In the years since Michael Porter's paper about the potential competitiveness of inner cities there has been growing evidence of a residential resurgence in urban neighborhoods. Yet, there is less evidence on the competitiveness of inner cities for employment. We document the trends in net...

Despite popular accounts that link public housing demolitions to spatial redistribution of crime and possible increases in crime, little systematic research has analyzed the neighborhood or citywide impact of demolitions on crime. In Chicago, which has conducted the largest public housing...

In this paper we contrast the spatial patterns of population density and other demographic changes in growing versus shrinking MSAs from 1980 to 2010. We find that, on average, shrinking MSAs show the steepest drop in population density near the Central Business District (CBD). Motivated by this...

When a city experiences a decline in income or population, do all neighborhoods within the city decline equally? Or do some neighborhoods decline more than others? What are the characteristics of the neighborhoods that decline the most? We answer these questions by looking at what happened to...

In this paper, we begin by documenting substantial variation in house-price growth across neighborhoods within a city during citywide housing price booms. We then present a model which links house-price movements across neighborhoods within a city and the gentrification of those neighborhoods in...

This paper explores the degree to which gentrification impacts local labor markets. It begins by describing the nature of employment change in one archetypical gentrifying neighborhood — Chicago's Wicker Park — to motivate the central hypothesis that gentrification is associated with...

A number of studies have measured negative price effects of foreclosed residential properties on nearby property sales. However, only one other study addresses which mechanism is responsible for these effects. I measure separate effects for different types of foreclosed properties and use these...

Little is known about how affected residents are able to cope with the financial shock of a natural disaster. We investigate the impact that flooding from a major US hurricane had on household finance. Spikes in credit card borrowing and overall delinquency rates for the most flooded residents...