A blog post questioning whether new market-rate housing actually “creates” demand for low-income housing.
• Los Angeles Affordable Housing Linkage Fee nexus study.