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Tax Incentives And Housing Investment In Low-Income Neighborhoods, Matthew Freedman

Matthew Freedman

This paper examines how tax incentives to promote housing investment affect communities by exploiting the lottery structure of Missouri’s Neighborhood Preservation Act (NPA). The NPA offers tax credits to homeowners and developers that improve or expand the owner-occupied housing stock in low-income areas. Taking advantage of the random assignment of NPA tax credits and detailed property-level data, I find that the program increases construction activity modestly. There are positive but highly localized spillovers on neighbors’ investment behavior. Spillovers on property values are larger in geographic scope, implying important roles for both neighbor interactions and amenity effects in local housing markets.