Nonprofit Housing and Neighborhood Spillovers

Publication Date: August 2005

Publisher: Furman Center for Real Estate

Author(s): Ingrid Gould Ellen; Ioan Voicu

Research Area: Social conditions

Keywords: neighborhoods; nonprofits; renters; Community and Economic Development

Type: Working Paper

Abstract:

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighborhood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these impacts on neighborhoods. This paper compares the neighborhood spillover effects of city-supported rehabilitation of rental housing undertaken by nonprofit and for-profit developers, using data from New York City. To measure these benefits, we use increases in neighboring property values, estimated from a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We study the impacts of about 43,000 units of city-supported housing completed during the 1980s and 1990s, and our sample of property transactions includes nearly 300,000 individual sales.