Estimating Housing Supply Elasticities for Manhattan from 1870 to 2017

Jason Barr, Rutgers University - Newark
Wei You, New York University

One of the most pressing problems today in large urban areas, like New York City, is that of housing affordability. We conjecture that affordability problems in the 21st century are relatively recent and that historically, over the run, large cities with fluid housing markets were able to supply housing to match the demand to keep housing prices relatively affordable. However, surprisingly little is known about long-run trends in housing prices and supply. We aim to fill this void with a focus on Manhattan’s real estate market from 1870 to 2017. We are creating a novel data set which will include virtually every new building permit issued in Manhattan and the sales prices of residential real estate during the period. This will be the first systematic study of housing supply elasticity over such a long period. We are in the process of geocoding the addresses of the permits and the transaction data (which is fraught with all the challenges associated with mapping historical data). Once all the data has been geocoded and mapped, we will investigate long run trends in housing prices, housing construction. In short, we aim to use historical, geocoded data to understand the long patterns of Manhattan housing market.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 134. Urban Economics