BIO

Hi there! My name is Adrian Velazquez, and I am currently a senior undergraduate student in the economics program at FSU. I am from the beachy paradise many call Panama City Beach, Florida. I enjoy hip hop dancing, bicycling, and walking as hobbies. In the career world, I hope to be engaged in policy work, data analytics, and project work in helping to improve the environment and standard of living.

Housing affordability in Leon County, Florida.

Abstract

Housing prices are surging in Tallahassee, Florida. In the past decade, median housing prices nearly doubled. However, the increase in family incomes lags behind increases in housing costs. Research suggests that with rising incomes, the percentage of income spent on housing decreases. Therefore, we ask the following: In what ways do changes in income, if at all, impact housing consumption? This research runs a cross-sectional regression using eighty-eight Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) and year observations containing median sale data in Leon County, from 2011 to 2021. Each sale price median was developed from tens to hundreds of single-family house prices in a given ZCTA and year. Preliminary results reveal that as income increases, the proportion of money spent on buying single-family houses does not decrease continuously in terms of square footage. The highest-income areas of Leon County experience greater economies of scale in their housing purchases relative to the county-wide trend. Policymakers should therefore avoid the creation of an affordability index using a consistency assumption from Engel curves for housing. Instead, policymakers should use procedures that repeatedly evaluate affordability, such as the Housing Price Index and the Case Shiller Index. Policy efforts should aim to tax unimproved land, improve permitting timelines, loosen and streamline zoning restrictions, and simplify the process of building housing (Foldvary et al. 2017). Future research should investigate rental datasets that include both the rent and square footage of rental properties to investigate if a consistent proportionality pattern exists in the rental market.

Keywords: housing affordability Leon County home