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This paper studies the real effects of foreign real estate capital inflows. Using transaction-level data, we document (i) a "China shock" in the U.S. housing market characterized by surging foreign Chinese housing purchases after 2008, and (ii) "home bias" in these purchases, as they concentrate in neighborhoods historically populated by ethnic Chinese. Exploiting their temporal and spatial variation, we find that these capital inflows raise local employment, with the effect transmitted through a housing net worth channel. However, they displace local lower-income residents. Our results show that real estate capital inflows can both stimulate the real economy and induce gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined contagion involving the aggregate and regional housing markets of the United States (US) with other asset markets using multichannel tests during the 2007–2008 global financial crisis based on a unique high-frequency, i.e., daily data set. To arrive at bias free results several contagion tests: the Forbes and Rigobon (FR) correlation test for contagion, the Fry, Martin and Tang coskewness (CS) test for contagion, the Hsiao cokurtosis (CK) test for contagion and the Hsiao covolatility (CV) test for contagion were employed. At the country level, the linear (correlation) channel indicates that contagion is present from (to) average housing returns to (from) the S&P500, with the correlation contagion also running from average housing returns to REITs. Moreover, the coskewness, cokurtosis and covolatility channels are strongly active with contagion running only from average housing returns to the S&P500, bond returns and REITs. At the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level, our results indicate that the linear (correlation) channel of contagion is relatively inactive, but the coskewness, cokurtosis and covolatility channels are strongly active with contagion running mostly from housing returns to the S&P500. Our results have important implications for investor and policymakers, given the possibility of differential results based on tests and whether we rely on regional or aggregate data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My commentary situates Desiree Fields' lecture within a long‐standing movement that, paying attention to real estate data and techniques of property, turned the housing market into a theoretical machine. I understand her intervention as a fourth and pivotal conceptual moment in the study of housing markets and inequalities for the discipline of geography, for it brings racial capitalism and settler colonialism as theoretical starting points to analyse the political economy of housing in the era of digital property technologies. As such, her lecture opens up a welcome, ambitious, yet also uncertain terrain to advance global urban theory under platform capitalism and stimulate relational approaches in housing studies. Discussing the regularities through which race, technology and property shape housing and wealth inequalities across variegated sites of market‐making provides a conceptual horizontality that acknowledges the United States as a testing ground, rather than a ground truth, for the production of geographical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article tells an untold history of the American title registry, a colonial bureaucratic innovation that, though overlooked and understudied, constitutes one of the most fundamental elements of the U.S. property system today. Prior scholars have focused exclusively on the registry's role in catalyzing property markets, while mostly overlooking the main sources of this property in the American colonies: expropriated lands and enslaved people. This analysis centers the registry's work of organizing and "proving" land claims that were not only individual but collective, to affirm encroachments on tribal nations' lands. In this way, registries helped scaffold the colonies' tenuous but growing political and jurisdictional power. The specific history of the U.S. title registry illustrates a crucial dynamic between property and sovereignty. In America, property and property institutions did not issue from sovereigns with established authority to govern a territory, as in the understanding drawn from European legal traditions. Rather, property institutions, exemplified by the title registry, preceded and ushered in colonial and U.S. sovereign title to Native homelands. This Article presents new questions about how the legal infrastructure of property furthered European colonists' conquest and how this progression of conquest on the ground produced the national jurisdiction and real-estate market of today. Leveraging established scholarship on the colonies and deploying original research on county creation, it shows that in the haphazard history culminating in the American title registry, colonists borrowed the English legal forms of the registry and county and remade them into local tools of colonial territorial expansion. The registry and county became key local governmental forms that drew settlers into Native nations' territories and encouraged them to claim lands by reassuring those settlers that their claims would become real property. The time map of county creation--not of the formation of territories, nor the admission of states, nor the conclusion of treaties--most accurately tracks where the United States grew its jurisdictional power, and when. The United States created counties and registries between its plans to invade and its actual ability to govern lands, before the naming of transitional territories, and often even before obtaining Native cessions to the lands by treaty. In the history of conquest, county creation thus lies in the transition between mere white entitlement and actual title. And as a consequence of this history, counties came to underpin the national jurisdiction, and the local institution of the registry became the common and continuous infrastructure for the entire national real-estate market. This Article's history of the title registry underscores the conceptual and practical stakes of redressing the erasure of race from our understanding of legal institutions and development. In particular, this history challenges us to recognize less obvious ways that the legacies of conquest and enslavement survive to structure our landscape and lives. Race works to shape law and legal outcomes in ways that many now recognize, such as by excluding people from institutional protections and benefits and through the predatory risks of formal inclusion. But the registry's history also illustrates a third phenomenon: the phenomenon of legal innovation spurred by white settlers' willingness to view racial violence as an economic resource, which introduced new institutions and practices that may appear to be facially "race-neutral" but promote the production of property value through the dehumanizing logic of race. Colonists constructed minimalist registries, which did not authenticate title claims and encouraged their proliferation. In this way, they prioritized the collective goal of building jurisdictional power at the direct expense of Native and Black communities whose lands and people colonists rapaciously claimed as property for that ever-growing market. The result was an institution that continues to privilege the production of property value above all--above protecting individual property interests, and above sustaining homes, communities, and life, in ways that now affect us all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC) so-called 'redlining' maps have gone from a niche corner of urban historical scholarship to the centre of mainstream narratives about racism in the United States. In this paper, I map this journey and trace the contours of the ongoing debates that have emerged, identifying two competing camps I call 'HOLC Culpablism' and 'HOLC Scepticism'. Finding these perspectives to have run up against their self-imposed limitations, I outline a research agenda that breaks from the debate's narrow confines by envisioning HOLC's mapping materials anew. My proposed approach recasts the maps and their accompanying field notes as windows into the governing racial–spatial ideology of 20th-century US real estate capital. In doing so, it invites researchers to reimagine the map grades as dynamic categories reflecting a particular spatiotemporal conception of value that is highly contingent on an area's estimated racial trajectory. This reformulation, I argue, not only opens new possibilities for studying the HOLC mapping programme but suggests that the power of these maps has almost certainly been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss data quality and modeling issues inherent in the use of nationwide property data to value environmental amenities. By example of Zillow's Transaction and Assessment Database, a real estate database covering the United States, we identify challenges and propose guidance for (1) identifying arm's-length sales; (2) geolocating parcels and buildings; (3) identifying temporal links between transaction, assessor, and parcel data; (4) identifying property types, such as single-family homes and vacant lands; and (5) dealing with missing or mismeasured data for standard housing attributes. We review [End Page 200] current practice and show that how researchers address these issues can meaningfully influence research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case studies have illuminated that U.S. real estate agents, as key housing market gatekeepers, continue to maintain racial residential stratification well into the twenty-first century. We use novel survey data gathered from real estate agents across the United States to descriptively explore agents' ideas about clients of color in the housing market, as well as their practices, such as conducting business through social networks. Our findings provide evidence of the subtle and more overt ways that these ideas and practices that, when taken together, constitute what we call racialized real estate agency and contribute to ongoing racial segregation. We issue a call for future research to continue examining the ways agents' and other gatekeepers' ideas and practices contribute to or mitigate stratifying processes and describe the utility of such research for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation easements, a widely used tool to preserve land for conservation purposes, suffer from a fundamental flaw in lacking a means of adapting the permanent interests they create to changed conditions. This flaw is becoming more apparent as the early generation of these interests age and climate change threatens to bring more rapid demands for adaptation of existing conservation goals in light of changed conditions. Drawing on lessons from successes in international financial centers and U.S. states that are successful in jurisdictional competition, this article argues that the law should embrace measures that enable such competition in providing for shared governance of land between conservation interests and private landowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents a brief introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Rural Social Sciences focused on heirs’ property. Real property transferred over generations without a proper will or other transfer device, heirs’ property and heirs’ property owners are vulnerable to a range of challenges, from limited productive land use to the actual loss of land. A situation that is national in scope, heirs’ property rates are particularly high in the southern region of the United States and among African Americans. Articles in this special issue address operationalizing and measuring heirs’ property at the county-level, describing the characteristics of people seeking assistance with heirs’ property, and the situation and implications faced in a state with limited protections of families with heirs’ property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper decomposes the components of wealth inequality and its change in the United States during the period 2006–2016. The results show that wealth inequality in the US is extremely high. Real estate, non-housing assets and financial investments are the first three important components of equivalent wealth and overall inequality. Financial investments, real estate liabilities and non-housing liabilities have positive marginal impacts on overall inequality, while other assets' marginal impacts are negative. Financial investments changes had the largest impact on the aggregate trends of wealth inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses mortgage regulation developments in the U.S. In September 2021, the Federal Housing Finance Agency extended again the COVID-19 relief program allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer forbearance to multifamily property owners as needed. The Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity issued a report in March 2022 containing 21 commitments for its member agencies divided among five categories, including enhancing fair housing/fair lending enforcement.

In 2021 real estate investment trusts (REITs) held investments in 1,806 US nursing homes. REITs are for-profit public or private corporations that invest in income-producing properties. We created a novel database of REIT investments in US nursing homes, merged it with Medicare cost report data (2013-19), and used a difference-in-differences approach within an event study framework to compare staffing before and after a nursing home received REIT investment with staffing in for- profit nursing homes that did not receive REIT investment. REIT investment was associated with average relative staffing increases of 2.15 percent and 1.55 percent for licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), respectively. During the postinvestment period, registered nurse (RN) staffing was unchanged, but event study results showed a 6.25 percent decrease in years 2 and 3 after REIT investment. After the three largest REIT deals were excluded, REIT investments were associated with an overall 6.25 percent relative decrease in RN staffing and no changes in LPN and CNA staffing. Larger deals resulted in increases in LPN and CNA staffing, with no changes in RN staffing; smaller deals appeared to replace more expensive and skilled RN staffing with less expensive and skilled staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This third article in a series of three on land reuse describes brownfield sites in Romania and the U.S. In 2018 and 2019, four of the authors toured brownfield areas in Romania (including Bucharest, southern Transylvania, and Oradea) and the U.S. (Southeast Missouri [called the Missouri Bootheel], Northern Arizona and Navajo Nation, and Northwest Indiana). We were interested in similarities and dierences among brownfields in various urban and rural settings in both countries. This article describes these sites through a visual perspective as well as site characteristics and commonalities. Ultimately, potentially contaminated or land reuse sites such as brownfields are common in many parts of the world. We hope to advance the understanding of brownfields and site transformation options through our collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid expansion of pipelines during the U.S. shale oil and gas boom drew attention to the economic consequences of pipeline incidents. This study investigates the impacts of 426 gas distribution pipeline incidents on property values in the United States between 2010 and 2020. We find that only incidents that are both severe (involving explosion, ignition, or fatalities) and occurred on above-ground pipelines, which we define as high-profile incidents, have adverse effects on nearby property values, while other incidents have no measurable housing price effect. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that high-profile incidents significantly decrease property values within 1000 m by 8.2%, and the negative impact can persist for about eight years on average. Furthermore, we find a drop in transaction volume that lasts a short period after the incidents, suggesting an initial demand-side response. In contrast to the strong effects of pipeline incidents, we do not find statistically significant price effects from pipeline installation. We also demonstrate that there is substantial heterogeneity by the type of incident and that results based on studies of individual incidents should be generalized with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufactured homes provide a critical source of affordable housing and are the primary source of low-income homeownership in the United States. Yet manufactured housing (MH) is both socially stigmatized and spatially marginalized, which translates to significant inequalities for MH residents. The law figures centrally into how MH is perceived and how it is located, segregated, and financed differently from other housing. This review explores how the law has treated MH with legal hybridity, as personal property similar to an automobile rather than real property like other forms of housing. This core legal distinction structures an array of zoning, financing, and policy provisions that together create a gulf between the opportunities available to conventional owners and renters and those available to residents of MH. I explore existing research on the outcomes of this disparate legal treatment to offer an agenda for future research on a broader range of housing insecurities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real estate agents often search randomly or navigate through local network to find trading partners. This article estimates the importance of network‐based searches relative to random searches by fitting Jackson–Rogers' model to the multiple listing service data for a major Midwestern city in the United States. We find that 35%–55% of trades are made through network‐based searches. Moreover, agents rely mainly on random searches at early stage of career, but more on network‐based searches after having many trades. On average, a real estate agent trades with 1 out of every 5–10 agents she finds through searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methodology used by the First Street Foundation Wildfire Model (FSF-WFM) to compute estimates of the 30-year, climate-adjusted aggregate wildfire hazard for the contiguous United States at 30 m horizontal resolution is presented. The FSF-WFM integrates several existing methods from the wildfire science community and implements computationally efficient and scalable modeling techniques to allow for new high-resolution, CONUS-wide hazard generation. Burn probability, flame length, and ember spread for the years 2022 and 2052 are computed from two ten-year representative Monte Carlo simulations of wildfire behavior, utilizing augmented LANDFIRE fuel estimates updated with all the available disturbance information. FSF-WFM utilizes ELMFIRE, an open-source, Rothermel-based wildfire behavior model, and multiple US Federal Government open data sources to drive the simulations. LANDFIRE non-burnable fuel classes within the wildland–urban interface (WUI) are replaced with fuel estimates from machine-learning models, trained on data from historical fires, to allow the propagation of wildfire through the WUI in the model. Historical wildfire ignition locations and NOAA's hourly time series of surface weather at 2.5 km resolution are used to drive ELMFIRE to produce wildfire hazards representative of the 2022 and 2052 conditions at 30 m resolution, with the future weather conditions scaled to the IPCC CMIP5 RCP4.5 model ensemble predictions. Winds and vegetation were held constant between the 2022 and 2052 simulations, and climate change's impacts on the future fuel conditions are the main contributors to the changes observed in the 2052 results. Non-zero wildfire exposure is estimated for 71.8 million out of 140 million properties across CONUS. Climate change impacts add another 11% properties to this non-zero exposure class over the next 30 years, with much of this change observed in the forested areas east of the Mississippi River. "Major" aggregate wildfire exposure of greater than 6% over the 30-year analysis period from 2022 to 2052 is estimated for 10.2 million properties. The FSF-WFM represents a notable contribution to the ability to produce property-specific, climate-adjusted wildfire risk assessments in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the precedent of the court case Lobato v. Taylor actually limits the chances that other community land grants have of achieving similar results. Topics discussed include legal precedent regarding community land grants, historical circumstances surrounding the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, and the failure of the U.S. judicial system.

Individual and household wealth is most often derived from three sources: real property, human capital, and productive capital. The modern economy has developed financial tools, such as mortgages and student loans, to help individuals accrue real property and human capital, but there is no meaningful way for the working class to accrue ownership of productive capital. And, so long as the growth rate of capital exceeds the growth rate of wages, wealth inequality in the United States and elsewhere will continue to grow. This Note explores existing methods to extend capital ownership to the working class, such as Employee Stock Ownership Plans, and proposes a federal, national, mandatory equity minimum wage as an effective solution to three problems in our modern economy. Specifically, (i) employees do not benefit when the companies for which they work are tremendously profitable and provide outsized returns to investors; (ii) wealth inequality is worsening and will continue to do so; and (iii) there is a savings deficit among nearly one-half of American households. This Note explains how a mandatory equity minimum wage will help ameliorate these three problems by meaningfully extending ownership of productive capital to the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nursing homes faced serious challenges with large COVID-19 resident infection rates and deaths during the pandemic. This descriptive case study examined the structure, operations, strategies, care outcomes, and owners of The Ensign Group Inc. the second largest U.S. for-profit chain, between 2007 and 2021. Ensign, as a holding company, has a complex organizational structure that uses more than 430 corporate entities to manage its 228 nursing homes and senior living facilities. With mostly Medicare and Medicaid revenues and favorable government COVID-19 relief, Ensign grew rapidly, even during the pandemic, to $2.5 billion (all amounts in U.S. Dollars) in revenues with a market capitalization of $4.5 billion and strong profits and financial metrics in 2020 to 2021. The company used real estate purchasing, debt financing, and spin-off companies, and tax arbitrage to optimize shareholder value. Before and during the pandemic, its 198 nursing homes had low registered nurse and total nurse staffing levels and regulatory violations with below-average ratings, and they had high COVID-19 infection rates during the pandemic. Ensign's small board, executives, and institutional investors protected and enhanced shareholder interests rather than ensuring that its nursing homes met professional standards and regulatory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on real estate investment trusts (REITs) ETFs in a quantile-based framework by employing the nonparametric causality test and the quantile autoregressive (QAR) model. Using data covering the returns of eight major United States (US) Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) over the period spanning 2 January 2012 to 28 February 2019, we find that there is a weak predictive power of EPU in REITs' returns and volatility. Our findings indicate that EPU has a leading effect on the real estate market returns at the mean level. However, we find no causality running from EPU to real estate markets volatility at all quantiles, indicating a weak influence of uncertainty on the real estate markets. Besides, our results report a significant impact of the EPU on the returns at the lower and upper quantiles. Yet, the impact is not symmetrical since the EPU shows a positive (negative) impact on the returns during the bearish (bullish) market condition. Moreover, the lagged EPU impacts the REITs negatively only during the normal and bullish market conditions, given all the estimated coefficients being negative and significant. Our results entail policy implications for investors, regulators, and asset managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mean wealth of the top wealth percentile surged more than two-and-a-half fold in real terms from 1983 to 2019. Changes in wealth over time can be decomposed into capital gains and savings. Capital gains in turn depend on asset price movements and portfolio composition. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the paper provides a decomposition of the change in the mean wealth and wealth share of the top percentile into a capital gains and savings effect. It then analyzes how much stock price movements and movements in other asset prices individually affect changes in the wealth of the top percentile. It finds that the rise in the stock market accounted for about a third of the advance in the wealth holdings of the super-rich, while increased business values explained about a quarter and gains in non-home real estate about a sixth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tension between pro- and anti-slavery factions during the delineation and mapping of Kansas Territory in the 1850s, as Euro-American settlement moved west of the Mississippi River, permeated local politics and commerce. Despite the standardized surveying system employed by the U. S. General Land Office, this tension was reflected in township or sectional state maps that were produced during this time period. Using government surveys and reports documenting the progress of township surveys, commercial map publishers and land agents produced maps with the purpose of promoting quick land sales and profits. Yet the profit motive is not the only one apparent in these maps, and the history of their production is rife with intriguing stories involving conflicts of interest for government employees and the pro- and anti-slavery politics that dominated this critical period in U. S. history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) land rights, sovereignty conflicts, and health outcomes have been significantly influenced by settler colonialism. This principle has driven the numerous relocations and forced assimilation of AI/AN children as well as the claiming of AI/AN lands across the United States. As tribes across the country begin to reclaim these lands and others continue to struggle for sovereignty, it is imperative to recognize that land rights are a determinant of health in AI/AN children. Aside from the demonstrated biological risks of environmental health injustices including exposure to air pollution, heavy metals, and lack of running water, AI/AN children must also face the challenges of historical trauma, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples crisis, and health care inequity based on land allocation. Although there is an undeniable relationship between land rights and the health of AI/ AN children, there is a need for extensive research into the impacts of land rights and recognition of sovereignty on the health of AI/AN children. In this article we aim to summarize existing evidence describing the impact of these factors on the health of AI/AN children and provide strateg ies that can help pediatricians care and advocate for this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusionary housing is considered a powerful local policy tool that can help address housing affordability and social inclusion issues. This paper draws from empirical research conducted in the City of Santa Monica in California to provide fresh insights on a successful innovative inclusionary housing program, the Affordable Housing Production Program (AHPP). This program was established to increase affordable housing production and enable social integration. Based on the Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) of the General Plan, the AHPP seeks to capture some of the increase in land value resulting from planned increases in the intensity of development. Our research shows that the program increased inclusionary housing production by market-rate developers by 15% over the previous inclusionary housing policy. The study finds that land use policies and planning can, through inclusionary housing, help harness the strength of the real estate market to (1) increase affordable housing production, and (2) achieve effective social integration in neighborhoods of opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse the role played by disaggregated oil shocks in driving real estate uncertainty (REU) over the monthly period of 1975:02 to 2017:12, based on impulse response functions generated from the local projection method. We find that the oil-specific consumption demand shock is statistically the strongest predictor of higher future REU, followed by the significant negative impact from the aggregate supply shock, especially for long-run REU. While the oil inventory demand shock has a short-lived positive impact on REU, global economic activity shock virtually plays no role in driving the same. Our results have important implications for policymakers and investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of redlining, or refusing to lend to someone because they live in an area deemed to be a poor financial risk, in the United States after the passage of the New Deal. It examines the intellectual origins of real estate economics, discusses the Institute for Research in Land Economics, and explores the Great Migration.

Repetitive losses from natural disasters are a multibillion dollar problem, and climate change threatens to make it worse. However, the problem is avoidable, and this Article offers a new analytical framework to explain how. While some disaster losses are inevitable, we argue that recurrent losses are a preventable consequence of real estate market failures and policy shortcomings. By applying the concept Of "adjustment failure costs," a recent contribution to property theory, we present a fresh perspective for understanding and alleviating the economic and human costs of disasters. Adjustment failure costs describe the costs (or losses) that arise from difficulties in markets reaching ejficiency. We contend that the problem of repetitive-loss properties is a manifestation of high adjustment failure costs. Vulnerable areas experience wave after wave Of death and destruction before investments in disaster-prone properties slow. Meanwhile, federal disaster policies impede market adjustments by subsidizing hazardous redevelopment. Thus, the real estate market's response to disaster risk remains laggard despite a painfully pricey set of lessons. Appreciating recurrent disaster losses as asymptom of high adjustment failure costs informs both when policies should intervene in real estate markets and how such interventions can prevent future losses. In particular, adjustment failure cost analysis can guide deployment of risk reduction efforts like buyouts. Additionally, policies seeking to prevent recurrent losses should aim to lower adjustment jiliture costs by altering how vulnerable real estate is treated as a market commodity. Based on these insights, this Article suggests specific changes tofederal disaster laws to avoid repetitive disaster losses and inform climate change adaptation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floods and other climate hazards pose a widespread and growing threat to housing and infrastructure around the world. By reflecting climate risk in prices, markets can discourage excessive development in hazardous areas. However, the extent to which markets price these risks remains poorly understood. Here we measure the effect of information about flood risk contained in regulatory floodplain maps on residential property values in the United States. Using multiple empirical approaches and two decades of sales data covering the universe of homes in the United States, we find little evidence that housing markets fully price information about flood risk in aggregate. However, the price penalty is larger for commercial buyers and in markets where buyers are more risk aware, suggesting that policies to improve risk communication could influence market outcomes. Our findings indicate that houses in flood zones in the United States are currently overvalued by a total of $43.8 billion (95% confidence interval: $32.6 to $55.6 billion) based on the information in publicly available flood hazard maps alone, raising concerns about the stability of real estate markets as climate risks become more salient and severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the significance of the notion of property-as-rent as an alternative conception in law and economics in the U.S. in light of the introduction of single-family rental-backed security (SFRBS). Topics discussed include the advantages of SFRBS and the disadvantages of debt-based financial assets, the role of the notion of consumer preference satisfaction in the economic conception of property, and the difference between mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and SFRBS.

In Georgia, real property passes through an intestate estate in the form of heirs property. Under this system, heirs share ownership of the property as tenants in common. This form of ownership poses several obstacles to realizing the land's full potential and, in certain circumstances, courts will partition the property in forced sales or will physically divide the property among the heirs. Heirs property and its accompanying problems are particularly common in Georgia due to strict policies concerning will execution formalities. Georgia and the U.S. Congress have attempted to cure the problems associated with heirs property through the adoption of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act and the Farm Bill of 2018. However, these remedies, while an admirable step toward addressing heirs property issues, fail to correct all of the problems associated with heirs property. This Note proposes several mitigating solutions for these problems and also suggests that Georgia facilitate the execution of wills to prevent heirs property from arising in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real property disputes between units or members of the same church are common in the United States. To resolve such disputes, the Supreme Court has endorsed two doctrines: the hierarchical deference approach and the neutral-principles of law approach. The Court has justified both doctrines on the First Amendment's Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, but this justification is problematic. Specifically, under the hierarchical deference approach courts must always give preferential treatment to one religious group over others-effectively endorsing a particular religion. On the other hand, courts can enforce their own interpretations of religious issues under the neutral-principles approach, thereby infringing free exercise of religious beliefs. And because Washington State courts use both approaches, they also use a flawed jurisprudence. To cure these defects, this Comment proposes that Washington State courts should treat church property disputes the way they treat property disputes from secular nonprofits or fraternity organizations. This streamlined treatment conforms to existing statutes and to Washington State Supreme Court precedent. In sum, removing the First Amendment's role is a simple and effective way for Washington State courts to resolve church property disputes without violating the federal Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains the implications for federal land management of the Supreme Court decision to uphold the grant of a natural gas pipeline right-of-way beneath the Appalachian National Scenic Trail within a Virginia national forest in U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association in 2021. Topics discussed include the background of the case, the role of the general property law principles in the decision, and the possible effect of Trails Act on land management decisions.

The article discusses the notarization and property recording requirements amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing protocols in the U.S. as of March 2021. Also cited are the plans to conduct real estate closings over the internet due to potential benefits like reduced transaction costs and fraud prevention through digital electronic document protections, and the changes in notarial law.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Urban vacancy presents myriad concerns for American legacy cities, including cyclical disinvestment, property value and tax revenue decimation, increased crime, and high management costs. To address these problems, the City of Chicago (IL) has sold more than 1,200 vacant city-owned parcels in distressed communities for $1 through its Large Lots Program since 2014. Program buyers must be same-block landowners, although they are not required to live nearby. In this study we estimate the true distance between buyers and their parcels and perform a block-level difference-in-differences analysis to explore whether the program reduces crime. We find that same-neighborhood buyers have purchased 69% of parcels. Overall, sales reduce block-level crime rates by 3.5%, but sales to neighborhood residents decrease crime rates by 6.8%. These findings are agnostic to what buyers actually do with their land and could be enhanced with a better understanding of which owners achieve productive reuse. Takeaway for practice: Side yard programs seek solutions to urban vacancy via decentralized community reinvestment but have so far been relatively untested. We demonstrate that Chicago's Large Lots Program has reduced crime while providing reinvestment and wealth-building opportunities. However, attention should be paid to how program rules and outreach efforts affect how "local" parcel buyers are. More research is needed to evaluate the broader impacts of side yard programs, such as on wealth building and community redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Assessing the strength and time variation of spillovers between returns on residential real estate, real estate investment trusts (REITs), stocks and bonds in the United States. Spillovers reduce the benefits of portfolio diversification, especially in crisis times, when asset returns tend to be more correlated. Design/methodology/approach: The Diebold–Yilmaz approach in the time domain and the Baruník–Krehlík methodology in the frequency domain are used. The latter allows distinguishing spillovers generating only short-lived volatility from those with a more persistent effect. Findings: On average, spillovers between housing, stock and bond returns are relatively modest and shocks to stock and bond markets affect housing returns more than the other way round, even though with variations over time. Spillovers in both directions are much stronger between REITs and stocks than between REITs and housing. Shocks originating in the housing market are most persistent, particularly in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Practical implications: Housing provides a hedge against volatility in financial (including REITs) markets. However, hedging strategies involving housing need to take into account potential tail events such as the GFC and the investment horizon. Originality/value: To the best of the knowledge of the authors, this paper is the first to apply the Baruník–Krehlík methodology to real estate price spillovers. Although the Diebold–Yilmaz methodology has been used in several studies on spillovers between residential real estate and financial asset returns, this paper covers a new set of variables and time span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary practice of homeownership in the United States was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)—and later the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill—expanded home buying opportunity, although in segregationist fashion. Through mechanisms such as redlining, these policies fueled white suburbanization and black ghettoization, while laying the foundation for the racial wealth gap. This is the first article to investigate the long-term consequences of these policies on the segregation of cities. I combine a full century of census data with archival data to show that cities HOLC appraised became more segregated than those it ignored. The gap emerged between 1930 and 1950 and remains significant: in 2010, the black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices are 12, 16, and 8 points higher in appraised cities, respectively. Results are consistent across a range of robustness checks, including exploitation of imperfect implementation of appraisal guidelines and geographic spillover. These results contribute to current theoretical discussions about the persistence of segregation. The long-term impact of these policies is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped racial geography in the United States, and the scale of intervention that will be required to disrupt the persistence of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing sector is the largest spot market in the world without a developed derivative contract to serve the risk management needs of market participants. This paper describes the evolution within a wider economic context of property derivatives in the United States and worldwide. We review various economic arguments presented in the literature to highlight the advantages of these financial instruments to society. The paper also provides a critical perspective on the principal obstacles hindering the development of property derivatives based on real estate prices--especially housing prices--and what can be done to overcome these difficulties. The issues discussed can serve as a guide for designing property derivatives capable of hedging real estate risk that has resurfaced time and time again in financial crises [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]