Search

An improved algorithm based on tent chaotic map and difference mechanism is proposed to address the problem of poor population diversity and easily falling into local optimum in the lion swarm optimization algorithm. At first, an improved tent chaotic map is introduced to initialize the population position to increase diversity and ergodicity, thereby improving the global search capability. Second, a perturbation factor combined with a differential evolution mechanism is introduced to realize the adaptive positioning of the lioness and improve its ability to jump out of the local optimum. Following that, the proposed algorithm's superiority is tested on 10 multi-type benchmark functions and compared to six swarm intelligence algorithms. Finally, the improved algorithm is applied to optimize the initial weights and thresholds of BP neural networks. Then a new model is proposed and applied to the study of house price prediction. Experiments are conducted on two standard datasets, and results show that the proposed model's convergence speed, accuracy, and stability are better than the other three methods. On the Boston dataset, the mean square error of the training set and test set is 0.0016 and 0.0052, respectively, and the absolute error of more than 98% of the data is within 3%. On the Californian dataset, the mean square error of the training set and test set is 0.0149 and 0.0151, respectively, with more than 92.3% of the data within 5% absolute error, further validating the effectiveness, higher accuracy, and convergence performance of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have been championed as a low-cost solution—both monetarily and politically—for America's housing affordability crisis. However, do these micro-units provide a city's lower-income community members with much needed affordable housing? And which income groups benefit from the theoretical supplemental income created by ADUs? Using socioeconomic data, building permit information, and geospatial analysis, this paper explores these questions by conducting a case study of the archetype of America's housing affordability crisis: San Francisco, California. Finding that, within the city and sample frame, few ADU permits have been filed in the most price-vulnerable communities, this paper challenges the theoretical benefits of ADUs espoused by politicians and academics. If the city continues to lean on ADU legislation, local legislators must strengthen current enforcement mechanisms and more narrowly tailor ADU-related rental restrictions. By offering model legislation and code language, this paper illustrates how San Francisco and other communities across the country can better ensure ADUs live up to their promise of affordability and access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The study investigates the influence of urban renewal on segregation patterns. • The strength of spatial segregation varies at different scales. • Urban renewal reduces localized patterns of spatial segregation. • Urban renewal breaks down segregation between inside and outside SEZ. Increasing residential segregation is emerging as a hindrance to urban sustainability. Urban renewal projects that claim alignment with sustainable development goals still lack comprehensive studies of their impact on social segregation, as evidenced by the ongoing scholarly debate over whether urban renewal has a positive or negative effect on social segregation. This paper explores the dynamics of urban spatial segregation, analyzes the role of urban renewal on segregation, and bridges the gap in existing research by considering dynamic changes, multiple spatial scales, and diverse renewal types. Using multi-source data – house price data, planning permit data and points of interest –stepwise regression models are combined with t-test methods to examine the impact of multiple types of urban renewal on local and regional residential segregation in Shenzhen. Our findings are as follows: 1) Income-based segregation in Shenzhen increased from 0.77 to 0.81 across neighborhoods, from 0.62 to 0.73 across sub-districts, and from 0.58 to 0.67 across districts between 2000 and 2020, therefore increasing at all scales but with more pronounced growth of segregation observed between units at larger scales; 2) Urban renewal can lead to greater income similarity amongst residents of a sub-district, by attracting more high-income people to move in, but this can lead to increased residential segregation of high- and low-income people at the macro-scale. 3) When assessing the impact of urban renewal on segregation, it is recommended to consider the variations in outcomes resulting from temporal changes, spatial scales, the types of renewal, the types of segregation, and the stages of urbanization. Understanding this process can help promote socially sustainable urban renewal projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the affordable housing market to develop a new way to understand the problem of co-optation in participatory urban governance. Through a case study of the Chicago metropolitan area, it uses data from 105 in-depth interviews—supplemented with ethnographic, archival, and secondary data—to shed light on the circumstances in which poverty-managing organizations compete for the resources necessary to house marginalized populations. Findings show how community-based groups, which have long housed the poorest neighborhoods and residents, are systematically excluded from access to development capital in favor of other "grassroots for hire" organizations more amenable to the elite co-optation of grassroots empowerment—a process referred to as co-optation by cohort replacement. The article discusses implications of these findings for the study of urban development, participatory governance, and the changing social safety net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High concentrations of poverty and joblessness in urban areas provide a strong rationale for place-based policies. In addition, gains in employment and income in disadvantaged areas may have positive spillovers for places via network effects that generate positive multipliers from local hiring. BACKGROUND EVIDENCE Many U.S. cities have had persistently high poverty rates, high unemployment rates, and low employment rates, and continue to have large concentrations of poor people in extremely poor areas. The Florida Back-to-Work Program, based on state unemployment insurance (UI) records, generated higher earnings and employment for participants (including the long-term unemployed) than for eligible nonparticipants in the four quarters after the program ended (Roder & Elliott, [21]). [Extracted from the article]

In this essay, I examine the types of costs that are imposed on society as a whole due to the absence of a sufficient number of decent housing units that are affordable to the low-income population. These costs present themselves in relation to health care, education, employment, productivity, homelessness, and incarceration. Some of the costs are direct expenditures while others are the result of lost opportunities. My hypothesis is that these costs are significant and offer, at the very least, a substantial offset to the cost of creating and subsidizing the operation of the necessary number of affordable housing units that are currently missing. I suggest a series of reasons why, in the face of this potentially inefficient outcome, the market/society does not produce the required units. The essay is conceptual in nature, not empirical. I recognize the issues associated with the quantification of often opaque costs and with their causal relationship to the lack of affordable housing. It is clear, however, that the costs are sizable and the correlations are strong and therefore, I believe, the hypothesis requires empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortage of affordable housing has become a global issue. The governments in developed and developing countries have initiated various programmes but those have proved inadequate to meet the growing demand of affordable housing. Pakistani metropolitan cities are also facing this issue. Lahore is the second largest city of Pakistan and is an administrative, business, education and recreational hub of the Punjab province. The rapid growth of population has created huge demand for housing in the city. In addition to the Lahore Development Authority (LDA), the principal planning agency in Lahore, the private sector has also been contributing towards housing supply through development of housing schemes. This research mainly attempts to explore how far the small plots/houses in such schemes are affordable to low income people and how many of such plots/houses have actually been occupied by them? The methodology includes: analysis of data on approved private housing schemes, views of the LDA officials, private developers and the residents of selected private housing schemes. The analysis confirms that the small sized plots in private housing schemes are occupied by the high and middle income groups. The housing has become severally unaffordable for the low income people. The government is falling short of providing adequate incentives to the private sector for delivering affordable housing to the low income groups. The study identifies several measures to improve the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an assignment model to understand the cross section of house prices within a metro area. Movers' demand for housing is derived from a life-cycle problem with credit market frictions. Equilibrium house prices adjust to assign houses that differ by quality to movers who differ by age, income, and wealth. To quantify the model, we measure distributions of house prices, house qualities, and mover characteristics from micro-data on San Diego County during the 2000s boom. The main result is that cheaper credit for poor households was a major driver of prices, especially at the low end of the market. (JEL D14, D91, R21, R31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools receiving Title I funding that fail to meet adequate academic performance targets for two consecutive years are deemed 'failing.' This broadly defined, but often misunderstood designation has exerted a negative and unintended effect on low-income neighborhoods-the same neighborhoods NCLB was originally intended to help. Specifically, we find that 'failing' designations significantly decrease home prices. This property value response is observed even after controlling for a myriad of traditional test score measures and school-level student demographics. Additional analyses suggest that this home price effect is largely due to strong perceptions of poor school quality or social stigma surrounding a 'failing' designation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the housing policies in China in the last 14 years in the context of the international debate on the World Bank's housing market enabling strategy to improve low-income housing provision in developing countries. A review of China's urban housing outcomes reveals housing price inflation and shortage of affordable housing in the fast expanding housing market. The paper analyzes policies to increase both demand for and supply of housing and argues that these policies have contributed to worsening affordability. This situation has been exacerbated by problems in the institutional framework managing the housing sector. The paper concludes that market enabling alone is not sufficient to achieve a satisfactory housing outcome for low- and middle-income groups in Chinese cities. It advocates more effective and direct public intervention for enhancing social housing provision and tightening market regulation to address both market and government failures to improve housing conditions for lower income groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This bibliography focuses on the dynamic relationships between housing affordability for the low- and moderate-income (LMI) population and smart growth management and planning practices. Smart growth advocates generally seek to promote greater housing affordability and diversity. However, compact development, a goal of smart growth, curbs land development and poses significant challenges to promoting affordability. Housing markets can be affected by smart growth-related planning practices, ranging from growth management policies to various urban design tools such as transit-oriented development and urban infill. The review concludes by emphasizing several important social, administrative, and economic issues facing a successful integration of smart growth and affordable housing goals, and discusses possible solutions for maintaining affordability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Housing shortage is a problem for all levels of household income particularly affects low-income households in recent years. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between migration and housing prices of low-income households. This study adopted the quantitative research method and involved a questionnaire survey of 381 low-income households in the district 20 located in south of Tehran, Iran. The result of this research shows that the inappropriate policy to control the housing prices in Tehran. The finding of this research can be used by the public and the private sectors as a basis for policy and decision making in housing markets, especially in the Iranian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Faculty of Economics / İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası is the property of Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The belief that it is fairer if communities are ''mixed'' can be traced at least to the late nineteenth century and the founders of the Garden City Movement. The idea is now firmly established in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and national policies. This article reviews the evidence and argues that this is essentially a faith-based policy because there is scant real evidence that making communities more mixed makes the life chances of the poor any better. There is overwhelming evidence that the attributes that make neighborhoods attractive are capitalized into house prices/rents. The result is that poor people cannot afford to buy into nicer neighborhoods, which anyway have amenities of no value to them. Moreover, ''specialized neighborhoods'' are an important element in agglomeration economies and seem to be welfare enhancing. Thus, policies for mixed neighborhoods treat the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty. Efforts to improve social equity would be more effectively directed toward people themselves rather than moving people around to mix neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relative effects of housing cost burden versus poverty thresholds to explain the economic hardship of low-income families and compared the differences in these effects among White, Black, and Hispanic families with children in the United States of America. The findings from the multivariate analyses indicate that poverty status better explains variations in economic hardship than housing cost burden status. In respect to group differences, association between poverty status and economic hardship score are different between White and Black families. The results of this study raise the issues of housing cost burden and economic hardship that the country’s low-income Black families disproportionately experience relative to their White and Hispanic counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the low-income rental market and evaluates the contribution of changes in the income distribution, increases in rental quality, land-use regulation, growth controls and zoning to the observed changes in rent burdens among low-income households. The majority of U.S. households are homeowners and homeownership rates have trended upward for virtually all demographic groups. The affordability of homeownership is monitored by a variety of organizations. For example, the National Association of Realtors and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regularly compute the monthly payments required to amortize a standard fixed-rate mortgage on the average house sold as a function of house prices and interest rates. Since affordability measures depend on both housing costs and incomes, trends in the distribution of income are potentially important in explaining the increase in housing costs and rent burdens experienced by poor and near-poor households. Concurrently, increases in rents can be caused by an increase in the quality and/or quantity of housing consumed or by increases in the price of a quality-adjusted unit of housing. Factors that may influence the quantity or quality of housing consumed by the poor are changes in income, tastes and government regulations that mandate the minimum quality housing standards.

While recent studies have shown that up to 35% of the total urban population of the Third World live in squatter settlements, there is a dearth of economic analysis on the phenomenon of squatting. This paper attempts to fill this gap. The equilibrium model argues that the difference in unit housing prices between the non-squatting (formal) sector of a city and its squatting (informal) sector reflects the premium associated with a secure tenure status. The empirical portion of this paper uses hedonic price techniques to derive the average premium on tenure security in a medium-sized Philippine city, Davao. Results show that formal-sector unit dwelling prices are about 18% (renters) to 58% (owners) more than in the informal sector. These equilibrium price differentials were found to be greater for lower income groups, larger household sizes, and households with older heads for renters and younger heads for owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses "The State of the Nation's Housing" report for 2017 by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), which focuses on the U.S. rental and homeownership markets. Topics discussed include the increase in housing prices, the impact of increasing housing costs and rents on low-and-moderate income families, and the issues with affordable housing supply.