Why don’t people like renters? Looking for rental housing up here in Toronto (where under any reasonable set of parameters, there looks to be a serious housing bubble at the moment), it seems very rare for houses to be rented and also very rare for rental and owned homes to appear in the same neighborhood. Why might this be? Housing externalities is one answer: a single run-down house on the block greatly harms the value of surrounding houses. Social opprobrium among homeowners may be sufficient to induce them to internalize these externalities in a way that is not true of landlords. The very first “real” paper I helped with back at the Fed showed a huge impact of renovating run-down properties on neighborhood land values in Richmond, Virginia.
Given that housing externalities exist, we may worry about policies that distort the rent-buy decision. Rent control may not only limit incentives for landlords to upgrade the quality of their own property, but may also damage the value of neighboring properties. Autor, Palmer and Pathak investigate a quasiexperiment in Cambridge, MA (right next door to my birthplace of Boston, I used to hear Cambridge referred to as the PRC!). In 1994, Massachusetts held a referendum on banning rent control, which was enforced very strongly in Cambridge. It passed 51-49.
The units previously under rent control, no surprise, saw a big spurt of investment and a large increase in their value. If the rent controlled house was in a block with lots of other rent controlled houses, however, the price rose even more. That is, there was a substantial indirect impact where upgrades on neighboring houses increases the value of my previously rent-controlled house. Looking at houses that were never rent controlled, those close to previously rent-controlled units rose in price much faster than otherwise-similar houses in the same area which didn’t have rent-controlled units on the same block. Overall, Autor et al estimate that rent decontrol raised the value of Cambridge property by 2 billion, and that over 80 percent of this increase was due to indirect effects (aka housing externalities). No wonder people are so worried about a rental unit popping up in their neighborhood!
Final version in June 2014 JPE (IDEAS version).
A Fine Theorem 