Residential Vacancies Research Articles

Mapping Residential Vacancies with Multisource Spatiotemporal Data: A Case Study in Beijing

China has undergone rapid urbanization in the past few decades, and it has been accompanied by overdevelopment. Residential vacancies caused by overdevelopment result in a waste of resources and generate greenhouse gases associated with land surface changes. Due to the poor spatial resolution and limited availability of data, previous studies performed analyses at low resolutions at the county scale, thus lacking spatial detail. In addition, they used complicated subjective indicators difficult to apply to cities of various sizes across China. To understand the detailed spatial pattern of residential vacancies in megacities, we designed a more generally applicable approach with multisource high-resolution spatiotemporal data and tested it in Beijing, the capital of China. At first, a statistical regression with features derived from multisource data was used. Then, the predicted values of the regression function were used as standard heat values, and the observed heat value in each unit was divided by the corresponding standard heat value. Next, residential vacancies were estimated by calculating the quantiles of these division results in all analysis units. This approach requires no prior knowledge or complicated indicators and can be easily applied across cities in China, which is beneficial for development planning at the provincial and national levels.

Variability in and mixtures among residential vacancies at granular levels: Evidence from municipal water consumption data

Unprecedented urbanization in China has directly resulted in residential vacancies, which has seriously stunted sustainable development, a part of China's new-type urbanization plan. Understanding the various types and mixes of residential vacancies is critical for the advancement of our knowledge of speculative urbanism and for devising vacancy-mitigation policies, but this issue remains insufficiently studied. Using municipal water consumption data, this study proposes a feasible and general-purpose framework for providing innovative insights into the variability in residential vacancies at the household level and the mixture of residential vacancies at the building level. This framework was applied to the city of Changshu, China, and four categories of vacant residences at the household level were identified: seasonally vacant residences, long-term vacant residences, newly built residences and occasionally vacant residences. The first category is closely related to tourism and seasonal industries, while the last three exhibit a Matthew effect. In addition to revealing significant and intensifying spatial clustering and three patterns of changes in vacancy mixtures (i.e., emergence, disappearance, and increases or decreases), the results identify particular types of vacant residences at the building level (e.g., extremely low-entropy long-term multihousehold buildings). The insights from this study can contribute to devising customized policies for alleviating residential vacancies.

Spatiotemporal dynamics and the contributing factors of residential vacancy at a fine scale: A perspective from municipal water consumption

With the unprecedented pace of urbanization in recent decades, urban vacant residences have increased dramatically. The problem of numerous vacant residences has been severely criticized. The lack of comprehensive data obstructs revealing the spatiotemporal dynamics and the contributing factors of the vacant residences at a fine scale. This study proposes a feasible and general-purpose framework to analyze the vacant residences using municipal water consumption data. First, a residential vacancy identification method is proposed to identify the vacant residences, and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the vacant residences are analyzed using the spatial analysis methods. Second, the relationships between the residential vacancies and the service environments of the neighborhoods are examined using the random forest method. The framework was applied in Changshu city, China, and the results revealed a concentric circular spatial structure for residences. The results also indicated that the diversity of the facilities and services (FASs) has the highest impact on residential vacancies. As the degree of enrichment of the FASs approximates 1 or the percentage/diversity of the FASs increase, the residential vacancy length decreases. This study not only draws a detailed picture of vacant residences but also sheds light on policy implications for mitigating residential vacancies.

The House Price-Vacancy Curve

Individual sales prices and local vacancy rates in the housing market pose a natural analogy to the wage curve, a popular concept in labor economics that describes how individual wages decrease with higher local unemployment. While housing search and matching models and housing externalities strongly suggest a stable inverse relationship, there is still a lack of convincing empirical research on the sensitivity of house sales to local vacancy variation. Based on more than 10,000 single-family home transactions from the German market, this paper confirms a robust house price-vacancy curve among individual home prices and adjacent residential vacancies. The economic size of the relationship is highly comparable across all four analyzed states: a doubling of the vacancy rate at the municipality level is associated with a 5-8% discount in quality-controlled selling prices. Despite negative price signals, local vacancy distributions tend to persist over long time horizons, leaving room for policy intervention.

From Prison to the Community: Assessing the Direct, Reciprocal, and Indirect Effects of Parolees on Neighborhood Structure and Crime

This study examines the direct, reciprocal, and indirect effects of parolees on neighborhoods, including residential vacancies, property sales, public assistance, and crime. Cross-lagged autoregressive models are estimated using a unique data set containing annual neighborhood information on parolees, crime rates, and neighborhood structure in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, between 2000 and 2008. Results suggest parolees degrade neighborhood structure, and these effects are direct, reciprocal, and indirect. Understanding how the presence of parolees can contribute to changes in neighborhood processes linked to crime will broaden our understanding of the effects that parolees have on communities and highlight additional areas for intervention.

Right-sizing shrinking cities: a landscape and design strategy for abandoned properties

Much popular and academic attention is paid to population deconcentration and economic decline in so-called shrinking cities. In this paper we react upon several theories of urban decline with a novel analysis of abandoned properties in the United States, using foreclosure-driven residential vacancies (FDRVs) as a proxy for abandoned properties. We empirically examine the amount and type of abandoned land in some of the cities hardest hit by the mortgage crisis, and present a relevant landscape and design strategy to show that landscape architects are well positioned to redesign this newly available land. To help develop a systematic set of stages and actions for right-sizing initiatives, we catalogue several examples of current initiatives to address abandonment, paying attention to roadblocks inherent to this landscape and design strategy. This strategy presents a useful model with which designers can tackle the difficult and controversial issue of right-sizing.

Vacant residential buildings as potential reserves: a geographical and statistical study

Vacant housing has been associated with a variety of interests from economic implications and consequences for the urban structure to the possibility of providing housing for the homeless. In addition to these social and financial aspects, unused buildings have resources embedded in them. They take land from other activities and contain refined natural resources in the form of building components and materials. Therefore, empty buildings can be regarded as reserves for housing and repositories for urban mining, i.e. material extraction. In doing so, these buildings contribute to the resilience of cities. This geographical and statistical study on residential vacancies is situated in Finland, where empty homes may also keep using energy and producing emissions. The research material consists of a vast dataset of all residential buildings with vacancies in Finland in mid-2014, a total of 275 486 buildings with 1 100 267 occupied and 378 802 unoccupied dwellings (52% of the Finnish housing stock). The paper shows several characteristics that increase the understanding of vacancies and their role in the dynamics of the building stock. Public policy should address the issue of vacancy, not only because of social and economic implications but also because of its environmental impacts and opportunities.

Grandes complejos turísticos de la globalización, el caso de Marina de Cope, Murcia

<p>El proyecto de urbanización turística Marina de Cope (Murcia, España), con 60.000 plazas hoteleras y residenciales, ofrece la posibilidad de analizar la relación entre estructura urbana y sociedad en el contexto de la globalización. Como instrumento de análisis, se proponen ocho preguntas sociológicas que, aplicadas al caso, permiten concluir que responde a un diseño urbano segregador, que evita la complejidad social, basado en una forma periférica de la economía globalizada y con un impacto socioambiental insuficientemente evaluado. </p>

Simulating Demography and Housing Demand in an Urban Region under Scenarios of Growth and Shrinkage

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, demographic decline and urban shrinkage brought massive changes in the housing stock in East German cities. Urban planners and policy makers face complex problems caused by the resulting vacancies and demolitions and the handling of urban brownfields in the inner city. At the same time, cities are under ongoing pressure of suburbanisation. Because existing models focus mainly on demographic and urban growth and their impact on housing stocks, we present a simulation model that is able to compute both growth and shrinkage processes. We uncover nonlinear dynamics and feedbacks between demography, housing preference, and supply of housing space. The simulation results show that, despite population decline, the increasing number of single households leads to a growing total housing demand in the central parts of the study area. Beyond this area, residential vacancies in multistorey housing segments will remain regardless of population growth. At the same time, the simulations show that, despite population shrinkage and an overall oversupply of flats, there is a negative net demand for flats in affordable prefabricated housing estates as the percentage of low-income households increases. These findings will help planners modify or adapt their visions of the residential function in shrinking cities and to adjust current programmes of renewal and restructuring.

Should Government Subsidize Caregiver Wages? Some Evidence on Worker Turnover and the Cost of Long-Term Care in Group Homes for Persons With Developmental Disabilities

High rates of worker turnover have been a persistent problem in the long-term care industry. Spending on individuals with developmental disabilities represents 20 percent of all long-term care spending and 40 percent of Medicaid spending on long-term care. Using detailed data on the providers of long-term community-based residential services for persons with developmental disabilities, this research examined the consequences of high worker turnover for long-term care costs and whether a wage-subsidy policy to reduce worker turnover would have been cost-effective in this sector. Higher turnover increased state-reimbursed training expenditures, the share of workers engaged in training, and workers’ compensation costs. Turnover had no effect on training expenditures that were not reimbursed by the state, nor did it affect residential vacancies. The findings indicated that providers were unlikely to reduce turnover on their own, since its associated costs were either tolerably small or borne by others. An analysis indicated that it was likely socially beneficial for the government to reduce turnover through wage subsidization in this sector.

Modeling and simulating residential mobility in a shrinking city using an agent-based approach

Shrinking cities are characterized by a huge oversupply of dwellings and resulting residential vacancies. Discussions among urban planners and policymakers in Europe have focused on the consequences of urban shrinkage following demographic transition, fertility decline and individualization. In this study, the shrinking city of Leipzig in Eastern Germany is singled out as a case basis for the study of residential mobility and land use change using agent-based modeling techniques, in which social scientists developed a concept of household types based on empirical data that form a unique base; these techniques were used to construct a data-driven, agent-based model. The spatially explicit simulation model RESMOB city presented here ‘translates’ these empirical data via behavioral rules of households. It computes spatially explicit household patterns, housing demands and residential vacancies. Based on three scenarios, population growth, stagnation and shrinkage, we show that population might stabilize within the coming years. The number of households is expected to further increase. We demonstrate that a selective demolition of vacant housing stock can counteract the enormous oversupply of dwellings and better balance housing demand and the number of available flats. Scenario simulation shows that the model can reproduce observed patterns of population, inner-urban migration and residential vacancy in a spatially explicit manner and thus can be applied to the analysis of scenarios of demographic change in urban regions. The presented model acts as a tool supporting the testing of hypotheses in social science research and allowing the quantification of land-use scenarios in urban regions based on household choices.