IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/pqgw7.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Boeing, Geoff

    (Northeastern University)

Abstract

As the rental housing market moves online, the Internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information inequalities. Biases in online listings' representativeness could impact different communities' access to housing search information, reinforcing traditional information segregation patterns through a digital divide. They could also circumscribe housing practitioners' and researchers' ability to draw broad market insights from listings to understand rental supply and affordability. This study examines millions of Craigslist rental listings across the US and finds that they spatially concentrate and over-represent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated communities. Other significant demographic differences exist in age, language, college enrollment, rent, poverty rate, and household size. Most cities' online housing markets are digitally segregated by race and class, and we discuss various implications for residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, housing voucher utilization, and automated monitoring and analytics in the smart cities paradigm. While Craigslist contains valuable crowdsourced data to better understand affordability and available rental supply in real-time, it does not evenly represent all market segments. The Internet promises information democratization, and online listings can reduce housing search costs and increase choice sets. However, technology access/preferences and information channel segregation can concentrate such information-broadcasting benefits in already-advantaged communities, reproducing traditional inequalities and reinforcing residential sorting and segregation dynamics. Technology platforms like Craigslist construct new institutions with the power to shape spatial economies, human interactions, and planners' ability to monitor and respond to urban challenges.

Suggested Citation

  • Boeing, Geoff, 2019. "Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality," SocArXiv pqgw7, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:pqgw7
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/pqgw7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5d2a1e1c1c5b4a001c9fe8b2/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/pqgw7?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alasdair Rae, 2015. "Online Housing Search and the Geography of Submarkets," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 453-472, June.
    2. Steven D. Levitt & Chad Syverson, 2008. "Market Distortions When Agents Are Better Informed: The Value of Information in Real Estate Transactions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(4), pages 599-611, November.
    3. Larry DeBoer, 1985. "Resident Age and Housing Search: Evidence From Hedonic Residuals," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 22(5), pages 445-451, October.
    4. Boeing, Geoff & Wegmann, Jake & Jiao, Junfeng, 2020. "Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data," SocArXiv phgqt, Center for Open Science.
    5. Carlsson, Magnus & Eriksson, Stefan, 2014. "Discrimination in the rental market for apartments," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 41-54.
    6. Robert Seamans & Feng Zhu, 2014. "Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(2), pages 476-493, February.
    7. Pablo Kurlat & Johannes Stroebel, 2015. "Testing for Information Asymmetries in Real Estate Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(8), pages 2429-2461.
    8. Wegmann, Jake & Jiao, Junfeng, 2017. "Taming Airbnb: Toward guiding principles for local regulation of urban vacation rentals based on empirical results from five US cities," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 494-501.
    9. Porter, Constance Elise & Donthu, Naveen, 2006. "Using the technology acceptance model to explain how attitudes determine Internet usage: The role of perceived access barriers and demographics," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 59(9), pages 999-1007, September.
    10. Kory Kroft & Devin G. Pope, 2014. "Does Online Search Crowd Out Traditional Search and Improve Matching Efficiency? Evidence from Craigslist," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 32(2), pages 259-303.
    11. Ben-Shahar, Danny & Golan, Roni, 2019. "Improved information shock and price dispersion: A natural experiment in the housing market," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 70-84.
    12. Heather L. Schwartz & Kata Mihaly & Breann Gala, 2017. "Encouraging Residential Moves to Opportunity Neighborhoods: An Experiment Testing Incentives Offered to Housing Voucher Recipients," Housing Policy Debate, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(2), pages 230-260, March.
    13. Kim, Anna Joo & Brown, Anne & Nelson, Marla & Ehrenfeucht, Renia & Holman, Nancy & Gurran, Nicole & Sadowski, Jathan & Ferreri, Mara & Sanyal, Romola & Bastos, Marta & Kresse, Klaas, 2019. "Planning and the so-called ‘sharing’ economy / can shared mobility deliver equity?/ The sharing economy and the ongoing dilemma about how to plan for informality/ regulating platform economies in citi," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100786, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Robert Sampson & Patrick Sharkey, 2008. "Neighborhood selection and the social reproduction of concentrated racial inequality," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 45(1), pages 1-29, February.
    15. Billings, Stephen B. & Johnson, Erik B., 2012. "The location quotient as an estimator of industrial concentration," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(4), pages 642-647.
    16. repec:wly:soecon:v:81:1:y:2014:p:135-167 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Boeing, Geoff, 2017. "New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings," SocArXiv v54w4, Center for Open Science.
    18. Im, Jongho & Seo, Youngme & Cetin, Kristen S. & Singh, Jasmeet, 2017. "Energy efficiency in U.S. residential rental housing: Adoption rates and impact on rent," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 205(C), pages 1021-1033.
    19. Anna Joo Kim & Anne Brown & Marla Nelson & Renia Ehrenfeucht & Nancy Holman & Nicole Gurran & Jathan Sadowski & Mara Ferreri & Romola Sanyal & Marta Bastos & Klaas Kresse, 2019. "Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Citi," Planning Theory & Practice, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(2), pages 261-287, March.
    20. Murchie, Judson & Pang, Jindong, 2018. "Rental housing discrimination across protected classes: Evidence from a randomized experiment," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 170-179.
    21. Halket, Jonathan & Pignatti Morano di Custoza, Matteo, 2015. "Homeownership and the scarcity of rentals," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 107-123.
    22. Mark J. Garmaise, 2004. "Confronting Information Asymmetries: Evidence from Real Estate Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(2), pages 405-437.
    23. Harriet Newburger, 1995. "Sources of Difference in Information Used by Black and White Housing Seekers: An Exploratory Analysis," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 32(3), pages 445-470, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Boeing, Geoff & Harten, Julia & Sanchez-Moyano, Rocio, 2023. "Digitalization of the Housing Search: Homeseekers, Gatekeepers, and Market Legibility," SocArXiv 643x2, Center for Open Science.
    2. Nhlabathi Mthobisi & Mgiba Freddy Marilahimbilu & Ligaraba Neo, 2022. "Social Media Marketing Attributes, Sandton’s Rental Market Brand Image, and the Millennials’ Rental Preference: An Empirical Study," Real Estate Management and Valuation, Sciendo, vol. 30(1), pages 34-52, March.
    3. Julia Gabriele Harten & Annette M Kim & J Cressica Brazier, 2021. "Real and fake data in Shanghai’s informal rental housing market: Groundtruthing data scraped from the internet," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(9), pages 1831-1845, July.
    4. Hu, Lirong & He, Shenjing & Luo, Yun & Su, Shiliang & Xin, Jing & Weng, Min, 2020. "A social-media-based approach to assessing the effectiveness of equitable housing policy in mitigating education accessibility induced social inequalities in Shanghai, China," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    5. Maksim Vlasov & Sergey N. Polbitsyn & Michael Olumekor & Hossam Haddad & Nidal M. Al-Ramahi, 2024. "Socio-Cultural Factors and Components of the Digital Economy in Ethnic Minority Regions," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(9), pages 1-14, May.
    6. Geoff Boeing & Max Besbris & Ariela Schachter & John Kuk, 2021. "Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?," Housing Policy Debate, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(1), pages 112-126, January.
    7. Geoff Boeing & Jake Wegmann & Junfeng Jiao, 2020. "Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data," Papers 2002.01578, arXiv.org.
    8. Adu, Providence & Delmelle, Elizabeth C., 2022. "Spatial Variations in Exclusionary Criteria from Online Rental Advertisements," SocArXiv 8g4sv, Center for Open Science.
    9. Boeing, Geoff & Besbris, Max & Wachsmuth, David & Wegmann, Jake, 2021. "Tilted Platforms: Rental Housing Technology and the Rise of Urban Big Data Oligopolies," SocArXiv 8jrfe, Center for Open Science.
    10. Ferreri, Mara & Sanyal, Romola, 2022. "Digital informalisation: rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112794, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    11. Geoff Boeing & Michael Batty & Shan Jiang & Lisa Schweitzer, 2022. "Urban analytics: History, trajectory and critique," Chapters, in: Sergio J. Rey & Rachel S. Franklin (ed.), Handbook of Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences, chapter 30, pages 503-516, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Lythreatis, Sophie & Singh, Sanjay Kumar & El-Kassar, Abdul-Nasser, 2022. "The digital divide: A review and future research agenda," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    13. Occhini, Giulia & Tranos, Emmanouil & Wolf, Levi John, 2023. "Occupational segregation in the digital economy? A Natural Language Processing approach using UK Web Data," SocArXiv z8xta, Center for Open Science.
    14. Chris Hess & Arthur Acolin & Rebecca Walter & Ian Kennedy & Sarah Chasins & Kyle Crowder, 2021. "Searching for housing in the digital age: Neighborhood representation on internet rental housing platforms across space, platform, and metropolitan segregation," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(8), pages 2012-2032, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Daniel Broxterman & Tingyu Zhou, 2023. "Information Frictions in Real Estate Markets: Recent Evidence and Issues," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 66(2), pages 203-298, February.
    2. Geoff Boeing & Max Besbris & Ariela Schachter & John Kuk, 2021. "Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?," Housing Policy Debate, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(1), pages 112-126, January.
    3. Badarinza, Cristian & Ramadorai, Tarun & Shimizu, Chihiro, 2022. "Gravity, counterparties, and foreign investment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(2), pages 132-152.
    4. Oded Palmon & Ben J. Sopranzetti, 2017. "On the relationship between the number of a broker’s real estate listings and transaction outcomes," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 49(1), pages 65-89, July.
    5. Boeing, Geoff & Wegmann, Jake & Jiao, Junfeng, 2020. "Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data," SocArXiv phgqt, Center for Open Science.
    6. Kim, Hayoung, 2022. "Heterogeneous effects of information disclosure: Evidence from housing markets," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 195(C), pages 359-380.
    7. Mr. Damien Puy & Mr. Anil Ari & Ms. Yu Shi, 2020. "Foreign Demand and Local House Prices: Evidence from the US," IMF Working Papers 2020/043, International Monetary Fund.
    8. Donner, Herman & Kopsch, Fredrik, 2016. "Housing Tenure and Informational Asymmetries," Working Paper Series 16/3, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance.
    9. Han, Lu & Strange, William C., 2015. "The Microstructure of Housing Markets," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 813-886, Elsevier.
    10. Johannes Stroebel, 2016. "Asymmetric Information about Collateral Values," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 71(3), pages 1071-1112, June.
    11. L. Li & K. W. Chau, 2024. "Information Asymmetry with Heterogeneous Buyers and Sellers in the Housing Market," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 68(1), pages 138-159, January.
    12. William N Goetzmann & Christophe Spaenjers & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2021. "Real and Private-Value Assets [Gendered prices]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(8), pages 3497-3526.
    13. Turnbull, Geoffrey K. & van der Vlist, Arno J., 2022. "The price of ignorance: Foreclosures, uninformed buyers and house prices," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    14. David C. Ling & Andy Naranjo & Benjamin Scheick, 2021. "There is no place like home: Information asymmetries, local asset concentration, and portfolio returns," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(1), pages 36-74, March.
    15. Vera Brenčič, 2016. "The impact of Craigslist’s entry on competing employment websites," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 5(1), pages 1-15, December.
    16. Victor M. Bennett & Robert Seamans & Feng Zhu, 2015. "Cannibalization and option value effects of secondary markets: Evidence from the US concert industry," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(11), pages 1599-1614, November.
    17. Marcel Fischer & Roland Füss & Simon Stehle, 2021. "Local house price comovements," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(S1), pages 169-198, March.
    18. Ajay Bhaskarabhatla & Priyatam Anurag & Chirantan Chatterjee & Enrico Pennings, 2021. "How Does Regulation Impact Strategic Repositioning by Firms Across Submarkets? Evidence from the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry," Strategy Science, INFORMS, vol. 6(3), pages 209-227, September.
    19. Geoffrey K. Turnbull & Bennie D. Waller & Scott A. Wentland, 2022. "Mitigating agency costs in the housing market," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 50(3), pages 829-861, September.
    20. Zhenyu Gao & Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong, 2020. "Learning about the Neighborhood," NBER Working Papers 26907, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:pqgw7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.