Amenity‐Based Housing Affordability Indexes
提出一种新的区域住房可负担性衡量方法，考虑就业可达性、学校质量和安全等便利设施，以波士顿大都市区141个城镇为例，发现纳入城镇级便利设施后，可负担性排名与传统评估有显著差异。
The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate‐income households, especially in high‐cost, supply‐constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town‐level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town‐level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability.