Housing vacancy and hypervacant neighborhoods: Uneven recovery after the U.S. foreclosure crisis

ABSTRACT

We examine neighborhood housing vacancy patterns in the largest 200 metropolitan areas from 2012 to 2019, focusing especially on Sunbelt and Rustbelt metros, both hit hard by the 2007–2011 foreclosure crisis. We pay special attention to neighborhood “hypervacancy,” where large amounts of long-term vacant housing are most likely to impose negative impacts. We find that, in the Sunbelt, hypervacant tracts declined over the 2012 to 2019 period, while they remained constant in Rustbelt metros. Despite this, the results show that hypervacant neighborhoods do exist in the Sunbelt, especially in slower-growth metros. We find that hypervacancy is heavily racialized; hypervacant tracts tend to have relatively large Black and Latinx populations. Regressions show that hypervacancy is shaped by preexisting urban disparities as well as metropolitan housing market strength. After controlling for metropolitan growth and economic factors, whether a city is located in the Sunbelt or the Rustbelt is not found to have an independent effect on the persistence of hypervacancy. There are, in fact, weak-growth metros in both the Sunbelt and the Rustbelt, and they tend to have high levels of vacancy and hypervacancy. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice in cities struggling with hypervacancy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Rustbelt is defined here as it is by Hackworth (2019), who includes the states bordering the Great Lakes including Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as two large metropolitan areas that spill over into these states: St. Louis and Louisville. Two metropolitan areas in these states are not included in the Rustbelt: the New York City and Philadelphia metros. These two very large metros are quite distinct from most Rustbelt metros, in that they are national and international-level “first-tier” metros that were never primarily dominated by the industrial history and decline facing most Rustbelt metros. The Sunbelt is defined as it has been by Strom (2017), which includes the states south of the 37th parallel: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Southern California.

2. Morckel (2013) also uses population change at the tract level, but this variable is problematic because it may be as much the outcome of housing vacancy as the cause of it, especially at the neighborhood level. (Below, we do include a population change variable, but only at the metropolitan level).

3. We explored the use of cluster analysis, but the results but the separation of the clusters was not strong, and the resulting groups did not always make intuitive sense.

4. In the third quarter data release of 2011, there was significant change in methodology and reporting, making it problematic to compare data before and after Q3 2011. The data also began to be reported in 2010 census tracts in 2012, eliminating the need to estimate changes across differing census geographies.

5. The median home value figures were from the 2018 5-year American Community Survey estimates.

6. From 2011 to 2018, delineations of MSAs by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) changed. Therefore, we manually cross-walked the 2011 data using the 2018 definition and county data to create spatially comparable 2011 data for calculation of the change variable. The MSA definitions are based on the 2018 OMB definition.

7. Rustbelt metros tend to have substantially smaller Latinx populations than Sunbelt metros. Of all tracts among the 200 largest metros, the mean Latinx share was 27.9% in 2018 in the Sunbelt versus 8.5% in the Rustbelt.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Austin Harrison

Austin Harrison is a PhD Candidate at Georgia State University’s Urban Studies Institute. His research interests include neighborhood change, community development, urban policy, and shrinking cities. In addition to his research, Mr. Harrison has consulted with various entities across the country to implement programs and policies aimed at inclusively revitalizing neighborhoods, developing quality affordable housing, and stabilizing systemically disinvested communities. He also serves as a Research Fellow for Innovate Memphis, a data intermediary in Memphis, Tennessee, focused on applied data analysis and research to drive advocacy for a variety of neighborhood-level challenges in the Memphis area.

Dan Immergluck

Dan Immergluck is Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University. His research concerns housing, real estate finance, neighborhood change, and community development. Dr. Immergluck is the author of four books, over sixty scholarly articles, numerous book chapters, and scores of research reports. He has consulted to HUD, the Department of Justice, Atlanta Legal Aid, and other organizations. Professor Immergluck has been cited and quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other media. He has testified several times before the U.S. Congress, as well as before the Federal Reserve Board. He has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Community Progress in Washington, D.C. His next book, Red-Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta, will be published by the University of California Press in 2022.