The Economics of Housing Renovation: Three Empirical Studies

This paper fills both gaps in the literature. Two detailed microdata sets document renovation activity among hundreds of thousands of buildings in two different cities and five-year periods: New York in the late 1960s, the birthplace and early years of gentrification; and Chicago in the late 1990s, where recent residential revitalization has been brisk. The first two chapters definitively establish the determinants of housing renovation in an empirical framework that is comparable to previous studies. The consistency of the results across the two cities and time periods attests to the conclusions' robustness. Using an aggregated version of the Chicago data, the third chapter estimates several parameterizations of a spatial lag model to empirically analyze the endogeneity of households' renovation decisions. The results not only indicate that neighborhood effects are strongly influential, but also suggest that many building and neighborhood characteristics may not, in fact, be determinants of renovation, but, rather, are proxies for spatial neighborhood effects.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Helms, Andrew Christopher

Contributors dc:contributor

• Brueckner, Jan K.

• Urban and Regional Planning

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3070323

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/85526