Brooks: The Changing Landscape of Affordable Housing

In The Changing Landscape of Affordable Housing in the Rural and Urban United States, 1990 – 2016, author Matthew M. Brooks (Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, Pennsylvania State) studies the changing landscape of affordable housing to better understand how certain socioeconomic forces may explain housing changes.

Brooks asserts that past research focused on place-level affordability (using county-level data) has focused primarily on metropolitan areas, generally overlooking housing in rural areas. Looking to these more rural regions, Brooks finds pronounced a significantly changing map of affordable housing. By 2016, the number of Midwest counties with high affordability rates declined significantly. Many more counties in California and the Mountain West had very low rates of affordability, and new clusters of low affordability emerged in the Southeast and Northeast. In addition, over half of the very low affordability counties are in the South.  

Although housing affordability declined in both rural and urban counties in the study timeframe of 1990 to 2016, Brooks seeks to identify the specific role, if any, of population change, population aging, and natural amenity development on rates of affordable housing, income, and housing costs in different county types. He finds, for example, that population growth resulted in decreased housing affordability in rural counties but increased affordability in larger metropolitan counties. The effects of population aging were more complex, and natural amenity development was—perhaps surprisingly—not associated with any changes in affordability for rural counties.

With this work, Brooks establishes an important starting point for further research on how demographic and economic change have produced disparities in affordability over the past several decades and, importantly, the relationship between geography and these various social and economic factors.