Cityscape Spotlights the American Housing Survey

The first issue of Cityscape in 2012 features a symposium of articles from the 2011 American Housing Survey (AHS) Users Conference. Guest editor Shawn Bucholtz introduces a sample of eight papers presented at the conference that highlights the breadth of information available from the AHS.

Denise W. Hoffman and Gina A. Livermore compare housing differences by disability status using the new, standardized questions on disability introduced in the 2009 AHS. Lauren M. Ross, Anne B. Shlay, and Mario G. Picon explore housing and neighborhood satisfaction levels between Housing Choice Voucher program and public housing participants and unassisted renters. Brent D. Mast also explores HUD program participants’ self-reported housing and neighborhood satisfaction, and introduces an economic model to improve the reliability of quality comparisons. Sung-jin Lee, Kathleen R. Parrott, and Mira Ahn examine housing conditions of low-income minority householders in the South. Also exploring housing conditions, Paul Emrath and Heather Taylor re-examine the AHS housing adequacy indicators; finding little correlation with housing values and rents, they propose a new method for determining physical inadequacy. Samuel Dastrup, Simon McDonnell, and Vincent Reina investigate energy use for housing program participants. George R. Carter III uses 1997–2009 AHS data to calculate trends in negative equity, nationally and for individual housing units, including the persistence of negative equity over time and the extent to which home sales could be considered distressed. To complement the symposium, two Australian authors — Andrew Beer and Debbie Faulkner — provide an international perspective on housing issues and data.

This issue of Cityscape introduces a new section, “Point of Contention,” which presents different expert viewpoints on narrow technical issues that can nevertheless generate significant disagreement. In this issue, Daren Blomquist, Mark Fleming, and Eric Rosenblatt and Vincent Yao offer perspectives on the size of the “shadow inventory” of homes on which the mortgagors have defaulted, but that lenders have kept off the housing market. The issue also features short analytical works, including “Public Housing Transformation and Resident Relocation: Comparing Destinations and Household Characteristics in Chicago” by Robert J. Chaskin, Mark L. Joseph, Sara Voelker, and Amy Dworsky; “The Importance of Using Layered Data to Analyze Housing: The Case of the Subsidized Housing Information Project” by Vincent Reina and Michael Williams; and "Using American Community Survey Data for Formula Grant Allocations,” an impact analysis by Paul Joice.