Neighborhoods in the 21st century: What do we know, and what do we still have to learn?: AREUEA Presidential Address

This article argues for more research on neighborhoods. Concern about neighborhood change, especially gentrification, has mounted in cities throughout the world. Not-in-My-Backyard versus Yes-in-My-Backyard (YIMBY) battles over local housing proposals have intensified. Meanwhile, people around the world are spending more time in their neighborhoods than they did previously, due to greater flexibility to work from home. But despite the increased public focus on neighborhoods, I argue that real estate economists are not paying enough attention. Although many have produced excellent, even pathbreaking, work on the trajectories of neighborhoods and their importance in shaping life outcomes, many real estate scholars focus on cities or metros as the unit of analysis, ignoring within-city variation, and those who look within cities often treat neighborhoods as fixed effects to absorb unobserved variation, without giving much thought to what it is that is happening inside that black box of neighborhoods. I argue that neighborhoods are more interesting and puzzling than ever, they are more significant to our lives, and new data enhance our ability to analyze them. Specifically, I lay out seven key reasons to study neighborhoods and to study them now.