The United States is emerging from a great recession whose major hallmark has been the collapse of national housing prices, which grew by 59 percent from 2000 to 2006 and then fell 41 percent by 2011, all in constant dollars. Nationally, real house prices in 2011 were 6 percent below levels in 2000. The housing price collapse had unanticipated contagion effects that helped produce the accompanying financial crisis and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The share of U.S. mortgages that were delinquent by 90 days or more rose from about 1 percent in 2006 to over 8 percent in 2010. The economic and social costs of this house price bubble and subsequent collapse have been immense.

The benefits of preventing future house price bubbles is obviously great, but realizing such benefits will require that policy makers learn to detect price bubbles as they are forming and then implement policies that will attenuate or mitigate them. A recent Lincoln Institute policy focus report, Preventing House Price Bubbles: Lessons from the 2006–2012 Bust, by James Follain and Seth Giertz, addresses the challenges of diagnosing and treating price bubbles in the real estate market. Their report builds on extensive statistical analysis available in several Lincoln Institute working papers.

While it is common to summarize the recent housing market bust using national indicators (as in the first paragraph above), these national indicators don’t account for great variations in both the levels and changes in housing prices across metropolitan areas. For example, from 1978 to 2011, constant dollar housing prices in Dallas, Texas and Omaha, Nebraska varied by less than 20 percent from their 1978 levels; those in Stockton, California nearly tripled from 1978 to 2006, but by 2011 fell back to their 1978 levels. Local housing markets are all influenced by national economic and financial policies and conditions, but these large differences across metropolitan markets indicate that local conditions play a very important role as well.

A key element of the statistical work by Follain and Giertz is to use metropolitan housing markets as the unit of observation for their analyses, which are based on annual data (for 1980 to 2010) and quarterly data (for 1990 to 2010) for up to 380 metropolitan areas. Their econometric work indicates that house price bubbles can be detected across metropolitan areas and that price changes and the accompanying credit risk vary greatly in size. Stress tests, such as those used to evaluate mortgage credit risk, can be useful indicators of potential price bubbles at the metropolitan level.

Because the levels and changes in housing prices vary greatly across metropolitan areas—with bubble-like price increases in some and essentially stable prices in others—Follain and Giertz conclude that policy measures to mitigate housing bubbles should be tailored to target metropolitan areas or regions rather than be applied uniformly across all metropolitan areas at the national level. Thus monetary policy would be an unattractive intervention to counter house price increases in a few metropolitan areas, because it would affect financing terms across both frothy and stable housing markets. Instead, Follain and Giertz favor policy interventions that would target those metropolitan areas with high price increases. The policy they advance would raise the capital reserve ratio that banks are required to hold against mortgages that they finance in those areas. Such countercyclical capital policies would both dampen house price increases and strengthen the reserves of the issuing banks, improving their ability to withstand any unexpected financial shocks.

Applying prudential housing market policies at the metro-politan level seems to be an obvious thing to do; so why has it not been done before? A major part of the answer is that housing market analysis is benefitting from a revolution in the availability of spatially disaggregated data at the metropolitan, county, and even zip code level. The data required to inform policy interventions targeted at the metropolitan level have only recently become widely available, and such data underpin the empirical work carried out by Follain and Giertz. For more information on their analysis, see http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/2245_Preventing-House-Price-Bubbles.

Las personas que trabajan conmigo por lo general se sorprenden de hasta qué punto mi canon filosófico deriva de las películas no convencionales de bajo presupuesto, especialmente de la década de 1980. Cuando busco sabiduría, suelo recurrir a las enseñanzas de la película “Repo Man” (traducida al español como “Los recolectores”) o, en el caso de este ensayo, a la obra maestra alegórica de Terry Gilliam, “Time Bandits” (“Bandidos del tiempo”). En esta película, un grupo de trabajadores públicos son empleados por el Ser Supremo para rellenar los agujeros que quedaron en el continuo espacio-tiempo por el apresuramiento de haber creado el universo en siete días: “Verán, fue un trabajo algo chapucero”.

Igual que los bandidos del tiempo, los gestores de políticas generalmente tienen la tarea de rellenar agujeros: agujeros literales, como los baches de las calles, o agujeros más teóricos, que son los artefactos de los mercados privados disfuncionales. Uno de los grandes agujeros que la política ha tratado de rellenar durante décadas es la oferta inadecuada de viviendas sociales. Por ejemplo, los economistas especializados en vivienda de los Estados Unidos se han vuelto bastante expertos en hacer el seguimiento del tamaño de este agujero, que cada vez es más difícil de rellenar desde que el gobierno federal se comprometió a tratar el tema como una prioridad de política nacional a partir de la Ley de Vivienda de 1949, que fue parte de la legislación conocida como Fair Deal del expresidente Harry S. Truman.

Tal vez nuestro fracaso colectivo para resolver el déficit de viviendas sociales en los últimos 66 años tenga que ver con un análisis incorrecto del problema y con la conclusión de que pueden diseñarse soluciones basadas en el mercado con el fin de resolver la discordancia entre la oferta de viviendas sociales y la demanda de las mismas. En su discurso del Estado de la Unión de 1949, el presidente Truman resaltó que, para poder suplir las necesidades de millones de familias sin una vivienda adecuada, “la mayoría de las viviendas que necesitamos deberán ser construidas por el sector privado sin subsidios públicos”.

Para apoyar esta idea, me desviaré brevemente hacia la teoría del mercado. Partiendo del enfoque matemático para analizar la economía que predomina hoy en día, un mercado es, simplemente, un sistema de ecuaciones diferenciales parciales que se resuelve mediante un único precio. Las ecuaciones diferenciales parciales captan las decisiones complejas que toman los consumidores y los productores de bienes, y concilian los gustos, las preferencias y los presupuestos de los consumidores con las complejidades técnicas derivadas de producir un bien para así llegar a un precio que despeje el mercado mediante el acuerdo de todas las operaciones que los proveedores y consumidores de bienes están dispuestos a realizar.

Los prestigiosos economistas Arrow, Debreu y McKenzie demostraron la existencia teórica de un conjunto único de precios capaz de resolver simultáneamente la cuestión del “equilibrio general” de todos los mercados en una economía nacional o mundial. Un importante aspecto de esta contribución (que obtuvo el Premio Nobel) fue la observación de que un único precio despejaba cada mercado: un mercado, un precio. No se esperaba que un único precio mantuviera el equilibrio en dos mercados. Pero este es el defecto fundamental del mercado de la vivienda: en realidad, no es un mercado, sino dos. Los mercados de la vivienda proporcionan tanto lugares para vivir a los consumidores locales como bienes de inversión comercializables en todo el mundo, gracias a los grandes mercados de capital al servicio de los inversores a nivel mundial. Esta condición de mercado doble describía más al sector de viviendas ocupadas por sus propietarios; sin embargo, con la proliferación de los fideicomisos de inversión inmobiliaria (REIT, por su sigla en inglés), los mercados de alquiler se encuentran ahora en la misma situación.

Los mercados de bienes de consumo se comportan de manera muy diferente a los mercados de inversión, ya que responden a “reglas básicas” distintas. En lo que a la oferta se refiere, los precios de los bienes de consumo se derivan de los costos de producción, mientras que los precios de los mercados de inversión tienen que ver con los beneficios esperados. En relación con la demanda, factores tales como gustos y preferencias, ingresos de las familias y características demográficas determinan el precio de la vivienda como lugar donde residir. La demanda de vivienda con fines de inversión está relacionada con aspectos tales como la liquidez y las preferencias de liquidez de los inversores, las ganancias esperadas de inversiones alternativas, o las tasas de interés.

En los países desarrollados, los mercados de capitales mundiales y el mercado de la vivienda colisionan a nivel local, con pocas probabilidades de reconciliación. Los hogares a nivel local compiten con los inversores a nivel mundial para decidir el tipo y la cantidad de viviendas que se producen. En los mercados que atraen la inversión mundial se produce una gran cantidad de viviendas, aunque la falta de viviendas sociales es aguda y empeora con el paso del tiempo. Esto se debe a que una gran parte de las viviendas nuevas se produce para maximizar las ganancias de la inversión y no para suplir las necesidades de vivienda de la población local. Por ejemplo, no escasean los inversores mundiales dispuestos a participar en el desarrollo de apartamentos de US$100 millones en la Ciudad de Nueva York; sin embargo, escasean las viviendas sociales por la dificultad de conseguir fondos para desarrollarlas. En los mercados que han sido abandonados por el capital mundial, los precios de las viviendas caen por debajo de los costos de producción, por lo que existe un excedente de viviendas que se acumula y se deteriora. En casos extremos como el de Detroit, el orden del mercado sólo puede recuperarse mediante la demolición de miles de viviendas y edificios abandonados.

Tal vez sea este el momento de reconsiderar el análisis que llevó al presidente Truman (y a miles de gestores de políticas de vivienda después de él) a concluir que podemos forjar soluciones basadas en el mercado ante el desafío de proveer de vivienda a la población del país. Truman concluyó que “al producir pocas unidades de alquiler, frente a una proporción demasiado grande de viviendas de alto precio, la industria de la construcción se está excluyendo a sí misma rápidamente del mercado debido a los precios”. No obstante, Truman se refería al mercado de la vivienda para residir, no para invertir. Resulta importante destacar que la cantidad de unidades habitacionales en oferta en los países desarrollados como los Estados Unidos excede en mucho la cantidad de hogares. En el año 2010, el Censo de los EE.UU. calculó que en el país existían 131 millones de unidades habitacionales y 118 millones de hogares, y que una de cada siete unidades habitacionales se encontraba vacante. Resulta aún más impactante que, en los Estados Unidos, este excedente de la oferta de viviendas es una característica de todos los mercados metropolitanos del país, incluso de aquellos mercados metropolitanos con una escasez extrema de viviendas sociales. En 2010, el 8,5 por ciento de las unidades habitacionales se encontraban vacantes en el Gran Boston, un 9,1 por ciento en el área de la Bahía de San Francisco, y un 10,2 por ciento en Washington D.C. El problema radica en que muchas familias no tienen suficientes ingresos para acceder a las viviendas que están disponibles.

Al final, los bandidos del tiempo decidieron, en lugar de rellenar los agujeros que existían en el tejido de espacio y tiempo, aprovecharse de ellos para “hacerse indecentemente ricos”. Los bandidos querían capitalizar las imperfecciones celestiales de la misma manera que los inversores mundiales desean obtener rentabilidad de las dislocaciones del mercado a corto plazo. A fin de ilustrar los peligros de la especulación desmedida en los mercados no regulados, consideremos un relato apócrifo de un mercado muy diferente. En 1974 en Bangladesh, se sugirió que, debido a las copiosas lluvias que habían caído durante la temporada de siembra, era posible que existiera una escasez de arroz en la temporada de cosecha. Para anticiparse a dicha escasez, el precio del arroz comenzó a subir. Especuladores expertos en bienes comercializables se dieron cuenta de que obtendrían una buena rentabilidad del arroz que mantuvieran fuera de mercado. A pesar de que la cosecha real produjo abundante arroz, la interacción entre las expectativas del mercado y las manipulaciones del mercado por parte de los inversores en bienes comercializables generó una de las peores hambrunas del siglo XX, que causó aproximadamente un millón y medio de muertes relacionadas con el hambre. Esta hambruna no fue el resultado de una escasez real de alimentos. La colisión entre el mercado de bienes y el mercado de inversión especulativa causó tal aumento del precio del arroz que hizo que quedara fuera del alcance de las poblaciones locales, lo que dio como resultado que las familias sin tierras sufrieran una tasa de mortalidad tres veces más alta que las familias con tierras.

Tal vez la vivienda y el alimento sean aspectos demasiado importantes para ser administrados por los mercados no regulados. En vista de los daños que puede provocar el conflicto entre el mercado de bienes y el mercado de inversiones en las poblaciones locales, quizá las políticas públicas deberían concentrarse en proteger una parte del mercado —y del público— de los estragos de la especulación. En este número de la revista Land Lines, describimos algunas medidas incipientes para producir constantemente viviendas sociales, aislándolas de la especulación mediante fideicomisos de suelo comunitario, viviendas inclusivas y cooperativas de vivienda. Miriam Axel-Lute y Dana Hawkins-Simons examinan los mecanismos necesarios para organizar fideicomisos locales de suelo comunitario. Loren Berlin describe las medidas tomadas a fin de preservar la vivienda social en forma de viviendas prefabricadas y promover la accesibilidad permanente a dichas viviendas mediante la conversión de comunidades de viviendas prefabricadas en cooperativas de patrimonio limitado.

En artículos más admonitorios, Cynthia Goytia analiza las formas en que las comunidades de bajos ingresos en ciudades de toda América Latina eluden las regulaciones sobre vivienda que aumentan los costos de la misma, y producen sus propias viviendas accesibles pero por debajo de los estándares en asentamientos informales. Finalmente, el artículo de Li Sun y Zhi Liu trata de la precaria condición del 25 por ciento de los hogares urbanos en China que compraron viviendas sociales con derechos de propiedad inciertos en terrenos de propiedad colectiva ubicados en la periferia en rápido desarrollo de las ciudades y en “aldeas urbanas”, es decir, asentamientos que, anteriormente, eran rurales y en la actualidad están rodeados de construcciones modernas. A medida que los mercados de capital se intensifican en estos países, la rivalidad entre la vivienda como un bien de inversión y la vivienda como un lugar para vivir probablemente exacerbará la informalidad en las ciudades de América Latina y hará más precarios los derechos de propiedad de las familias chinas. Después de casi setenta años de medidas fallidas para lograr que los mercados privados suplan las necesidades de vivienda social de la población, tal vez sea el momento de desarrollar, y de exportar, otro enfoque que se fundamente en una comprensión más realista de la complejidad del mercado de la vivienda y del mercado del capital.

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 5 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

¿Es la segregación espacial urbana una consecuencia del funcionamiento normal de los mercados inmobiliarios urbanos, reflejo de las preferencias individuales acumulativas, o es más bien resultado del mal funcionamiento de mercados inmobiliarios urbanos que privatizan los beneficios sociales y socializan los costos privados? ¿Proviene quizás de prejuicios contra ciertas clases o razas? ¿Crean guettos las políticas de viviendas de interés social, o los crean las acciones de agentes y prestamistas inmobiliarios que ponen sus prejuicios personales por encima de toda objetividad, generando y alimentando estereotipos sobre conciudadanos y vecindades? ¿Podrían cambiar los patrones de asentamiento intrametropolitanos si se modifica la política del suelo, o para ello es imperativo que se produzcan transformaciones sociales profundas relacionadas con valores como tolerancia, oportunidad y derechos humanos?

Treinta y siete académicos y asesores de trece países se enfrentaron a éstas y otras preguntas afines en el “Seminario Internacional sobre Segregación en la Ciudad” organizado por el Instituto Lincoln en Cambridge, Massachusetts durante el pasado mes de julio. Los organizadores del seminario, Francisco Sabatini (Universidad Católica de Chile) Martim Smolka y Rosalind Greenstein (Instituto Lincoln) plantearon una amplia gama de aspectos para explorar las dimensiones teóricas, históricas y prácticas de la segregación. Los participantes, procedentes de países tan diversos como Brasil, Israel, Kenya, Países Bajos, Irlanda del Norte y los Estados Unidos, trajeron consigo su formación profesional como juristas, sociólogos, economistas, planificadores urbanos, científicos regionales y geógrafos. A medida que intentaban llegar a un acuerdo sobre el significado de la segregación, las fuerzas diversas que la crean y la refuerzan, y las respuestas políticas posibles, se fue haciendo obvio que no hay respuestas simples y que muchos puntos de vista contribuyen al debate interminable. Este breve informe sobre el seminario ofrece una muestra de esta discusión.

¿Qué es la segregación y por qué es tan importante?

El trabajo de Frederick Boal (Escuela de Geografía, Universidad de Queens, Belfast) es fruto del gran caudal de literatura sociológica sobre segregación y su propia experiencia de vida en medio de los conflictos entre católicos y protestantes en Irlanda del Norte. Boal sugirió que la segregación debe entenderse principalmente como parte de un espectro que abarca desde el movimiento extremista de limpieza étnica hasta el más idealista de asimilación (véase la fig. 1). Tal como pasa con tantos temas vinculados con políticas, para estudiar el problema de la segregación es preciso observarla, más que como una dicotomía, como un continuo de grados o niveles de separación, cada uno con diferentes manifestaciones espaciales.

Para Peter Marcuse (Escuela de Posgrado de Arquitectura, Conservación y Planificación, Universidad de Columbia, Nueva York), la segregación supone la imposibilidad para elegir o la presencia de coerción, o ambas. Marcuse llama “agrupaciones en enclaves” a grupos de diferentes razas o etnias que deciden vivir juntos por voluntad propia. Por otra parte, llama “segregación en guettos” cuando a los grupos se los obliga a vivir aparte, bien sea explícitamente o a través de mecanismos más sutiles. La clave que distingue a estos dos patrones—la imposibilidad para elegir—invita a una respuesta del orden público.

El significado y la importancia de la segregación varía según el contexto histórico. Para William Harris (Departamento de Planificación Urbana y Regional, Universidad Estatal de Jackson, Mississippi), escritor de temas de segregación espacial en el sur de los Estados Unidos, la segregación no puede entenderse ni tampoco enfrentarse sin un conocimiento profundo del papel que ha desempeñado y sigue desempeñando la raza en la historia de los Estados Unidos y del orden público. Flavio Villaça (Escuela de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad de São Paulo, Brasil) entiende la segregación dentro de un marco conceptual de clases, en donde los factores principales que influyen en los patrones residenciales son el nivel de ingresos y el estatus social, y no la raza. En Brasil y muchos otros países con larga historia de regímenes autoritarios, el estado suele encargarse de prestar los servicios urbanos. En estos países, los patrones residenciales urbanos determinan el acceso a agua y a instalaciones sanitarias (y por tanto, a la salud) así como a medios de transporte, infraestructuras de servicios públicos y otros servicios urbanos.

Según Villaça y otros, en muchos casos la actividad del mercado del suelo y las regulaciones y los códigos urbanos se han aplicado de maneras furtivas o incluso abiertamente para crear vecindades selectas bien dotadas de servicios que separan las clases superiores del resto de la sociedad, al cual prácticamente se le hace caso omiso. Este cuadro tiene paralelismos en los Estados Unidos, en donde el acceso a escuelas de alta calidad y a otras valiosas amenidades lo determinan fundamentalmente patrones residenciales que tienen estrecha relación con la segregación, ya sea por nivel de ingresos, raza u otras características demográficas. Igualmente, los participantes del seminario señalaron la correlación entre las comunidades precarias y la situación de los peligros ambientales. Las zonas de barrios o guettos pobres, habitadas generalmente por personas de raza negra, son el vertedero de los aspectos negativos del mundo urbano moderno, como lo son desechos peligrosos y otros usos indeseados del suelo.

Ariel Espino (Departamento de Antropología, Universidad de Rice, Texas) presentó un análisis del uso de la distancia para reforzar desigualdades sociales, políticas y económicas en la vivienda. Cuando las diferencias sociales y económicas están claramente especificadas y entendidas, las élites dominantes “toleran” la proximidad física. Por ejemplo, los sirvientes pueden vivir cerca de sus patrones, incluso en la misma casa, porque las relaciones económicas y las normas de comportamiento dictan la separación por clases.

¿Por qué persiste la segregación?

Una suposición que prevaleció a lo largo del seminario fue la de que todos los residentes de la ciudad (es decir, los ciudadanos) deberían tener acceso a los servicios urbanos, o al menos a un nivel mínimo de servicios. Sin embargo, Peter Marcuse lanzó al grupo la idea de pensar más allá de un nivel mínimo y de considerar el acceso a amenidades urbanas en el contexto de los derechos. Se cuestionó si la riqueza, la herencia familiar, el color de la piel o la identidad étnica deberían ser los factores determinantes en el acceso a los bienes públicos, no sólo educación, salud y abrigo, sino también a otras amenidades directamente relacionadas con la ubicación física. Expresándose en un lenguaje evocador de las ideas de Henry George sobre la propiedad común a finales del siglo XIX, Marcuse preguntó si era justo o correcto, por ejemplo, que los ricos disfrutaran de las mejores vistas de océanos, ríos u otras bellezas naturales, mientras que los pobres estuvieran relegados a zonas menos atractivas.

Robert Wassmer (Departamento de Orden Público y Administración Pública, Universidad Estatal de California) describió los procesos económicos involucrados en la ubicación residencial, tal como los entienden los economistas de la escuela del “public choice” (decisiones públicas). Según esta perspectiva, los compradores de viviendas eligen no sólo una casa y su terreno, sino también un diverso grupo de ventajas que varían según el sitio. Algunos compradores pueden optar por un paquete de conveniencias que ofrece más sistemas de transporte público y menos vistas panorámicas, mientras que otros pueden preferir mayor acceso a autopistas y a escuelas públicas de mejor calidad. Sin embargo, no todos los ciudadanos tienen las mismas oportunidades para hacer esas selecciones. Varios participantes añadieron que este debate forma parte de una discusión más amplia sobre acceso y selección en la sociedad, dado que casi todas las opciones están restringidas hasta cierto grado, y que muchas restricciones varían sistemáticamente entre los grupos sociales.

Otros participantes señalaron las maneras en que las políticas gubernamentales (p. ej., sistemas tributarios, legislación de vivienda) e instituciones privadas (p. ej., agentes de bienes raíces, instituciones prestamistas) actúan en conjunto para influir en el comportamiento de los mercados inmobiliarios, y por consiguiente, en el efecto de las políticas del suelo en acciones públicas y privadas. Greg Squires (Departamento de Sociología, Universidad de George Washington) informó de un estudio sobre el proceso de búsqueda de vivienda en Washington, DC. Sus hallazgos ponen en evidencia el papel que desempeñan los agentes de bienes raíces al “orientar” a compradores e inquilinos hacia vecindades de las mismas razas. Como resultado fundamental, los negros no disfrutan de las mismas oportunidades que tienen los blancos y sus posibilidades de obtener su solución habitacional preferida son menores, lo cual se contrapone al modelo de “public choice”. Entre los hallazgos de Squires está el hecho de que la selección de la vivienda está determinada por el estatus social o económico. Por ejemplo, en el proceso de búsqueda de vivienda, las amenidades más solicitadas por los clientes negros difirieron de aquéllas preferidas por los blancos, en parte porque aquéllos disponían de menos recursos particulares (tales como automóviles) y requerían viviendas situadas cerca de servicios centralizados tales como transporte público.

John Metzger (Programa de Planificación Urbana y Regional, Universidad del Estado de Michigan) examinó la influencia del mercado privado en la perpetuación de la segregación. Metzger presentó investigaciones sobre perfiles grupales demográficos usados por compañías como Claritas y CACI Marketing Systems para caracterizar los vecindarios. Dichos perfiles se venden a una amplia gama de industrias, entre ellas agencias inmobiliarias y financieras, como también a entidades públicas. La industria inmobiliaria se vale de los perfiles para alimentar el proceso decisorio de comercialización, planificación e inversión, y —señala Metzger— para propiciar enclaves de razas y la persistencia de la segregación. Las instituciones de préstamos hipotecarios se valen de los perfiles para determinar la demanda del consumidor. Los planificadores urbanos, tanto asesores privados y del sector público, usan los perfiles para la determinación de usos futuros del suelo, para la planificación a largo plazo y para guiar las actividades de planificación e inversión de distritos comerciales centrales, mientras que los promotores de bienes raíces los usan para definir sus mercados y demostrar las demandas aceleradas de sus productos. Los perfiles en sí suelen estar basados en estereotipos raciales y étnicos, y a su vez refuerzan la separación de grupos raciales y étnicos dentro de los mercados de bienes raíces regionales.

Xavier de Souza Briggs (Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy, Universidad de Harvard) introdujo la idea de “capital social” en la discusión. El término “capital social”, tal como lo emplean actualmente sociólogos y expertos en teoría sociológica, encarna las redes y relaciones sociales dentro las comunidades, que pueden aprovecharse para el logro de metas individuales y comunes. Briggs argumentó que si bien el capital social es, al mismo tiempo, causa y efecto de la segregación en los Estados Unidos, también puede utilizarse para crear cambios positivos. Otros participantes cuestionaron la eficacia de la teoría y las investigaciones en capital social para resolver el problema de la segregación espacial urbana, señalando que éstas tendían a limitarse a la cuestión de “cómo mejorar la situación de los pobres” en vez de estudiar los mecanismos estructurales e institucionales que contribuyen a la segregación residencial y a la desigualdad de la renta. No obstante, los sociólogos opinan que el capital social es justamente lo que necesitan las comunidades para tener cierto control sobre sus ambientes inmediatos, en vez de ser simples receptoras de las consecuencias previstas e imprevistas de la economía política.

Justicia social y política del suelo

Durante el seminario, participantes de distintas partes del mundo dieron ejemplos de casos de segregación espacial utilizada como estrategia política por los poderes estatales:

• El gobierno colonial británico de Kenya instituyó leyes de planificación y de zonificación de exclusión para separar a los africanos nativos de los británicos. Esos patrones residenciales, establecidos hace casi un siglo, se reflejan en la Nairobi de hoy.
• Durante el régimen británico en Palestina, el gobierno militar forzó a los palestinos árabes a vivir en un solo sector de la ciudad de Lod, lo que facilitó la transformación de esta ciudad antiguamente árabe en lo que hoy en día se conoce oficialmente como Israel.
• El régimen militar de Augusto Pinochet desalojó a miles de chilenos de la clase trabajadora de ciertos sectores de sus ciudades para dar paso a pequeños enclaves exclusivos para familias de clase media y alta.
• El régimen del Apartheid de la República Sudafricana creó sectores residenciales separados por raza y mantuvo un aislamiento sistemático de grupos en prácticamente todos los aspectos de la sociedad.

Las conexiones entre estas formas extremas de segregación espacial y las fuerzas de mercados y políticas inmobiliarias de la mayoría de las ciudades modernas son complejas y difíciles de articular. Uno de esos vínculos se refleja en las maneras como se continúan aplicando las políticas inmobiliarias y las instituciones que apoyan los mercados inmobiliarios para brindar legitimidad a las prácticas discriminatorias.

Al imaginarse un mundo de ciudades cuyos habitantes tengan verdadera libertad para escoger dónde vivir, los planificadores del seminario se concentraron en políticas y programas gubernamentales que facilitan la integración, tales como el programa “Moving to Opportunity” del Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano de los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, Stephen Ross (Departamento de Economía, Universidad de Connecticut) cuestionó los supuestos beneficios de las políticas de integración o repoblación lanzando esta pregunta: “¿Qué pasaría si dispersáramos personas de altos ingresos por toda la ciudad? ¿Qué cambiaría? ¿Nos ayuda esto a considerar con más detenimiento la importancia del espacio?”

Otra pregunta de Xavier Briggs obligó a los participantes a pensar en dónde se producen la mayoría de las interacciones sociales significativas. Específicamente, ¿qué debe pasar —y en qué circunstancias— para ir desde el movimiento extremo de limpieza étnica (según el espectro étnico urbano mencionado por Boal) al extremo opuesto de la asimilación? Briggs sugirió que es posible que instituciones como escuelas y lugares de trabajo estén en más capacidad de facilitar la diversidad en las interacciones sociales, que los vecindarios residenciales.

Al fin y al cabo, los planificadores urbanos desearían que se usen sus herramientas para formar ciudades que ofrezcan justicia para todos. Hablando de las condiciones de los ciudadanos árabes en la ciudad mixta de Lod, Haim Yacobi (Departamento de Geografía, Universidad de Ben-Gurion, Israel), tocó los cimientos de los ideales democráticos occidentales al preguntar lo siguiente: “Si una persona no tiene acceso total a la ciudad, si no puede participar de lleno en la vida de la ciudad, ¿está esa persona viviendo en una ciudad verdadera?”

William Fischel is professor of economics and the Patricia F. and William B. Hale ’44 Professor in Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was a member of the Hanover zoning board for 10 years, and has long served on the teaching and research faculty of the Lincoln Institute. He has written more than 50 articles and three books about the related topics of local government, land use controls, school finance and property taxation. Fischel’s most recent book pulls those themes together under the title The Homevoter Hypothesis (Harvard University Press 2001), and he will discuss them at a course at the Lincoln Institute on April 25.

Land Lines: The term homevoter doesn’t seem to be in any dictionary. What does it mean?

William Fischel: I coined the word to convey the theme of my book. My original title was Municipal Corporations and the Capitalization Principle, but when I tried it out on people their eyes glazed over. I had to think of something catchier, and homevoter popped into my head. In local government elections, residents tend to “vote their homes.” For example, if the school board proposes a tax increase to reduce class size, most homeowners will consider the impact of the taxes and the better school quality on the value of their homes as well as on their personal situations.

LL: What’s the difference between people voting their personal situations and voting their homes?

WF: If people voted only according to their immediate situation, almost every school referendum would be voted down. Since the last of the baby boomers graduated from high school in the late 1970s, only about a third of all American households have any children in public school. If people only cared about whether school expenditures benefited them directly, the two-thirds of voters without kids in school would vote down school referenda and save themselves some taxes. The reason they usually don’t is that they know that scuttling the local schools will drive their home values down. They may not like paying taxes, but most voters will not actively oppose a reasonable school budget.

LL: Why would home values override immediate concerns about taxes, since most homeowners plan to keep their houses for a long time?

WF: For the great majority of homeowners, the equity in their home is much larger than their holdings of stocks and bonds and savings accounts. An owner-occupied home is a huge asset, and it is nearly impossible to diversify the financial risk of holding on to it. People who own a lot of stocks can diversify their holdings by buying mutual funds. But you cannot diversify your homeownership portfolio by buying a tenth of a house in Cambridge, a tenth in Springfield, a tenth in Pittsburgh, and so forth. You are stuck with all your homeownership eggs in one local basket. If the schools are declining, so is much of your investment. You don’t have to plan to sell a home soon to be concerned about its value, just as you don’t have to be ready to retire to be concerned about your retirement investments.

LL: So even people who will never have kids are interested in the quality of public schools?

WF: They sure are, especially when they are buying a house. Many economic studies of housing values have found that the major determinant of house price differences among communities is the quality of public schools. Further, the difference in home values is not reflected in the cost of the structure but in the land value. If your home burned down and you decided to sell your lot instead of rebuilding, the price of the lot would reflect the value of the community’s public assets such as its schools. The structure itself would just reflect the cost of building it.

LL: What other community assets do homevoters pay attention to?

WF: Lots of things, including neighborhood traffic, local parks, good (or bad) views, local air quality, open space, crime rates and public libraries. Like school quality, all of these community characteristics are capitalized in home values if they are better or worse than average.

LL: Capitalized? As in the stock market?

WF: Yes, just as in the stock market. If Merck Pharmaceuticals develops an effective drug to treat cancer, the value of Merck stock will go up. That good news is quickly capitalized in (or reflected in) the price of the stock. If a particular city found a good way to control traffic noise and congestion, the value of homes there would rise. In both cases, the stockholders would be pleased.

LL: How is a city like Merck?

WF: They are both corporations. One is a municipality and the other is a business, but each has a corporate identity that is independent of its owners or residents. The main difference is that a city’s major stockholders, its homeowners, cannot diversify their assets. So unlike most business stockholders, residents pay close attention to what their corporation’s managers are doing. They make managers do their business in the open most of the time, and they make their board of directors—the city council—stand for election more frequently than business corporation boards.

LL: What about the role of other stakeholders, such as local business owners?

WF: Business people are usually behind development plans, and city councils pay attention to them. But in the municipalities where most people live—cities and towns of less than 120,000 population—homeowners have to be persuaded that the proposed development will do them some good. Just creating jobs and lowering taxes is not enough in most places. A job-creating, tax-paying factory whose traffic, noise and pollution devalue the homes of nearby residents will have a hard time getting permission to locate there. Homevoters may not be as active as developers, but they are usually more numerous and vocal, and few city councils can afford to ignore their concerns.

LL: And how do renters benefit from the system?

WF: Renters get the benefit of municipal services that are more consumer-oriented as a result of homevoters’ activism. But renters have a shorter time horizon because when they move they neither gain nor lose from the local improvements they leave behind. This may explain why renters tend to participate in local government less than homeowners. They don’t have the long-term financial stake that even the short-term homeowner has.

LL: What’s the downside of homevoters’ influence?

WF: The downside is exclusionary zoning. Zoning is a necessary tool for local governments to rationalize development. The problem is that homevoters can overuse this tool. Because homes are not a diversifiable asset, homeowners often become risk averse to any development that might reduce their home’s value. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome is most often seen in homeowners, and my theory says they are rational to behave this way. But what is rational for the homeowners in a single community might not be rational for the larger region. Siting low-income housing, power plants, half-way houses and the other necessary but sometimes unlovely developments is impeded by having people too worried about their home values.

LL: Is there a way to control the bad side of homevoting and still keep the good side?

WF: Understanding where the problem comes from is a start. People who oppose low-income housing projects are not necessarily opposing low-income people. They may be mainly worried about their home values. One way to deal with that would be to offer home-value insurance for neighborhoods that feel threatened by proposed land use changes. An innovative program in Chicago offered home-value insurance to help forestall “panic selling” and thus stabilize neighborhoods with respect to both home values and socioeconomic composition. It might be worth extending home equity insurance to other situations in which neighborhood change raises the anxieties of homeowners.

LL: But people have lots of reasons to oppose neighborhood changes besides loss of property value.

WF: It is rare for people to mention property values in public discussions. It sounds too selfish to talk about in a public forum. But economists know that most of the things that people do talk about, such as traffic, noise, open space and service costs, clearly affect people’s home values. Whether owners are consciously relating these characteristics to home values or simply intuitively aware of this connection is hard to say. If developers could take home values off the table in such debates, it might go a long way to overcoming the NIMBY problem.

LL: You mentioned earlier that the quality of community life was reflected in land values. Would this argue for a tax on land rather than improvements in order to finance local services?

WF: I think it does, and in fact that’s what most property taxes really do tax. Local development is a highly regulated activity because of zoning laws, planning reviews and environmental impact statements. I believe that local land use regulation is tight enough to make buildings essentially indistinguishable from land as a tax base. Take the example of the home that burns down. The buyer of the lot typically has to put up another home of the same type, and the tax payment on land and structure will be the same as before. For the most part, owners of homes and businesses in zoned communities have only one allowable use for their land, so that increasing or decreasing local taxes is not going to affect that use. That’s exactly the same virtue as a tax on land. Beyond that, taxing property value gives voters cooperative incentives on the zoning front. Homevoters won’t want to trash another side of town with an unfriendly land use, because devaluing other people’s property would cause property taxes to be shifted to the remaining homeowners.

LL: A land tax is what Henry George advocated more than 100 years ago. Are you saying that the local property tax already is a land tax?

WF: Yes, within certain contexts. It is quite a bit like a land tax in largely residential communities and for most new development. Zoning limits a developer’s alternatives, so the tax rate will not alter his behavior. A general property tax would not be like a land tax, however, if it were administered by a large jurisdiction such as a state or national government, unless those governments also had local zoning controls in place. It is the combination of local zoning plus the property tax that approximates a land tax. Henry George’s ideas came in through the back door of suburban zoning and property taxation rather than through the front door of state and national taxation.

In the past decade, nearly 50 mansions have been demolished and replaced in the historic Chicago suburb of Kenilworth. Four demolition permits are currently pending review, while permits have been approved for two other historically significant houses. To slow the teardown trend, Kenilworth has enacted a nine-month waiting period between issuance of a demolition permit and initiation of the teardown process. However, the village does not have a historic preservation ordinance, and local officials generally support the rights of property owners to demolish and replace their houses. The National Trust for Historic Preservation included Kenilworth on its 2006 list of the 11 most endangered places nationwide (Black 2006).

The practice of demolishing and replacing houses in high-priced areas generates passionate controversy. The fight to save the Skiff House in Kenilworth is illustrative (Nance 2005). That property at 157 Kenilworth Avenue is one of the premier locations in one of Chicago’s most expensive suburbs, three blocks west of Lake Michigan and five blocks from the commuter train station in the village center.

The house was built in 1908 for Frederick Skiff, the first director of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. This beautiful and historically significant house was designed by the architectural firm of Daniel H. Burnham, who was considered the preeminent architect in America at the turn of the twentieth century. He oversaw the construction of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and helped design a series of lakefront parks as part of the 1909 Plan of Chicago.

Plans to demolish the Skiff House shortly after it was purchased in 2004 for $1.875 million created an uproar. While many neighbors supported the owner’s right to tear down the property—after all, they might want to do the same—others saw it as an assault on the community’s character. “Save 157 Kenilworth” signs began to appear in front yards throughout the village, and a neighborhood group, Citizens for Kenilworth, led a campaign to save the house. After months of controversy, and only days after an auction to sell off valuable parts of the house before demolition, a neighbor purchased the house for $2.35 million in order to save it.

Historic houses continue to be torn down in Kenilworth and elsewhere, but not all teardowns generate controversy. Residents of many Chicago suburbs have been supportive of the teardown trend. Naperville is a representative case. Founded in 1831 and incorporated in 1857, Naperville grew slowly until plans for the East-West Tollway (I-88) were announced in 1954. The population grew from 7,013 in 1950, to 21,675 in 1960, to 140,106 today.

Naperville’s downtown has undergone a renaissance over the last decade, attracting new restaurants, shops, and residences. Although the city has a historic district just to the east of the downtown area, teardown activity has been concentrated in what were formerly more humble areas. Small, older houses are being purchased for about $400,000 and replaced by much larger houses that may sell for $1 million.

The teardown trend in Naperville is illustrated by one small house being sold as a teardown, with an announcement of an upcoming public hearing posted in the yard. It is likely to be replaced by a house that is similar to the recently constructed house next door (see pages 6 and 7). Though teardown activity is not entirely without controversy in Naperville, it does not generate the same passion as the Skiff House did.

How Widespread is the Teardown Phenomenon?

Nationwide the teardown phenomenon has attracted much media and public attention. The decennial Census of Population and Housing offers a way to quantify the practice using the “net replacement method.” For example, suppose the Census lists 10,000 housing units in an area for 1990 and 10,500 units in 2000—an increase of 500 units. Now suppose the Census shows that 800 housing units were built during the decade. Then 300 of the newly built units must have simply replaced existing units. The 300 replacement units are a crude but nonetheless enlightening measure of teardown activity in that community.

Figure 1 shows counties where at least one census tract had a net replacement rate in excess of 4 percent. Teardown activity is clustered in older urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. In fact, the map does not look substantially different from a map of population density in the United States. This simple analysis shows that replacement of the preexisting housing stock is an extensive phenomenon that is national in scope.

Nevertheless, it is surprisingly difficult to track teardown activity on a case-by-case basis. The classic teardown is a house whose sale is followed by the issuance of both demolition and building permits, but timing is a key factor in tracking these permits. If a demolition permit is issued four years after a sale, was the house really sold as a teardown? Similarly, a building permit may be issued long after a dilapidated house was demolished, yet this situation is not what most people have in mind when they think of teardowns.

Some teardowns are carried out by the current owner without a sale. Other houses are so extensively remodeled that they are effectively teardowns, even though no demolition permit is issued. Even when data on sales, demolition permits, and building permits are available, it is difficult to merge the different sources of information since they frequently come from different agencies that vary in the quality of their database management.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has described the Chicago metropolitan area as the “epicenter of teardowns.” Aside from Kenilworth, teardowns are common in both the city of Chicago and its suburbs. The Village of Skokie (2005) surveyed 20 of its neighbors in Chicago’s near north suburbs and compared the number of detached single-family housing unit demolition permits from 2000 to 2003 to the total number of such units as reported in the 2000 U.S. Census. Thirteen of the 20 communities reported demolition permits representing more than 1 percent of the housing stock over the four-year period.

Richard Dye and I (forthcoming) have used data from Chicago and six suburban communities to document the degree of teardown activity in the region. We were able to obtain data on house sales and demolition permits for Chicago; one of its suburbs to the west, Western Springs; the northwest suburb of Park Ridge; and four suburbs on the North Shore—Glencoe, Kenilworth, Wilmette, and Winnetka.

Between 1996 and 2003, the number of demolition permits ranged from 29 in Kenilworth to 273 in Winnetka and 12,236 in Chicago. Of course, Kenilworth has only 2,494 residents, whereas Winnetka’s population is 12,419, and Chicago has 2.9 million residents. Figure 2 shows the number of demolition permits as a percentage of total housing units for each community. More than 9 percent of Winnetka’s housing stock was torn down between 1996 and 2003, and teardown rates were also quite high in Winnetka and Kenilworth. Even Chicago, with more than 400,000 housing units, had a demolition rate near 3 percent.

These six suburbs were not chosen randomly. All had high median incomes in 2000, ranging from $73,154 in Park Ridge to more than $200,000 in Kenilworth. All of these suburbs have stations on commuter train lines to downtown Chicago, little or no vacant land on which to build, and good schools and other local public services. In other words, demand to live in these suburbs is high. Teardown activity in Chicago is concentrated in comparable neighborhoods within the city, such as Lincoln Park, West Town, and Lakeview on the near north side.

The Costs and Benefits of Teardowns

Teardowns can impose significant social costs. Local residents often complain that new houses destroy the character of a neighborhood. Those houses may be built to the limits of the zoning code, tower above their neighbors, and reach to the edge of the property line. Sometimes neighbors simply dislike the design of new buildings, particularly those that replace historic houses. When tall apartment buildings replace single-family houses or two-family houses in the city, neighbors complain of the loss of sunlight, lack of parking spaces, and increased traffic congestion. The construction process itself can be noisy and disruptive. New, expensive houses may cause assessments to increase in the neighborhood. And, teardowns may reduce the stock of affordable housing.

Teardowns also carry some benefits, however. In places that rely on the property tax to fund local services, the additional revenue from high-priced replacement houses is often quite welcome. Not all teardown buildings are historic, architecturally significant, or mourned when they are demolished. Some teardowns are simply eyesores.

Some of the new houses being built today will eventually be viewed as historically significant properties in their own right. Once entire blocks are rebuilt, the new housing no longer looks out of place. It is surprising to discover how stark and incompatible some properties built in the early 1900s appear in historic photographs taken before trees grew and the neighborhood filled in with similar houses.

It also is important to recognize that teardowns may help to curb sprawl. One reason people move to the urban fringe is to build a new house in a contemporary construction style. Allowing people to tear down a small, outdated house and replace it with a modern house may induce them to stay in centrally located areas. In general, encouraging housing and economic growth helps maintain the vitality of previously developed areas, which is a strategic complement to anti-sprawl policies designed to limit growth at the fringe.

Policy Responses

Local jurisdictions have been creative in responding to teardowns. Some policies are designed to the slow the amount of teardown activity by making it more costly, through demolition fees and fines for illegal demolitions. Others, such as a moratorium on new demolition permits or an enforced waiting period between permit issuance and the time when demolition can start, are simply designed to cool a potential teardown fever. Such policies also raise the cost of teardowns by making developers wait for some time after purchasing a property before being able to recoup their costs. Complementary policies include landmark designation and historic district designation, which make it more difficult or even impossible to tear down existing structures.

Policies on the other side of the balance sheet may give developers an incentive not to demolish existing structures. Communities may offer tax breaks to owners who rehabilitate existing houses rather than demolish them to build new ones. Or, owners may be granted variances from restrictive zoning provisions in order to enlarge rather than demolish an existing house.

At the same time, jurisdictions often use zoning to influence the type of new housing that is built in their community. Lot-coverage and floor-area restrictions are used to ensure that new structures do not dwarf their neighbors. Other policies include maximum building sizes; set-back and open space requirements; and restrictions on such design elements as garage and driveway locations, roof pitch, bulk limits, solar access, and the alignment of the new house with neighboring structures. Many communities have design review boards that can revoke building permits for structures that are not in compliance. These standards are not always clear beforehand, however, and they can increase the level of uncertainty for developers, delay construction, and raise costs.

Even if communities do not attempt to curb teardown activity, they often adopt policies designed to reduce the disruption caused by new construction. The builder may be required to notify neighbors when construction is about to begin, and a time window may be imposed for completion of the building. Construction activity may be limited to certain hours of day, the site may need to be fenced, and work vehicle and dumpster location requirements are often imposed. Communities also may require that contractors be bonded and certified.

How successful are these policies in slowing the rate of teardown activity? As we have seen, the Skiff House was saved because Kenilworth’s nine-month waiting period between permit issuance and the start of demolition provided enough time for a buyer to step forward before the house was razed. However, the potential for profits in such transactions make it difficult to stop teardowns completely. If a developer can purchase an existing property for $300,000, demolish it for $20,000, and spend $400,000 to build a new house according to current construction standards, then he has incurred $720,000 in costs. With new upscale houses routinely selling in excess of $1 million in communities with many teardowns, it should not be surprising that developers continue this practice.

Implications for Land Values

Assessors encounter enormous difficulties in placing a value on land in built-up areas. When few vacant lots exist, it is nearly impossible to find enough sales of vacant land to assess the value of land accurately. In the absence of direct land sales data, land values can be estimated by subtracting construction costs less depreciation from the sale price of improved properties in the area.

Statistical analysis of mass appraisal data can account for such structural characteristics as square footage in order to control for the contribution of the building to total property value. With a complete set of these characteristics, the residual from the regression reflects the contribution of location to property value—in other words, land value. Unfortunately, any unobserved structural characteristic will also be part of the residual.

Teardowns can help estimate the value of land in developed areas. Consider the earlier example of a property that is purchased for $300,000, demolished for $20,000, and replaced by a million-dollar house. If the developer could purchase a vacant lot of the identical size next door for $290,000, which property would he prefer? If there is no salvage value for parts of the existing house, it will cost the developer $320,000 before it is possible to build on the lot with the existing house. Yet the vacant lot is available in the same general location for $30,000 less. The vacant lot is preferable even though it does not include a house—in fact, it is preferable precisely because it does not include an existing structure.

If the price of the vacant lot rises to $310,000, the developer still obtains a lot that is ready to build upon for $10,000 less than the cost of building on the neighboring lot. Only at $320,000 will the developer be indifferent between the two lots. It follows that the value of land in this case is $320,000. This key insight leads to an extremely useful method of valuing land in areas experiencing teardowns. The value of land is simply the sales price of a teardown property plus any demolition cost.

An important implication of this line of reasoning is that only location determines the value of a teardown property; characteristics of the structure are irrelevant except insofar as they influence demolitions costs or salvage value. This implication is somewhat surprising to people who think that a historic house has intrinsic value. Though it is tempting to think that the Skiff House in Kenilworth is worth approximately $2 million because of its historic and architectural value, a vacant lot next door would sell for nearly the same price. Any house near Lake Michigan in Kenilworth will sell for well more than $1 million. The conclusion to be drawn is simply that land is expensive along Chicago’s North Shore.

Richard Dye and I (forthcoming) test the prediction that only location characteristics influence sales prices in our sample of seven communities in the Chicago area. Our measures of location include such variables as lot size, distance from the nearest commuter train station, and proximity to Lake Michigan. Structural characteristics include such variables as building size, age, and whether the house is built of brick and has a basement, garage, or fireplace. We identify teardowns as houses for which a demolition permit was issued within two years of a sale. As predicted, structural characteristics do not significantly influence the sales price of teardown properties. Teardowns are purchased for the land underneath.

Final Thoughts

The teardown phenomenon is not new. Houses have been demolished and replaced for as long as they have been built. American cities grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and again in the years just after World War II. Tastes now appear to be changing toward larger houses with spacious rooms and high ceilings. Many people find the existing housing stock less desirable than new construction. In this situation, it is not surprising that buyers purchase, demolish, and build new houses, especially in high-demand areas. The trick for local governments is to keep the costs of teardown activity from overwhelming the less obvious benefits.

Daniel P. McMillen is professor in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Government and Public Affairs at University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published widely in urban economics, real estate, and applied econometrics. He is a visiting fellow in 2006–2007 at the Lincoln Institute.

References

Black, Lisa. 2006. Kenilworth added to list of endangered historic towns. Chicago Tribune, May 20.

Dye, Richard, and Daniel P. McMillen. Forthcoming. Teardowns and land values in the Chicago metropolitan area. Journal of Urban Economics.

Nance, Kevin. 2005. Teardown ‘madness has to stop’: Developer rescues historic Burnham house, but says it’s just a start. Chicago Sun-Times, November 6.

Village of Skokie. 2005. Comprehensive Plan Appendix C: Near north suburban housing activity study. http://www.skokie.org/comm/Appendix%20C.pdf.

The character of institutions, political settings, and social relationships is critical in determining whether nonprofit developers are effective in reusing vacant, abandoned, and contaminated properties in their communities.

Over the last several years, growing public attention has centered on the fallout from the subprime lending debacle—an unprecedented event that has resulted in massive foreclosures and widespread housing vacancy in what had been the perennially growing Sunbelt (Goodman 2007; Leland 2007). Across the southern United States, from Atlanta, to Fort Meyers, to Phoenix, massive new housing developments are largely unoccupied while older housing is abandoned due to foreclosure. Cities in the Sunbelt now exhibit housing vacancy rates akin to those observed in former industrial Rustbelt cities.

This situation leads to two critical questions: Can Sunbelt cities manage the land use changes that this unstable (and unpredictable) economic market has created, while still maintaining at least the status quo for remaining residents? Are these changes providing new planning opportunities for urban sustainability?

In our work with the Lincoln Institute, we conducted an empirical study to begin to answer those questions (Hollander et al. 2010). The United States Postal Service (USPS) regularly releases datasets that provide information on occupied housing units for each zip code. We were able to obtain household residential delivery data for all zip codes in the lower 48 states for three time periods: the beginning of the real estate boom (February 2000); the peak of the real estate market (February 2006); and a time of high foreclosures and significant decline in real estate markets (February 2009).

The key indicator employed in our study was derived from the USPS dataset: occupied housing units. The USPS data lists how many housing units received mail during a given month in each zip code. When no one is receiving mail at a location, it is considered vacant. After 90 days of vacancy, the USPS no longer lists the unit as active and, for our purposes, removes it from the occupied housing unit list.

Following a methodology developed by Hollander (2010), we noted changes in occupied housing unit density from one period to the next. It was possible to analyze this because zip code boundaries remained constant in our study sample. We focused on broad shifts in occupancy in a given zip code as being indicative of widespread vacancy and abandonment.

Two time intervals were selected for analysis: February 2000 to February 2006, and February 2006 to February 2009. The first period corresponds with the housing boom years, and the second period with the slowing of the boom into the foreclosure crisis. Change for each time interval and each zip code was calculated by subtracting the total count of households at the end of each interval from the count at the beginning.

Data Tabulation, Mapping, and Analysis

In addition to comparing national indicators of household change between the two periods, each dataset was separated into urban, suburban, and rural areas. Urbanized Areas, as defined by the United States Census, provided boundaries for our urban areas. Areas between the Urbanized Area and the Metropolitan Statistical Area boundary lines were considered suburban, and areas outside of Metropolitan Statistical Areas were considered rural.

For each of these regions and for both time intervals, we analyzed the following factors for both declining and gaining zip codes:

• number of zip codes with a net decline or gain in housing occupancy;
• total square mileage within those zip codes;
• total net housing loss (or gain) for all declining (and gaining) zip codes; and
• percentage of the total housing units lost (or gained) in declining (or gaining) zip codes.

The data were also mapped in three categories to display which zip codes were losing and gaining housing units for each time interval. Zip codes that had a net loss of 30 or more housing units were mapped as “losing,” those that gained 30 or more units were mapped as “gaining,” and those that lost or gained up to 29 units were considered as having no significant change.

Two measures of spatial autocorrelation—Global Moran’s I and a Univariate Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA)—were used to explore spatial clustering of USPS’s housing unit occupancy change data and thus identify broad areas that were impacted most severely. In this analysis, the GeoDA software package was used to run the Global Moran’s I and Univariate LISA tests, with results shown only for zip code clusters with significance at 0.01 for the Global Moran’s I test and 0.05 for the LISA test.

Four possible results are derived from the Univariate LISA test, in which “high change” refers to an increase in housing occupancy of more than 30 units in a zip code and “low change” refers to a decrease of more than 30 housing units.

1. High-high clustering: high change zip codes surrounded by high change zip codes

2. Low-low clustering: low change zip codes surrounded by low change zip codes

3. Low-high clustering: low change zip codes surrounded by high change zip codes

4. High-low clustering: high change zip codes surrounded by low change zip codes

The high-high and low-low results indicate local clustering, while the high-low and low-high results indicate outliers or “islands” (Anselin 1995).

Findings

This analysis of the USPS occupied housing dataset revealed a number of trends that provide a spatial and statistical context for understanding the foreclosure crisis and numerous paths for further investigation. We had anticipated finding significantly more zip codes with a decline in occupied housing in the 2006–2009 period than the 2000–2006 period. Though the latter period did have 16.4 percent more declining zip codes than the former period, this increase was not as high as expected given the assumption of a boom vs. bust comparison.

However, when the dataset was separated into urban, suburban, and rural areas, much more distinctive trends were evident (tables 1 and 2). Suburban areas registered 42.8 percent more declining zip codes in the latter (2,333) than the former period (1,634) and rural zip codes registered 13.8 percent more declining zip codes in the latter (2,189) than in the former period (1,924), whereas urban areas had only 1.9 percent fewer declining zip codes in the latter period (2,084 versus 2,124).

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the occupied housing unit gains and losses during both periods. The 2006–2009 interval was marked not only by an increase in the size and number of declining (red) zip codes but a slowing of growth in previously expanding areas, as indicated by the increase in no-change (yellow) zip codes in many previously expanding regions. Decline also became more prevalent in new areas. The upper Midwestern states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, and Minnesota) and the Sunbelt region (including Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans, and the outskirts of Florida’s coastal cities) showed noticeable increases in declining zip codes. In contrast, declines in the Great Plains, Mississippi River corridor, western Pennsylvania, and the Pacific Northwest were either less pronounced or reversed in the latter period.

The results of the Global autocorrelation tests indicated spatial clustering existed in the dataset. Not surprisingly, the LISA analysis found declining clusters prevalent in regions that had high percentages of declining zip codes, generally in both intervals (figures 3 and 4). However, it was surprising that fewer low-low (declining) clusters were found in the 2006–2009 period. The 2000–2006 period shows low-low clusters, particularly in the Great Plains states, the Mississippi River corridor, and western New York and Pennsylvania. Despite having more total declining zip codes, less low-low clustering occurred in the 2006–2009 period. However, clustering did occur in new territory including the upper Midwest, South Florida, New Orleans, the Southwest, and California.

Application of the Findings

Since completing the working paper on which this article is based, its findings have influenced further on-the-ground research. Widespread instances of decline in metropolitan areas in the Sunbelt led to more targeted research in cities shown to be among those most severely impacted by the recession of the late 2000s. Three cities are examined as case studies by Hollander (2011): Phoenix, Orlando, and Fresno (figures 5, 6, and 7).

In Phoenix, a fire-hot real estate market led to widespread overbuilding of housing in recent years. Developers converted farms in the Laveen neighborhood into housing subdivisions, in some cases finishing only half of them. In Orlando, inner city neighborhoods that had experienced rebirth in the mid-2000s are stricken by widespread foreclosures today, leading to arson and high vacancy levels. Many of the grand older houses of Fresno are now overrun with weeds and decay as demand for housing has plummeted in this center of California’s agricultural industry. With jobs scarce, people are fleeing former boomtowns and leaving behind a new type of vacancy and abandonment. In these cities and others, entire blocks that had been fully occupied now have half or more of the housing stock unoccupied.

Additionally, the number of new declining zip codes found in Metropolitan Statistical Areas in this study raises more specific questions about how the recent recession has impacted different parts of the country. This finding challenges the belief that urban cores are most prone to decline while suburban growth will continue in perpetuity.

This shift in declining neighborhoods from urban to suburban areas spurred another related study that broke metropolitan regions down into central cities, inner ring suburbs, and outer ring suburbs (Zinder 2010). It used statistical metrics to compare trends within those subsets of the metropolitan region and added another round of evidence that suburban decline is becoming more pervasive in most regions of the country.

Zinder found more new declining zip codes in all suburban regions during the recent recession than in the previous period and determined that outer ring suburbs sustained the largest increase of new zip codes with a net decline in housing occupancy. In contrast, the total number of declining zip codes in central cities decreased. This study also provided additional support for the regional trends reported here showing particularly deep impacts in southwestern cities and outer ring suburbs in the Midwest, South, and Northeast.

Concluding Remarks

The findings from this research effort indicate that the face of declining cities and regions in America has begun to change. Though many areas previously hit by economic downturns have continued to feel their impacts, decline is no longer limited primarily to older manufacturing towns, urban cores, and declining rural farming communities. Places that had prospered in more recent times, including Sunbelt cities and remote suburbs, have begun to see declines in occupied housing stock as well and were, in fact, the places hit hardest by the subprime lending crisis. It is important to note that housing abandonment (i.e., a drop in occupied housing unit density) is one manifestation of neighborhood change, but it is only part of a larger story of metropolitan growth and decline. We focus here on those neighborhoods in decline, but in the future we will be attuned to growing neighborhoods as well.

Our research located some statistically significant clusters of zip codes experiencing home abandonment in recent years. The next question to answer is: What social processes and factors explain this clustering? In future phases of this research, we plan to examine how changes in occupied housing density have been dispersed throughout major Census-defined Urbanized Areas and begin to employ advanced multivariate statistical techniques to understand the key attributes associated with clusters of decline.

Should current trends persist in years to come, planners and policy makers will need to be better prepared, perhaps by looking to models adopted by other communities to build upon existing assets while embracing population decline. Understanding these complex dynamics will help community leaders come to terms with the challenges their cities and regions face. This article provides an introduction to a methodological approach to identify these trends in nearly real time to help quantify impacts on a given zip code, city, or region.

References

Anselin, Luc. 1995. Local indicators of spatial autocorrelation–LISA. Geographical Analysis 27:93–115.

Goodman, Peter S. 2007. This is the sound of a bubble bursting. The New York Times. December 23.

Hollander, Justin B. 2010. Moving towards a shrinking cities metric: Analyzing land use changes associated with depopulation in Flint, Michigan. Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 12(1):133–151.

Hollander, Justin B. 2011. Sunburnt cities: The great recession, depopulation, and urban planning in the American Sunbelt. London/New York: Routledge.

Hollander, Justin, Colin Polsky, Dan Zinder, and Dan Runfola. 2010. The new American ghost town: Foreclosure, abandonment, and the prospects for city planning. Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Leland, John. 2007. Officials say they are falling behind on mortgage fraud cases. The New York Times. December 25.

Zinder, Daniel H. 2010. Through the rings: A study of housing occupancy declines across major urbanized areas in the United States. Medford, MA. Tufts University.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to Nick Giner for his contributions to the spatial autocorrelation analysis used in this research. Much of the methodological explanation is based directly on his work on the spatial distribution of lawns in Massachusetts.

About the Authors

Justin B. Hollander is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and a research scientist at the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Colin Polsky is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Geography and associate dean for Undergraduate Research & Active Pedagogy at Clark University. He is a geographer specializing in the human dimensions of global environmental change.

Dan Zinder is a recent graduate of masters degree program in Urban and Environmental Planning at Tufts University. His research interests include land use policy, declining cities, GIS, and sustainability.

Dan Runfola is a Ph.D. student at Clark University. His research interests include remote sensing, GIS, land change science, and vulnerability.

La vivienda es un componente importante tanto del patrimonio neto de un hogar como de la riqueza nacional agregada o el inventario de capital residencial. La riqueza residencial agregada es la suma de los valores de todas las unidades de vivienda. En Brasil, las estructuras residenciales representan alrededor de un tercio de los activos netos totales, de manera que su valor es importante para la política económica y social. El presente análisis se hace las siguientes preguntas: ¿Qué variables determinan los valores del inventario de la propiedad residencial? ¿Cómo afectan a estos valores la ubicación de las viviendas y las condiciones del barrio? ¿Cuál es la riqueza residencial agregada en la Región Metropolitana de Rio de Janeiro (Metro Rio)? ¿Cuál es su distribución entre los grupos de ingresos familiares y valores inmobiliarios? En otras palabras, ¿qué genera la riqueza residencial? ¿Cuánta riqueza residencial existe? ¿Quién la tiene? ¿Dónde está ubicada? (Vetter, Beltrão y Massena 2013.)

Metodología para estimar la riqueza residencial

Para responder a estas preguntas, primero calibramos un modelo hedónico de renta residencial con microdatos de muestra del censo de población de 2010 realizado por el Instituto Brasileño de Geografía y Estadística (IBGE). Las unidades de análisis son las familias que viven en unidades de vivienda privadas permanentes en áreas urbanas de Metro Rio. La cantidad total de hogares en 2010 era 3,9 millones, y nuestra muestra fue de 223.534 (5,7 por ciento). Usamos los 41.396 inquilinos en la muestra para calibrar nuestro modelo y después estimar la renta para los propietarios de vivienda y los propietarios de unidades exentas de alquiler. Finalmente transformamos las rentas reales e imputadas en valores de vivienda dividiéndolas por la tasa de descuento mensual de 0,75 por ciento (9,38 por ciento de tasa anual), según la práctica estándar para estudios de riqueza residencial en Brasil (Cruz y Morais 2000, Reiff y Barbosa 2005, y Tafner y Carvalho 2007).

La suposición subyacente en estos estudios es que los precios hedónicos de las características en el modelo y la tasa de descuento son similares para unidades de alquiler y exentas de alquiler. Estas son suposiciones importantes pero necesarias para aplicar la metodología con los microdatos de censo existentes. La suma de los valores estimados de las viviendas es nuestra medida de riqueza residencial. El objetivo es estimar el valor agregado de todas las unidades de vivienda y sus valores promedio.

Al calcular los precios promedio de las viviendas para estos grupos, no controlamos por tamaño de vivienda u otras características, como se haría para los índices hedónicos de precios de viviendas. Con el uso de microdatos del censo, también podemos estimar la riqueza residencial por ingresos familiares así como para unidades espaciales más pequeñas dentro de las municipalidades, como barrios o distritos. Si bien la muestra de unidades de alquiler es relativamente grande, el tamaño de la muestra cae rápidamente a medida que los alquileres y los ingresos familiares aumentan, y las varianzas son particularmente altas para el grupo abierto en el extremo superior de la distribución de ingresos. Como no tenemos datos sobre el valor de las hipotecas, nuestra medida es de riqueza residencial bruta en vez de neta.

El uso de los valores de alquiler del censo o una encuesta de hogares se compara favorablemente con otros métodos usados comúnmente para estimar riqueza residencial para las cuentas nacionales de Brasil y estudios asociados (Garner 2004), tales como pedirles a los propietarios que estimen el precio de venta o el alquiler mensual de sus casas, usar los precios de oferta de viviendas a la venta o usar los registrados cuando se efectúa la venta propiamente dicha. Si bien los inquilinos saben cuánto pagan mensualmente de alquiler, los encuestados quizás tengan muy poca información sobre las tendencias vigentes en los precios de las viviendas, y el precio de oferta inicial es frecuentemente más alto que el precio de venta final. En Rio de Janeiro, el gobierno municipal usa sus propias estimaciones de los precios de venta en función de los precios de oferta, en vez del valor registrado utilizado en el cálculo del impuesto de transferencia inmobiliaria, porque los vendedores y compradores muchas veces registran la venta a un valor más bajo.

En nuestro modelo hedónico de renta residencial, la variable dependiente es un vector de rentas residenciales, y las variables independientes son las matrices de las características estructurales de la unidad de vivienda, el acceso a empleo y las características del barrio, incluyendo indicadores de acceso a infraestructura y servicios urbanos. Las variables utilizadas son para el hogar propiamente dicho y también para el área del censo en que está ubicado. La figura 1 muestra las 336 áreas del censo de Metro Rio y los límites municipales más amplios, agrupados en seis subregiones de acuerdo a los indicadores analizados en este estudio y en estudios previos (Lago 2010).

El indicador de acceso al empleo mide el tiempo promedio de viaje al trabajo para los residentes de cada área del censo. La figura 2 muestra que el tiempo promedio de viaje al trabajo aumenta con la distancia al centro, pero no tanto como era de esperar, parcialmente debido a una mayor congestión de tráfico en todas las áreas y a que Metro Rio es policéntrico, con muchos centros subordinados.

Los indicadores de la calidad de la infraestructura y los servicios del barrio incluyen el acceso del hogar al sistema público de alcantarillado y agua, recolección de basura y condiciones de la manzana (por ejemplo, si las calles están pavimentadas y tienen bocas de alcantarillado). Como estos indicadores están altamente correlacionados, los resultados de componente de un análisis de componentes principales se utilizan como las variables independientes en el modelo hedónico. El primer componente principal explica el 46,6 por ciento de la varianza y muestra cargas altamente positivas sobre las condiciones e infraestructura adecuada de la manzana, y cargas altamente negativas sobre condiciones de manzana inadecuadas (por ejemplo, basura en las calles y alcantarillado abierto), identificando aquellas áreas que tienen un alto nivel de atractivo o deseabilidad (figura 3). Si bien los resultados más bajos están claramente concentrados en las áreas periféricas, los patrones de atractivo varían considerablemente. Como con los tiempos de viaje al trabajo, el patrón de distribución de los resultados de atractivo revela la complejidad de la estructura espacial de Metro Rio.

Nuestro modelo hedónico explica el 73 por ciento de la varianza de la renta residencial. Las variables independientes clave son estadísticamente significativas; la calidad del barrio y el acceso al empleo explican casi dos tercios de la varianza, mientras que las características estructurales de la vivienda explican sólo alrededor de un tercio de la varianza. En otras palabras, gran parte del valor de la vivienda es el valor capitalizado del acceso al empleo y a infraestructura y servicios del barrio, todos los cuales están determinados en gran medida por los gastos públicos. La figura 4 (pág. 20) muestra la distribución de los valores promedio estimados de la vivienda para las áreas del censo en dólares estadounidenses, de acuerdo a la determinación de nuestra metodología. (La tasa de cambio promedio para 2010 es de US$1=R$1,76). Estos valores tienden a ser más altos en áreas donde el viaje al trabajo es relativamente corto y hay buen acceso a infraestructura y servicios urbanos.

Distribución de la riqueza residencial

¿Qué parte de la riqueza residencial les corresponde a los propietarios de viviendas y qué parte les corresponde a los propietarios de unidades de alquiler y unidades exentas de alquiler utilizadas por empleadores, familiares u otros? Nuestra estimación de la riqueza residencial agregada de Metro Rio, tanto en unidades ocupadas como desocupadas en 2010, es de alrededor de US$155.100 millones (94,2 por ciento del PIB de Metro Rio de 2010 de US$164.100 millones) y US$140.200 millones solamente para unidades ocupadas (84,2 por ciento del PIB de Metro Rio). Del total de unidades ocupadas, el 74,8 por ciento de esta riqueza residencial (alrededor de US$105.000 millones) corresponde a unidades ocupadas por sus dueños, y el resto pertenece a propietarios de unidades de alquiler o que no cobran alquiler. En el caso de hogares de menores ingresos, los propietarios podrían ser otra familia de menores ingresos.

La tabla 1 muestra que el porcentaje de propietarios es bastante similar para todos los grupos de ingresos familiares. Por ejemplo, los propietarios abarcan casi tres cuartas partes de los hogares en el grupo de familias de menores ingresos (con menos de dos salarios mínimos o un ingreso promedio anual de solamente US$4.407). Una razón clave para este alto porcentaje de propiedad de la vivienda es que aquellos que viven en favelas u otros tipos de viviendas informales se pueden declarar propietarios, aunque no tengan derecho legal al suelo donde se encuentra ubicada su casa. El censo de 2010 identificó más de 520.000 hogares (más del 15 por ciento de todas las viviendas urbanas privadas permanentes) en estos tipos de asentamientos en Metro Rio. La propiedad del suelo en estos asentamientos es una cuestión legal compleja, sobre la cual ni siquiera los abogados se pueden poner de acuerdo, ya que la probabilidad de desalojo (o por lo menos de desalojo sin compensación) es bastante baja, y, según la ley brasileña, aquellos que viven en suelos sin título legal pueden adquirir derechos de ocupación después de cinco años.

Si bien el 25,3 por ciento de todos los hogares ingresaba menos de dos salarios mínimos (US$6.960 por año), los propietarios de este grupo tenían solamente el 15,3 por ciento de la riqueza residencial agregada de todos los propietarios. En contraste, sólo el 15,6 por ciento de los hogares ganaba 10 o más salarios mínimos (US$34.800 por año), pero los propietarios de este grupo de ingresos tenía el 34,5 por ciento de la riqueza residencial agregada. De todas maneras, los hogares de menores ingresos tienen más riqueza residencial de lo que uno podría esperar, en parte debido a que frecuentemente son propietarios en asentamientos informales.

La figura 5 muestra la curva de Lorenz para la distribución de riqueza residencial agregada de los propietarios, por grupos de valor inmobiliario. Esta distribución es bastante desigual, porque casi el 23,7 por ciento que no son propietarios no tienen esa riqueza (tal como se ve donde la curva de Lorenz corre a lo largo de la parte inferior del eje) y porque aquellos que viven en viviendas de mayor precio tienen mayor riqueza residencial.

Distribución de riqueza residencial por subregiones

Gran parte de la riqueza residencial agregada está en manos de aquellos que viven en los suburbios y la periferia de Metro Rio, si bien el valor promedio de sus unidades de vivienda es menor. La tabla 2 muestra que esas subregiones (4 y 6) representan en su conjunto el 79 por ciento del total de hogares en Metro Rio (3,1 millones) y el 58,1 por ciento de la riqueza residencial agregada (US$80.900 millones). La subregión 2 (los barrios de altos ingresos más antiguos a lo largo de la bahía y la costa) representa solamente el 6,3 por ciento de los hogares de Metro Rio (alrededor de 242.000), pero el 19,0 por ciento de su riqueza residencial.

El porcentaje de inquilinos, 28,6 por ciento, es mayor en los grandes asentamientos informales (subregión 5), con un 2,7 por ciento adicional de unidades exentas de alquiler. Las tasas de propiedad de la vivienda son mayores (80,4 por ciento) en la periferia (subregión 6), donde muchos propietarios viven en suelos sobre los que no tienen un título legal pleno, si bien estas áreas generalmente no son asentamientos informales de acuerdo a la definición del IBGE.

Distribución espacial de los ingresos de los hogares

Un resultado de la interacción de las fuerzas de mercado que conforman los precios de alquiler y de viviendas residenciales es que la distribución de los ingresos agregados de los hogares tiende a reflejar la distribución de riqueza residencial agregada. En otras palabras, hay un nivel de segregación relativamente alto por grupo de ingresos, con las familias de menores ingresos concentradas en los grandes asentamientos informales, y en los suburbios y la periferia (subregiones 4, 5 y 6). La alta concentración espacial de hogares de mayores ingresos genera un ingreso agregado y demanda mayores en áreas que ofrecen servicios de mayor nivel, lo cual a su vez hace que estas áreas sean más atractivas para propietarios e inquilinos de mayores ingresos. La figura 6 (pág. 22) muestra que los ingresos anuales promedio de los hogares en las áreas del censo de 2010 reflejan en gran medida la distribución de los valores promedio de las viviendas (figura 4), los tiempos de viaje (figura 2) y el atractivo del barrio (figura 3).

En 2010, el área de altos ingresos de Barra de Tijuca (subregión 3) abarcaba solamente el 2,1 por ciento de todos los hogares de Metro Rio, pero generaba el 8,1 por ciento de los ingresos agregados de los hogares y el 7,6 por ciento de la riqueza residencial agregada. En comparación, los cuatro grandes asentamientos informales de la subregión 5 abarcaban el 2,5 por ciento de todos los hogares pero generaban sólo el 1,0 por ciento de los ingresos agregados de los hogares y el 1,4 por ciento de la riqueza residencial. De todas maneras, el valor residencial agregado de estos cuatro grandes asentamientos informales fue de casi US$2.000 millones, y el valor promedio de la vivienda fue de casi US$21.000. Estos resultados muestran una concentración espacial relativamente alta tanto de ingresos agregados de los hogares como de riqueza residencial, lo cual está ligeramente atenuado por el porcentaje de propietarios de vivienda en asentamientos informales.

Implicaciones para la metodología y las decisiones políticas

La metodología usada en este análisis brinda un panorama interesante sobre la importancia macroeconómica y social de la riqueza residencial; las variables que la genera; su distribución en función de la tenencia de la vivienda, los ingresos familiares y grupos de valor inmobiliario; y su distribución en las distintas subregiones, desde los barrios de ingresos más altos hasta los asentamientos informales. Se deben tener en cuenta las importantes suposiciones requeridas para el uso de esta metodología al interpretar sus resultados. Se podrían usar más adelante datos de registros de propiedades u otras fuentes con información más detallada sobre el tamaño de las unidades para complementar esta metodología.

Los servicios, las inversiones y las acciones reguladoras del gobierno pueden generar beneficios (por ejemplo, acceso al empleo, servicios urbanos y equipamientos) y costos (por ejemplo, impuestos, aranceles e impactos medioambientales negativos) que se capitalizan en el valor de las viviendas de los barrios afectados. Para los propietarios, los beneficios netos positivos de las acciones gubernamentales aumentan su riqueza residencial, porque se capitalizan en el valor de su vivienda. No obstante, para inquilinos y nuevos propietarios, estas mismas acciones gubernamentales pueden hacer aumentar los alquileres y los precios de las viviendas, junto con los beneficios netos mencionados anteriormente. Algunos hogares, especialmente los inquilinos y compradores de vivienda de menores ingresos, quizás tengan que dejar el área beneficiada, y otros nuevos propietarios potenciales quizás no puedan asentarse en el área. Por lo tanto, la tenencia de la vivienda es importante para determinar si un hogar recibe o no los beneficios netos de las inversiones y acciones reguladoras del gobierno.

La capitalización de los beneficios netos de las acciones gubernamentales sería claramente un problema para más del 30 por ciento de los hogares que viven en los cuatro grandes asentamientos informales y que no son propietarios, y también para aquellos que están accediendo al mercado de la vivienda. Si bien no hay datos confiables sobre la rotación de viviendas, sabemos que el número total de hogares urbanos en Metro Rio aumentó más del 20 por ciento, o 657.000 unidades, entre 2000 y 2010. Este incremento fue un 14 por ciento mayor que el número total de hogares en la Municipalidad de Curitiba (la capital del estado de Paraná) en 2010 y bastante más que el doble de Washington, D.C. Todos estos nuevos hogares, más todos los inquilinos (alrededor de un quinto del total de hogares) y los propietarios que se quieran mudar deberán pagar mayores alquileres y precios de viviendas debido a los beneficios netos de las acciones gubernamentales.

Estos resultados demuestran la necesidad de contar con políticas que aseguren que el aumento de los alquileres y los precios de las viviendas no excluyan a ciertos hogares en áreas donde se están mejorando los servicios públicos y la infraestructura. Por ejemplo, parte del programa de mejoras se podría destinar a ayuda económica para la compra de una vivienda. Una manera de financiar estos programas de inversión y viviendas de interés social sería recuperar parte de la plusvalía generada por las inversiones de infraestructura de los hogares de mayores ingresos. La recuperación de parte de la plusvalía generada por las inversiones urbanas podría ayudar a financiar subsidios de vivienda adicionales para familias de menores ingresos y también inversiones adicionales, generando una especie de multiplicador de inversiones.

Sobre los autores

David M. Vetter (Ph.D., Universidad de California) ha trabajado por más de cuatro décadas en financiamiento urbano y temas económicos en América Latina para entidades brasileñas, en el Banco Mundial y en Dexia Credit Local, y también como consultor.

Kaizô I. Beltrão (Ph.D., Universidad de Princeton) fue decano e investigador senior en la Escuela Nacional de Estadística (perteneciente al IBGE) y es ahora profesor titular e investigador senior en la Fundación Getulio Vargas.

Rosa M. R. Massena (Doctorado, Universidad de Burdeos) fue investigadora principal en IBGE durante 23 años y desde entonces ha trabajado como consultora en programas de indicadores sociales para Hábitat, el Banco Mundial, PNUD y otras entidades.

Recursos

Cruz, Bruno. O. y Maria P. Morais. 2000. Demand for Housing and Urban Services in Brazil: A Hedonic Approach. Paper presented at the European Network for Housing Research Conference, Gavle, Sweden (Junio).

Garner, Thesia I. 2004. Incorporating the Value of Owner-Occupied Housing in Poverty Measurement. Prepared for the Workshop on Experimental Poverty Measures, Committee on National Statistics. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies.

Lago, Luciana C. 2010. Olhares Sobre a Metrópole do Rio de Janeiro: Economia, Sociedade e Território. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Observatório das Metrópoles, FASE, IPPUR/UFRJ.

Reiff, Luis. O. y Ana L. Barbosa. 2005. Housing Stock in Brazil: Estimation Based on a Hedonic Price Model. Paper No. 21. Basel, Switzerland: Bank for International Settlements. Tafner, Paulo y Marcia Carvalho. 2007. Evolução da Distribuição Familiar da Riqueza Imobiliária no Brasil: 1995–2004. Revista de Economia 33(2) (Julho-Dezembro): 7–40.

Vetter, David M., Kaizô I. Beltrão, y Rosa R. Massena. 2013. The Determinants of Residential Wealth and Its Distribution in Space and Among Household Income Groups in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region: A Hedonic Analysis of the 2010 Census Data. Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

People who work with me are often surprised by the extent to which my philosophical canon derives from low-budget offbeat films, typically from the 1980s. When in need of wisdom, I frequently turn to the teachings of Repo Man or, for this essay, Terry Gilliam’s allegorical masterpiece Time Bandits. In the movie, a group of public workers are employed by the Supreme Being to fill holes in the time-space continuum left from the haste of creating the universe in seven days: “It was a bit of a botched job, you see.”

Like the Time Bandits, policy makers are often tasked to fill holes—actual potholes in roadways, or more theoretical holes that are the artifacts of dysfunctional private markets. One big hole that policy has struggled for decades to fill is the inadequate supply of affordable housing. For example, housing economists in the United States have become quite adept at tracking the size of the hole, which has only become harder to fill since the federal government committed to address it as a national policy priority beginning with the Housing Act of 1949, part of President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal.

Perhaps our collective failure to solve the affordable housing deficit over the last 66 years stems from wrongheaded analysis of the problem, and the conclusion that market-based solutions can be designed to solve the mismatch between the supply of affordable housing and demand for it. In his 1949 State of the Union address, President Truman noted that to fill the needs of millions of families with inadequate housing, “Most of the houses we need will have to be built by private enterprise, without public subsidy.”

To support this claim, permit me a short departure into market theory. From the now-preferred mathematical approach to economic analysis, a market is simply a system of partial differential equations that is solved by a single price. The partial differential equations capture the complex decisions made by consumers and producers of goods, reconciling tastes, preferences, and budgets of consumers with the technical complexities of producing goods to arrive at a price that clears the market by settling all transactions that suppliers and consumers of goods are willing to make.

Acclaimed economists Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie proved the theoretical existence of a single set of prices that can simultaneously solve for the “general equilibrium” of all markets in a national or global economy. One important aspect of this Nobel Prize–winning contribution was the observation that a unique price cleared each market—one market, one price. There was no expectation that a single price could maintain equilibrium in two markets. But this is the fundamental flaw of the housing market—it is actually two markets, not one. Housing markets supply both shelter for local consumption and a globally tradable investment good made possible by broad capital markets that serve global investors. This dual-market status used to be more descriptive of owner-occupied housing, but, with the proliferation of real estate investment trusts (REITs), rental markets are now in the same boat.

Markets for consumption goods behave very differently than investment markets, responding to different “fundamentals.” On the supply side, prices for consumption goods are dictated by production costs, while prices in investment markets are dictated by expected returns. On the demand side, such things as tastes and preferences, household incomes, and demographics determine the price of housing as shelter. Investment demand for housing is dictated by factors like liquidity and liquidity preferences of investors, expected returns on alternative investments, or interest rates.

In developed countries, global capital markets and the market for shelter collide locally with little chance of reconciliation. Local households compete with global investors to decide the character and quantity of housing that is produced. In markets that attract global investment, plenty of housing is produced, but shortages of affordable units are acute, and worsen over time. This is because a huge share of new housing is produced to maximize investment return, not to meet the needs of the local population for shelter. For example, there is no shortage of global investment willing to participate in developing $100 million apartments in New York City. But affordable housing, being much harder to finance, is in short supply. And in markets that have been abandoned by global capital, house prices fall below production costs, and surplus housing accumulates and decays. In extreme cases such as Detroit, market order can only be restored by demolishing thousands of abandoned homes and buildings.

Perhaps it is time that we reconsider the analysis that led President Truman, and thousands of housing policy makers after him, to conclude that one could forge market-based solutions to the challenge of sheltering a country’s population. Truman concluded that “By producing too few rental units and too large a proportion of high-priced houses, the building industry is rapidly pricing itself out of the market.” But Truman was thinking about the market for shelter, not investment. It is remarkable to note that the number of housing units supplied in developed countries such as the United States significantly exceeds the number of households. In 2010, the U.S. Census estimated that there were 131 million units of housing in the country and 118 million households—one in seven housing units were vacant. It is even more shocking to note that in the United States this oversupply of housing characterizes every metropolitan market in the country—even metropolitan markets with extreme shortages of affordable housing. In 2010, 8.5 percent of housing units were vacant in Greater Boston, 9.1 percent in the San Francisco Bay area, and 10.2 percent in Washington, DC. The problem is that many households have insufficient incomes to afford the housing that is available.

In the end, rather than fill the holes in the fabric of time and space, the Time Bandits decided to take advantage of them to “get bloody stinking rich.” The bandits sought to capitalize on celestial imperfections in the same way that global investors seek returns from short-term market dislocations. To illustrate the dangers of naked speculation in unregulated markets, consider an apocryphal tale from a very different market. In 1974, heavy rains during planting season in Bangladesh suggested that rice might be in short supply at harvest time. In anticipation of these shortages, rice prices started to rise. Savvy commodity speculators realized that there would be a good return on any rice that was held off the market. Despite the fact that the actual harvest produced a bumper crop, the interaction between market expectations and market manipulations by commodity investors produced one of the worst famines of the 20th century—with an estimated 1.5 million famine-related fatalities. The famine was not the result of real food shortages. The collision of the market for goods and the market for speculative investment priced rice out of the reach of the local populations, with landless families suffering mortality at three times the rate of families with land.

Perhaps shelter and food are too important to be left to unregulated markets to allocate. In light of the damage that the conflict between the market for goods and the market for investment can inflict on local populations, perhaps public policy should focus on protecting a share of the market—and the public—from the ravages of speculation. In this issue, we describe some nascent efforts to produce permanently affordable housing by insulating it from speculation—through community land trusts, inclusionary housing, and housing cooperatives. Miriam Axel-Lute and Dana Hawkins-Simons discuss the mechanics of organizing local community land trusts. Loren Berlin describes efforts to preserve affordable housing in the form of manufactured homes and to promote permanent affordability of that stock through the conversion of manufactured housing communities to limited equity cooperatives.

On more cautionary notes: Cynthia Goytia discusses the ways that low-income communities circumvent housing regulations that drive up housing costs to produce their own affordable but substandard shelter in informal settlements around Latin American cities; and Li Sun and Zhi Liu discuss the tenuous status of one-quarter of urban Chinese households that purchased affordable shelter with uncertain property rights on collectively owned land at the rapidly developing edge of cities and in “urban villages,” former rural settlements now surrounded by modern construction. As capital markets deepen in these countries, the competition between housing as investment good and housing as shelter will likely exacerbate informality in Latin American cities and make property rights of these Chinese families more precarious. After almost seven decades of failed efforts to get private markets to meet populations’ needs for affordable shelter, it might be time to develop, and to export, another approach that is based on a more realistic understanding of the complexity of housing and capital markets.

Is urban spatial segregation a consequence of the normal functioning of urban land markets, reflecting cumulative individual choices? Or, is it a result of the malfunctioning of urban land markets that privatize social benefits and socialize private costs? Is it the result of class bias, or racial bias, or both? Does public housing policy create ghettos? Or, do real estate agents and lending officers substitute personal bias for objective data, thereby creating and reinforcing stereotypes about fellow citizens and neighborhoods? Can changes in land policy lead to changes in intra-metropolitan settlement patterns? Or, do such changes come about only from deep social changes having to do with values such as tolerance, opportunity and human rights?

Thirty-seven practitioners and academics from thirteen countries struggled with these and other related questions at the Lincoln Institute’s “International Seminar on Segregation in the City” in Cambridge last July. The seminar organizers, Francisco Sabatini of the Catholic University of Chile and Martim Smolka and Rosalind Greenstein of the Lincoln Institute, cast a wide net to explore the theoretical, historical and practical dimensions of segregation. Participants came from countries as diverse as Brazil, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland and the U.S., and they brought to the discussion their training as lawyers, sociologists, economists, urban planners, regional scientists and geographers. As they attempted to come to terms with the meaning of segregation, the various forces that create and reinforce it, and possible policy responses, it became apparent that there are no simple answers and that many viewpoints contribute to the ongoing debate. This brief report on the seminar offers a taste of the far-reaching discussion.

The papers presented by all participants in this seminar are posted on the Lincoln Institute website.

What is Segregation and Why Is It Important?

Frederick Boal’s (School of Geography, Queen’s University, Belfast) work is informed by both the rich sociological literature on segregation and his own experience of living in the midst of the troubles between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Boal suggested that segregation was best understood as part of a spectrum that ranged from the extreme approach of ethnic cleansing to the more idealistic one of assimilation (see Figure 1). As with so many policy issues, segregation will not be solved by viewing it as a dichotomy but rather as a continuum of degrees or levels of separateness, each with different spatial manifestations.

For Peter Marcuse (Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning, Columbia University, New York) segregation implies a lack of choice and/or the presence of coercion. When racial or ethnic groups choose to live together, he calls that clustering in enclaves. However, when groups are forced apart, either explicitly or through more subtle mechanisms, he calls that segregation in ghettoes. It is the lack of choice that distinguishes these patterns and invites a public policy response.

The meaning and importance of segregation varies with the historical context. For William Harris (Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Jackson State University, Mississippi), who writes about spatial segregation in the U.S. South, segregation can be neither understood nor addressed without fully appreciating the role that race has played and continues to play in American history and public policy. Flavio Villaça (School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil) understands segregation within a class framework, where income level and social status, not race, are the key factors influencing residential patterns. In Brazil and many other countries with long histories of authoritarian regimes, urban services are generally provided by the state. In these countries, urban residential patterns determine access to water and sewer facilities (and therefore health) as well as transportation, utility infrastructure and other urban services.

In many cases, Villaça and others assert, land market activity and urban codes and regulations have been used, both overtly and furtively, to create elite, well-serviced neighborhoods that segregate the upper classes from the rest of society, which is largely ignored. This view has parallels in the U.S., where access to high-quality schools and other valued amenities is largely determined by residential patterns that are closely associated with segregation by income level, ethnic background and other demographic characteristics. Seminar participants also cited the correlation between disadvantaged communities and the location of environmental hazards. People segregated into low-income ghettoes or neighborhoods comprised primarily of people of color confront the downsides of modern urban living, such as hazardous waste sites and other locally unwanted land uses.

Ariel Espino (Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Texas) presented an analysis of how distance is used to reinforce social, political and economic inequality in housing. When social and economic differences are clear and understood, ruling elites tolerate physical proximity. For example, servants can live close to their employers, even in the same house, because economic relations and behavioral norms dictate separation by class.

Why Does Segregation Persist?

Prevalent throughout the seminar was an assumption that all residents of the city (i.e., citizens) ought to have access to urban services, at least to a minimum level of services. However, Peter Marcuse challenged the participants to think beyond a minimum level and to consider access to urban amenities in the context of rights. He questioned whether wealth or family heritage or skin color or ethnic identity ought to determine one’s access to public goods—not only education, health and shelter, but also other amenities directly related to physical location. In language reminiscent of Henry George’s views on common property in the late-nineteenth century, Marcuse asked whether it was fair or right, for example, for the rich to enjoy the best ocean views or river frontage or other endowments of nature while the poor are often relegated to the least attractive areas.

Robert Wassmer (Department of Public Policy and Administration, California State University) described the economic processes involved in residential location, as they are understood by public choice economists. In this view, house buyers do not choose to buy only a house and a lot; they consider a diverse set of amenities that vary from place to place. Some buyers may choose an amenity bundle that includes more public transit and less lakefront, while others may choose greater access to highways and higher-quality public education. However, not all citizens have equal opportunities to make such choices. Several seminar participants added that this debate is part of a larger conversation about access and choice in society, since nearly all choices are constrained to some extent, and many constraints vary systematically across social groups.

Other participants drew attention to the ways that government policy (e.g., tax codes, housing legislation) and private institutions (e.g., real estate agents, lending institutions) interact to influence the behavior of land markets, and thus the effects of land policies on public and private actions. Greg Squires (Department of Sociology, George Washington University) reported on a study of the house-hunting process in Washington, DC. His research findings emphasize the role of real estate agents in steering buyers and renters into same-race neighborhoods. As a consequence, blacks simply do not enjoy the same opportunities as whites and are far less likely to obtain their first choice of housing, thus challenging the public choice model. Squires also found that housing choice is determined by social or economic status. For example, priorities for neighborhood amenities among black house-hunters tended to differ from those of whites, in part because they had fewer private resources (such as an automobile) and were more dependent on a house location that provided centralized services such as public transportation.

John Metzger (Urban and Regional Planning Program, Michigan State University) examined the role of the private market in perpetuating segregation. He presented research on the demographic cluster profiles that companies like Claritas and CACI Marketing Systems use to characterize neighborhoods. These profiles are sold to a range of industries, including real estate and finance, as well as to public entities. The real estate industry uses the profiles to inform retailing, planning and investment decisions, and, Metzger argues, to encourage racial steering and the persistence of segregation. Mortgage lenders use profiles to measure consumer demand. Urban planners—both private consultants and those in the public sector—use profiles to determine future land uses for long-range planning and to guide planning and investment for central business districts. Real estate developers use profiles to define their markets and demonstrate pent-up demand for their products. The profiles themselves are often based on racial and ethnic stereotypes and in turn reinforce the separation of racial and ethnic groups within regional real estate markets.

Xavier de Souza Briggs (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) brought the idea of “social capital” to the discussion. As the term is being used today by sociologists and social theorists, social capital embodies the social networks and social trust within communities that can be harnessed to achieve individual and group goals. Briggs argued that social capital is both a cause and an effect of segregation in the U.S., but it can be leveraged to create positive change. Others challenged the extent to which social capital theory and research helps to address urban spatial segregation. These participants argued that it tended to frame the policy question as “How do we improve poor people?” rather than addressing the structural and institutional mechanisms that contribute to residential segregation and income inequality. Yet, the sociologists’ view is that social capital is the very element that communities need to exert some element of control over their immediate environments, rather than to be simply the recipients of the intended and unintended consequences of the political economy.

Social Justice and Land Policy

Seminar participants from around the world shared examples of spatial segregation enforced as a political strategy through the power of the state.

• The British colonial government in Kenya employed planning laws and exclusionary zoning to separate native Africans from the British, and those residential patterns established almost a century ago are reflected in Nairobi today.
• The military government at the time of the British mandate in Palestine forced the Arab Palestinians to reside in only one sector of the city of Lod, facilitating the transformation of this once Arab city in what is now Israel.
• The military regime of Augusto Pinochet evicted thousands of working-class Chileans from certain sectors of their cities to make way for small, elite middle- and upper-class settlements.
• The Apartheid regime of South Africa created separate residential sectors based on race and systematically kept groups isolated in virtually all aspects of society.

The connections between these extreme forms of spatial segregation and the land policies and market forces at work in most cities today are complex and challenging to articulate. One link is in the ways that land policies and the institutions that support land markets continue to be used to legitimize discriminatory practices.

By envisioning cities where citizens have real freedom to choose their residential locations, the planners in the seminar focused on government policies and programs to facilitate integration, such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity Program. However, Stephen Ross (Department of Economics, University of Connecticut) questioned the assumed benefits of resettlement or integration policies by asking, “What if you dispersed high-income people across the city? What would change? Does this idea help us to think more carefully about why space matters?”

Another query from Xavier Briggs challenged participants to think about where the most meaningful social interactions actually occur. Specifically, what needs to happen, and in what circumstances, to move from the extreme of ethnic cleansing on Boal’s urban ethnic spectrum toward assimilation? Briggs suggested that institutions such as schools and workplaces might be better suited to foster more diversity in social interactions than are residential neighborhoods.

Ultimately, the urban planners wanted the tools of their trade to be used for shaping a city that offered justice for all. Haim Yacobi (Department of Geography, Ben-Gurion University, Israel), while referring to the status of the Arab citizens in the mixed city of Lod, touched the foundations of western democratic ideals when he asked, “If a citizen does not have full access to the city, if a citizen is not a full participant in the life of the city, is he or she living in a true city?”

Allegra Calder is a research assistant at the Lincoln Institute and Rosalind Greenstein is a senior fellow and cochairman of the Institute’s Department of Planning and Development.