Predicting the Impact of the Housing Crisis and the “Great Recession” on the Revenues of the Nation’s Largest Central Cities

This paper examines the impact of the recession and the collapse in housing prices on local governments in the United States, focusing particularly on the nation’s largest cities. While the fiscal condition of most state governments is slowly improving, many central cities have only recently begun to feel the full impacts of the economic slowdown and the disruptions to the housing market. The conclusions of this paper are based on a constructed forecasting model that is used to demonstrate that the revenues available to the majority of large central cities in the U.S. are likely to decline over the next couple years.