Abstract:
Housing affordability remains a significant social and economic issue in New Zealand
and the developed world. Affordability policies such as Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) have
been promoted as alternatives to streamline the delivery of land as an intermediate
stage to boost the supply of affordable housing. IZ has been applied with relative
success in several countries. Nonetheless, research on price effects is relatively scarce
and applications of causality approaches remain limited. It is of interest to explore
whether voluntary IZ (or rezoning policies in general) may have effects beyond average
prices considering the heterogeneity of housing markets. This paper explores if and
how a rezoning policy (the Special Housing Areas in Auckland, New Zealand) affects
the distribution of prices within designated areas. Our empirical strategy relies on
quantile difference-in-difference models to identify distributional effects. We estimate
changes-in-changes models to relax functional form assumptions and to incorporate
heterogeneity. We use about 175 thousand sales transactions between September 2011
and September 2016 in the Auckland Region. Our findings show that the SHAs program
increased housing prices for all distribution segments, ranging from 3% to 7%. That is,
the SHAs may have affected market segmentation within the designated areas, and it
cannot be concluded that there was a cross-subsidy from more expensive houses toward
affordable. Hence, the distributional effects may affect the potential of a voluntary IZ
as an affordability policy.
