It has become clear that places considered to be suburbs are, in fact, extraordinarily diverse, including many that have characteristics traditionally associated with “urban” areas. In response, many planners, policy makers, and scholars have been trying to develop new and more meaningful definitions of suburban (and urban) places.
Our new interactive map allows users to visualize a variety of demographic, social, and economic changes in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area between 1990 and 2016.
How might refinancing a mortgage affect homeowners' financial situations? In this talk, Joshua Abel will discuss research that, using data from the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) to identify the causal effect of refinancing a mortgage on borrower balance sheet outcomes, indicates that one average, refinancing into a lower-rate mortgage reduced borrowers' default rates on mortgage and non-mortgage debts by about 40 and 25 percent, respectively.
Although much has written about the housing-market collapse in 2006 and the subsequent rise in the number and share of cost-burdened renters, few studies have carefully examined the connections between these two significant changes. In this talk, Lee will present research, carried out with Dowell Myers and Gary Painter, which found that as of 2015, about 8.4 million would-be homeowners (the expected number given market and demographic characteristics in 2000) either became renters or have left the housing market. This shift, they estimate, triggered a host of changes in rental housing markets, notably greater demand for more expensive rental units and higher rental burdens.
More than half of US households are now headed by someone 50 or over, according to Housing America’s Older Adults 2018, a new JCHS report to be released Wednesday, November 14.
