Landlord production efficiency advantages associated with the management of housing units in a multifamily building as opposed to single-family homes imply that multifamily units should be less likely to be owner-occupied, all else equal. In this paper, we employ a novel instrumental variable strategy – exploiting differences in soil quality – to identify the causal effect of the local housing stock composition on the local homeownership rate. Our instrumental variable panel fixed effects estimates for England suggest that a ten percentage points increase in the share of multifamily housing causes the homeownership rate to decrease by around nine percentage points. This very tight relationship has important consequences for the location choices of households inclined to become homeowners and hence for observed local inequality within and between cities. Using the EU-SILC household panel, we demonstrate that the link between accommodation type and housing tenure status holds among all 31 surveyed European countries.

Prior research shows that households reduce consumption of basic necessities in response to increasing rent burden. However, questions remain regarding the interrelated, cumulative tactics renters use to survive. We address these critical questions by leveraging data from a door-to-door household survey in South and Central Los Angeles. First, we find that rent-burdened households (those paying over 30% of their income on rent) were more likely to reduce consumption and that many consumption adjustments had persisted for years. Second, many households undertook impactful functional adjustments, including working more hours and altering their homes to accommodate more residents, across rent burden status. Finally, we find that many households made both functional adjustments and consumption cutbacks simultaneously, which demonstrates the cumulative hardships caused by housing unaffordability.

Unexpected fortune makes people feel wealthier. In this paper, we estimate the effects of housing wealth on online consumption. Using the announcement of the “Northern Metropolis development strategy” on October 6th, 2021 as an exogenous shock, we find that the average housing price in the Northern Metropolis area increased by 20.50 percentage points more than that in the Non-Northern Metropolis areas after the policy. This increased housing wealth within the Northern Metropolis area is associated with a surge in online consumption. Specifically, the total amount of online orders placed by buyers residing within the Northern Metropolis area increased by 4.96 percentage points more than that for buyers in the Non-Northern Metropolis areas after the policy. Renters, however, do not reap the benefits of the policy. These findings add to the literature on consumers’ responses when facing unexpected wealth and shed light on the effectiveness of place-based policies.