Effects of Suburbanization without Growth on Central City Vacancy

Many scholars have written descriptively about the relationship between sprawl and blight, often in the context of regional or central city decline. However, existing literature has not produced systematic, quantitative estimates of the relationships between the components of sprawl and central city vacancy—generally or given the context of urban decline. Such estimates are required to design effective policies to correct the market failures of sprawl without growth. This paper applies an existing economic framework of sprawl and blight (Brueckner and Helsley, 2011) to 99 urbanized areas in the United States to estimate the impact of sprawl without growth on changes in residential vacancy from 2012-2018. The results suggest that across cities, every 79 units of excess housing constructed results in 1 net increase in residential vacancy in the central city. Shrinking cities appear to have a vacancy multiplier, where every vacant until in 2012 resulted in an additional 0.27 vacancies by 2018; this is hypothesized to be a neighborhood effect resulting from historic redlining and other racially based policies.