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Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time while Google-generated geocodes are almost always more accurate. However, while Google’s geolocation is more likely to be accurate, when it is inaccurate, it deviates from the true location by a much greater distance than HUD. We therefore recommend that scholars use Google-generated geocodes for most research applications where the localized environment matters; however, in studies where observations are aggregated to a larger area, researchers may prefer to use HUD geocodes, which are more frequently inaccurate but typically by smaller distances.
The Supply-Equity Trade-Off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply
(2023)
Institutions that structure representation have systematically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. We examine an understudied dimension of this problem: how local electoral rules shape the provision of collective goods in relation to racial groups. We leverage the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which compelled over 100 cities to switch from at-large to district elections for city council, to causally identify how equalizing spatial representation changes the permitting of new housing. District elections decrease the supply of new multifamily housing, particularly in segregated cities with sizable and systematically underrepresented minority groups. But district elections also end the disproportionate channeling of new housing into minority neighborhoods. Together, our findings highlight a fundamental trade-off: at-large representation may facilitate the production of goods with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, but it does so by forcing less politically powerful constituencies to bear the brunt of those costs.