Avoiding Both Disinvestment and Speculation in Private Multifamily Housing

Maintaining the health of existing urban neighborhoods requires a radically different approach from that of simply intervening with recently developed housing tools such as Urban Renewal, FHA mortgages, FAIR plan insurance, HUD subsidized loans and the like. Instead, the dynamics of healthy and pathological neighborhoods must be more closely examined so the workings of the prevailing system can be identified. Housing policy has largely been formulated on the concept of housing “filtering or trickling down” while people move up, but this theory frequently fails to fit the facts. Neighborhood change and response to interventions often seem unpredictable. A new theory based on the inherent strength of existing stable urban neighborhoods to stave off forces that lead to disinvestment on the one hand, and speculation on the other, would be more useful than one that accepts deterioration and obsolescence as inevitable. This paper seeks to contribute to such a theory. While the data presented here are drawn from research in multi‐family housing, many of the inferences apply to single‐family housing as well.