Waiting for affordable housing in New York City

Abstract

We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing policies. We estimate the model using data collected by the New York Housing Vacancy Survey in 2011. We find that there are significant adjustment costs in all markets as well as serious search frictions in the market for affordable housing. Moreover, there are large queuing frictions in the market for public housing. Having access to rentstabilized housing increases household welfare by up to $65,000. Increasing the supply of affordable housing by 10% significantly improves the welfare of all renters in the city. Progressive taxation of higher-income households that live in public housing can also be welfare improving.

Low Homeownership in Germany - A Quantitative Exploration

“…The existing macroeconomic literature on such policies is limited, partly due to fact that they do not play much of a role for aggregate outcomes in the U.S. economy. 5 In a recent study, Sieg and Yoon (2017) build a dynamic equilibrium model with uninsurable income risk to study social housing policies in New York City. Households can apply for different types of subsidized housing or freely rent at the market rate, but cannot become homeowners.…”