Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residents of gentrifying neighborhoods from displacement, by merging the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with a decennial Census-tract-level measure of gentrification and a new data set on state-level property tax policy covering the period 1987 to 2009. We find some evidence that property tax pressure can trigger involuntary moves by homeowners, but no evidence that such displacement is more common in gentrifying neighborhoods than elsewhere, nor that property tax limitation protects long-term homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. We do find evidence that gentrification directly displaces renters.

In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of property tax limitation exacerbate racial inequality, providing the greatest reduction in effective tax rates to white homeowners. In the aggregate, these inequalities result in substantially unequal tax savings that might not survive democratic scrutiny if they were distributed as direct subsidies. This inequality may be especially problematic insofar as tax privileges for property owners effectively disguise a public benefit as a private property right.

Public housing has been an important site for empirical research on concentrated poverty, social isolation, and social organization. Scholars have demonstrated that public housing was disproportionately built in high poverty neighborhoods, thereby exacerbating the physical and social isolation of residents. They have also hypothesized that physical features of public housing may contribute to a breakdown of social organization. These hypotheses motivated the demolition of large and physically deteriorated public housing structures throughout the United States. I use the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey to test the hypotheses that large building size and visible building disorder are associated with mistrust among neighbors, as would be expected by theories linking the built environment to social organization. Although I find some evidence that trust is less common in large buildings with higher levels of disorder, I argue that critics of public housing overstate the social effects of the built environment.

No abstract

No abstract