Explaining recent changes in home prices
The increase in housing prices in the past ten years can largely be explained by falling mortgage interest rates and changes in household income. This article offers some projections of what might happen to housing prices if mortgage rates increase.
“Put Your Money Where Your Love Is”: Parental Aid to Adult Children
Qualitative data are used to examine parents’ support to their adult children, and their motivations and feelings about it. The sample is 40 adult children and parents from four racial/ethnic groups: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, non-Latino Whites, and Latinos. Ideals of adult independence versus interdependence emerge as determinants of feelings about aiding adult children. The ambivalence concept provides the means to elucidate the tensions between these ideologies and children’s structurally shaped circumstances. Parental assistance to adult children was seen as acceptable for education, home ownership, and on behalf of young children, especially if the child was “working hard.” Parents still provided aid, however, even if these conditions were not met. In these situations, more intrafamilial tension characterized the aid transfer.
Land-Use Controls, Natural Restrictions, and Urban Residential Land Prices
Research has focused on how variations in land-use controls explain interurban variations in prices. With the notable exception of the work by Rose (1989a, 1989b), virtually no attention has been focused on how natural restrictions (bodies of water, mountains, etc.) impact land prices. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of both land-use controls and natural restrictions on interurban variation in residential land prices. Our results indicate that, as expected, land prices are significantly higher as the land supply decreases both as a result of natural and man-made restrictions.