Date of Award

12-24-2025

Date Published

January 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Economics

Advisor(s)

Alexander Rothenberg

Subject Categories

Economics | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

This dissertation contains two chapters related to housing choices of low-income families, neighborhood quality, and the remediation of urban blight. The first chapter examines the effectiveness of Detroit's 2014–2022 residential demolition program in addressing neighborhood blight and vacancy in a shrinking city context. Using a stylized model of durable housing with downward price frictions, I combine parcel-level data on vacancies, blight, and demolitions to estimate the causal effects of demolition exposure on vacancy rates for non-demolished, single-family homes. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I find that the program as a whole did not reduce vacancies, and instead slightly increased them by accelerating the transition of originally occupied homes into vacancy. I argue that this is partly explained by the implementation of the program itself---independent of amenity benefits from blight removal---whereby demolition crews disrupted neighborhoods, signaled poor neighborhood trajectories, and created unsightly empty lots. However, there is strong evidence that demolitions of higher-blight structures in particular successfully increased local housing demand and reduced vacancies, especially in less distressed neighborhoods. The second chapter studies tradeoffs between structure and neighborhood quality that people face when making housing choices. My co-authors and I show that low-income households often sacrifice housing quality to live in a better neighborhood, or instead, they may choose to live in a larger home in a worse neighborhood. To determine whether these outcomes reflect preferences or constraints, we develop a new hedonic framework to estimate marginal rates of substitution for structure and neighborhood attributes. We find significant, but modest, income elasticities of the marginal rates of substitution of neighborhood quality for housing size, suggesting that budget constraints better explain these tradeoffs.

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Open Access

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