Essays on Housing Policy

Abstract

I study the effects of housing policies on housing supply, land use across space, and households’ welfare. In Chapter 1, I study the impact of transit-oriented development incentives on multifamily housing development. I leverage the implementation of Los Angeles’s Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) incentive program as a natural experiment. Introduced in 2017, TOC streamlined the entitlement process for and granted density bonuses to qualifying projects near major transit stops. Using novel, project-level data covering applications, approvals, and permits from 2004 to 2023, I document a sharp increase in development proposals following the program’s rollout. However, this increase in applications did not translate into a rise in the rate of new housing supply. The program did shift the composition of new development: TOC projects were more likely to include income-restricted units and be located in lower-income, renter-occupied neighborhoods. Using a structural framework and estimated approval probabilities, I show that TOC enabled projects that would have faced lower approval chances or higher appeal risk under the previous discretionary regime. These findings highlight how procedural streamlining can shift the type and location of urban development, even if aggregate supply effects are limited. In Chapter 2, I quantify the environmental externalities of land development at the urban edge. Human activity is the primary cause of wildfires in California, suggesting that land development increases the probability of ignition, thereby creating environmental externalities. Using geospatial data, I estimate a concave relationship between housing development and the probability of wildfire ignition. Converting 2.5 acres of wildland into low-density development at the urban edge increases the annual probability of wildfire ignition by 0.34-0.67 percentage points, compared to an average yearly probability of 1.74 percent. At higher levels of development, additional developed land does not increase the probability of ignition. The probability of ignition decreases at higher rates of land development under weaker drought conditions. Each new housing unit near an ignition site generates up to $23,774 in expected annual suppression costs for small fires. Policy simulations highlight how concavity exacerbates or mitigates the costs of the externality. Limiting greenfield development while relaxing urban supply constraints reduces wildfirerelated costs, while restricting supply without offsetting infill development may worsen risk. These results highlight the importance of coordinated land use policy to mitigate wildfire externalities as climate change intensifies fire conditions. In Chapter 3, we study the impact of “right-to-counsel” programs on tenant welfare. “Right-to-counsel” programs provide free legal assistance to tenants in eviction court. Legal assistance can delay or prevent eviction. However, large-scale legal assistance programs can also generate costs for tenants due to equilibrium rental market responses. In this paper, we study how right-to-counsel impacts rental markets when implemented at scale, and quantify the policy’s impact on tenant welfare. Leveraging the geographic rollout of New York City’s program, we find listed rent prices rose by $22-$38/month within two years of policy implementation, with larger increases in areas with higher baseline eviction rates. We do not find evidence that landlords adjusted on other margins, such as tenant screening or improvements to habitability. Guided by these results, we develop a framework to evaluate the policy’s welfare implications for tenants, incorporating the trade-off between protection from eviction and higher rent prices. We quantify the parameters of our framework using linked data on eviction court cases, rental housing listings, and tenant earnings trajectories. Despite the direct benefits and insurance value of stronger eviction protections, the estimated price increases are large enough to generate a small net reduction in ex-ante tenant welfare.