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The Atlantice Cites: How Stuck Are America's Homeowners, Really?
The campaign goal: “Every American lives in safe, decent, affordable and energy efficient housing on fair terms!” Join a community that is well informed on housing issues in the news. See the links below and Get Empowered Now.
It’s widely assumed that America’s housing crisis, especially its large share of underwater homes, has undermined the economic mobility of its residents. Census data show American mobility at record lows and several widely cited studies have documented the mobility-staunching effects of the housing and mortgage crisis.
A study reported in last week in ProPublica questions this, suggesting that too much has been made of the connection. The study, by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis economist Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, finds that owners of underwater homes are not as trapped by their circumstances as has been widely supposed. In fact, the paper argues that they are somewhat more likely to move than owners of homes that are worth more than their mortgages.
The new study supposedly updates and allegedly contradicts an earlier National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study, “Housing Busts and Household Mobility," by Wharton School economists Joseph Gyourko and Fernando Ferreria and New York Fed economist Joseph Tracy, which found that underwater home owners were 30 percent less likely to move.
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