Hector Blanco

🚨 Excited to share that my work w/ @lorenz_06, “Knocking it Down and Mixing it Up: The Impact of Public Housing Regenerations” found a home at @restatjournal. We study the impact of converting distressed public housing into mixed-income housing on local housing markets. 🧵👇1/9

Submit you housing papers: Cities, Housing, & Society — a one-day conference at Harvard on Aug. 27, 2026. We welcome policy-relevant housing research across urban, public, labor, real estate, IO, political economy & macro. Deadline: May 1. Submit here: diamondr.github.io/cities-housing…

🚨 LAST CALL 🚨  #CallForPapers for the 8th Workshop on #UrbanEconomics 📌 Deadline: March 15th ‼️ 📅 June 17-18, 2026 📍 Barcelona Keynote speakers: 🗣️ Gabriel @Ahlfeldt  (@HumboldtUni) 🗣️ Lu Han (@UWMadison)  Info👉 f.mtr.cool/tmoiwjznil

Next #IEBSeminars 👉 "New Deal Public Housing and Racial Segregation in U.S. Cities" 🎙️ @_Hector_Blanco (@RutgersU) 📅 Tuesday, March 10th 🕝 14:30h (CET) ℹ️ Details: f.mtr.cool/vtwjjwolqn

New paper (w/ Jon Gruber): What’s a building permit worth? And what can we learn about the importance of de-facto regulatory burdens versus de-jure constraints in housing development? We study these questions using a new setting: the market for land with preapproved permits.

¿Sabéis qué es lo bueno de la economía aplicada a las políticas públicas? Que toma una medida y se pregunta "oye, esto qué efectos va a tener REALMENTE". El Comité asume que el DESEO basta para que el objetivo se cumpla. Pero si abres tu mente, admites que el mundo es complejo y la gente decide de manera autónoma a tu deseo normativo, en seguida verás que una medida como esta tendría serios efectos negativos: → Si solo puede comprar quien entra a vivir, el mix de gente que llega a un barrio o a una ciudad corresponderá con quien puede comprar: clase media en adelante, no migrantes. → Quien se plantea comprar para alquilar a largo plazo (alguien me tiene que explicar muy despacio por qué esto sería "especular": ¿no queremos favorecer esta oferta?) no podrá hacerlo. → Es un "mira mejor no vengas" a quien se plantee construir para alquilar, o rehabilitar grandes bloques, o en general invertir en movilizar parque de vivienda. Las respuestas habituales a estas objeciones tienen el mismo pecado original: 🤬 "Pues regularemos quién puede comprar". Buena suerte haciendo eso y que la oferta no se vaya a pique por falta de incentivos para vender. 💵 "Daremos ayudas a la compra para los perfiles más vulnerables". Imaginad la captura de este dinero por parte del vendedor si la oferta no puede responder creciendo (construyendo). 🏛️ "Que compre el Estado". ¿Todo lo que salga a la venta (que no será mucho en estas condiciones)? ¿Con qué dinero/a qué precio? ¿Por qué este uso es superior a simplemente inversión en vivienda nueva de la que claramente hay déficit? Esto es lo bueno de la economía. Que te devuelve los pies al suelo. Y, si quieres, desde ahí puedes caminar hacia tu objetivo pisando sobre firme.

Of potential interest to UEA members: Call for Papers – IEB 8th Workshop on Urban Economics Barcelona, June 17–18, 2026 Keynotes: Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Lu Han Submission deadline: March 15, 2026 Details: ieb.ub.edu/wp-content/upl…

Why are many U.S. cities building less? Why have they insisted on a "thicket" of regulations that make housing hard to build? In a new #jobmarketpaper with @beau_bressler , I study how much of the answer lies with a forgotten federal program that taught cities to restrict growth

My coauthor Tate Twinam and I have a new NBER working paper: “Shutting Down Japantown: The Effects of WWII Internment on Japanese Enclaves.” nber.org/papers/w34510 During WWII, the U.S. government incarcerated all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast (the “exclusion zone”) in internment camps. While there is a large literature on how internment affected the internees themselves, far less is known about what happened to the Japantowns and Little Tokyos they left behind. Were these neighborhoods repopulated by other minority groups? Or did Japanese Americans return and rebuild their historic enclaves? We digitize enumeration-district maps from the 1940 and 1950 censuses for 14 cities (representing newly every city with a significant Japanese population) and use them to track racial composition changes across thousands of neighborhoods. We find: The locations of Japanese enclaves proved remarkably resilient. But historic West Coast Japantowns lost 25–50% of their prewar Japanese American populations. The vacancies created by internment were filled almost one-for-one by Black households. Enclaves outside the exclusion zone boomed, gaining roughly 0.8 Japanese Americans for every Japanese American who was already there. These new enclaves, however, remained smaller than their West Coast predecessors.

EALE 2026 in Barcelona! Deadline February 1, submit here: ub.edu/eale2026/

I am pleased to announce the Rutgers Economics 2025–2026 Job Market candidates. We’ve got six students this year, all in applied microeconomics. economics.rutgers.edu/job-market They are: Ji Hye Choi’s fields are labor, household/gender economics, and crime. Her JMP studies the mechanism through which marriage reduces male criminal behavior, focusing on bargaining power within the household. Md Wahid Ferdous Ibon’s fields are labor, education, and development. His JMP studies whether the effect of parental job loss on college enrollment and dropout varies with the academic calendar. Shailee Manandhar’s fields are labor, development, and migration. Her JMP studies how the 2015 earthquake affected migration trends in Nepal. Roisin O'Neill’s fields are labor, public, and family/gender economics. Her JMP studies how paid family leave and paternal leave-taking affect the child penalty. Pim Pinitjitsamut’s fields are crime, urban, and labor economics. Her JMP studies the effect of arbitration caps on police performance in New Jersey. Tessie Krishna’s fields are health economics and the economics of crime. Her JMP studies the effects of a juvenile diversion program on recidivism.

Spatial JMCs: Each year, I compile a list of spatial-economics job-market papers. To make sure you're on my list (& save me some work), please reply with your info in the following format: Firstname Surname (School) - JMP title - homepageURL [Trade JMCs: reply to other tweet]

Local control over zoning is a government failure, because restrictive zoning imposes a negative externality on non-residents who are priced out. Higher-level governments need to set zoning policy to internalize the externality.

📢 Call for Small Grant Proposals 📢 Measuring the causal effect of a policy change and seeking to measure its Marginal Value of Public Funds? Apply for an Early Career Scholars Grant @policyimpacts to support your work: policyimpacts.org/announcements/…

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ @cailin_slattery & @WNober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay

🚨 Our working paper The Price of Silence is out! Thrilled that @el_pais featured our research on noise & housing prices. Great to see our work making an impact beyond academia! 📰 Article (in Spanish): shorturl.at/rLBYC 📄 WP: shorturl.at/MheQ4 With @marimagagno

A caveat of our results is that we focus on **highly localized** effects, where demand effects dominate, while regenerations may still contribute (albeit modestly) to city-wide affordability through broader supply effects. 9/9

Implications: 1️⃣ Conversion to mixed-income housing while preserving the public housing stock can mitigate the negative effects of traditional public housing on neighborhoods 2️⃣ By improving amenities, it can also make housing less affordable in the **very local** vicinity 8/9

🚨 Excited to share that my work w/ @lorenz_06, “Knocking it Down and Mixing it Up: The Impact of Public Housing Regenerations” found a home at @restatjournal. We study the impact of converting distressed public housing into mixed-income housing on local housing markets. 🧵👇1/9