Searching for housing in the digital age: Neighborhood representation on internet rental housing platforms across space, platform, and metropolitan segregation

Abstract

Understanding residential mobility, housing affordability, and the geography of neighborhood advantage and disadvantage relies on robust information about housing search processes and housing markets. Existing data about housing markets, especially rental markets, suffer from accuracy issues and a lack of temporal and geographic flexibility. Data collected from online rental platforms that are commonly used can help address these issues and hold considerable promise for better understanding the full distribution of available rental homes. However, realizing this promise requires a careful assessment of potential sources of bias as online rental listing platforms may perpetuate inequalities similar to those found in physical spaces. This paper approaches the production of rental advertisements as a social process driven by both contextual and property level factors. We compare data from two online platforms for the 100 most populated metropolitan areas in the United States to explore inequality in digital rental listing spaces and understand what characteristics are associated with over and underrepresentation of advertisements in certain areas. We find similar associations for socioeconomic measures between platforms and across urban and suburban parts of these metropolitan areas. In contrast, the importance of racial and ethnic composition, as well as broader patterns of segregation, for online representation differs substantially across space and platform. This analysis informs our understanding of how online platforms affect housing search dynamics through their biases and segmentation, and highlights the potential and limits in using the data available on these platforms to produce small area rental estimates.

Predatory Inclusion in the Market for Rental Housing: A Multicity Empirical Test

“…We focus on listings posted to these two sites because qualitative studies of housing search processes in multiple metropolitan areas indicate that voucher holders use online listings from Craigslist and gosection8.com (Greif 2018; Harvey et al 2020; Metzger et al 2019). In addition, Craigslist is widely recognized as the most comprehensive platform for today’s metropolitan rental housing market, which overwhelmingly operates online (Boeing and Waddell 2017; Hess et al 2021; Kroft and Pope 2014; Kuk et al 2021; Schachter and Besbris 2017). The number of novel ads for rental housing on Craigslist has far outpaced any other source in many U.S. cities for over a decade, and Internet sites like Craigslist have become one of the most common ways renters find their housing—particularly renters with families and low levels of education (Besbris et al 2021).…”

“…As a result, they prioritize unit features over less known neighborhood qualities (DeLuca et al 2013;DeLuca and Rosenblatt 2017;Rosenblatt and DeLuca 2012). Under these circumstances, housing advertisements that mention the acceptance or denial of vouchers may be especially strong signals about the appropriateness of a particular unit (see Besbris, Schachter, and Kuk 2021;Boeing et al 2021;Kennedy et al 2021), and past research has shown that restricted search conditions and fear of discrimination lead voucher holding households to scan rental advertisements specifically for positive or welcoming language (Rosenblatt and Cossyleon 2018).…”