Jacob Krimmel

Working Papers:

The Local Residential Land Use Regulatory Environment Across U.S. Housing Markets: Evidence from a New Wharton Index (with Joseph Gyourko and Jonathan Hartley), (submitted to Journal of Urban Economics) NBER Working Paper No. 26573, December 2019 (Online here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26573)

We report the results from a new survey of local residential land use regulatory regimes for just over 2,450 primarily suburban communities across the United States.  Key stylized facts include:  (1) the local regulatory system remains a complex one of different rules and barriers, as opposed to explicit limits on permitting or production;  (2) the most highly-regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas having the most restrictive regulation according to our metrics;  (3) being relatively lightly-regulated by our rankings does not mean the place is unregulated:  the bottom quartile of communities in terms of regulatory strictness has two entities that must approve any project needing rezoning and they typically employ density controls in the form of minimum lot size restrictions of up to one-half acre;  (4) the top quartile of communities in terms of regulatory stringency typically has at least three entities that must approve any project, has a more intense level of involvement in the regulatory process by their local officials and residents, has a minimum lot size restriction of more than one-half acre, and is more likely than not to impose open space requirements and impact fee regimes on builders;  project review times also are long, averaging over eight months, which is more than double the time in the least restrictive communities;  (5) comparing our new results to those from a previous survey finds that the housing market bust from the Great Recession did not lead any major market that previously was highly regulated to reverse course and deregulate;  moreover, regulation in coastal markets increased over time.

Persistence of Prejudice: Estimating the Long-Term Effects of Redlining

As part of a New Deal initiative to minimize home foreclosure, federal government officials and local real estate professionals graded each neighborhood in America’s largest cities on its perceived credit risk. Using recently digitized maps that precisely show neighborhoods marked with red ink (highest risk) or yellow ink (slightly lower risk), I document that surveyors disproportionately assigned the most restrictive credit rating to neighborhoods with black residents. Nearly 90 percent of African Americans in 1940 lived in a census tract marked for credit redlining. Comparing credit-restricted “redlined” census tracts to adjacent “yellow-lined” tracts, I estimate the long-run effects of redlining on housing and neighborhood outcomes. Between 1940 and 1970, redlining was associated with large differential declines in housing supply and population density; homeownership rates and racial composition did not change differentially from their 1940 baseline though. Once discriminatory lending was outlawed during the mid-1970s, there was moderate convergence in homeownership rates and racial composition. However, housing supply and population density remain persistently lower in formerly credit-restricted census tracts relative to their credit-favored neighbors. Although African-American neighborhoods were much more likely to be redlined, I show the effects do not vary by a neighborhood’s initial share of African American residents. Results also hold when restricting the sample to neighborhoods without any black residents in 1940. Taken together, these findings suggest redlining impacted neighborhood housing supply and population independent of pre-war patterns of racial segregation.

In Progress:

• Why Economists Have Trouble with Bubbles, Bloomberg View - 07/28/2015 Description

   

  "Why Economists Have Trouble with Bubbles" by Noah Smith, Bloomberg View. July 28, 2015

   

• Sanders Stretches State of the Rich, FactCheck.org - 07/23/2015 Description

  "Sanders Stretches State of the Rich" by Brooks Jackson. FactCheck.org, July 23, 2015 

• The Show-Off Society, New York Times - 09/25/2014 Description

  "The Show-Off Society" by Paul Krugman, New York Times. September 25, 2014