Rental Property Sales as a Driver of Homelessness and Educational Hardship Among Public School Children

• In Event: Unsheltered Homelessness, Shelter Attributes, and Housing Stability: Evidence from Policy, Practice, and Lived Experience

Abstract

Rental properties sales have emerged in housing research as a force of instability for families. Recent work shows that property-level eviction filing rates are higher in years following a sale, and families are more likely to move from properties that are sold compared to families living in similar properties in the same neighborhood. However, scholars have not yet asked how property sales may serve as a predictor of homelessness nor the educational consequences of housing displacement for school-aged children. We address this limitation in the literature by analyzing an innovative, longitudinal dataset linking property-level data on real estate with individual-level academic records of public school students in the state of North Carolina from 2017-2023. In this article, we describe a novel approach to data linking wherein we geospatially linked sales of properties (associated with parcels of land with idiosyncratic street addresses) to student addresses using a point-in-polygon match. Student addresses were geocoded using the National Address Database (NAD), which is an up-to-date collection of highly precise geospatial points used to route and dispatch emergency responders. As a result, we retain a high percentage of matches (>94%) across the dataset, improving internal validity of our findings. Preliminary analyses from individual-fixed effects models show that students are nearly twice as likely to be identified as homeless by their school systems in the year during or immediately following a sale of their home to a new owner. Preliminary models testing for heterogeneity find that these findings are concentrated among students whose home was sold to a local (versus non-local) owner and for students whose building was old (built before 1990) versus those living in properties built more recently. We use these findings to argue that housing markets have a structural force on housing insecurity and homelessness that is beyond the predictability and control of renting families, and this force has implications for the educational trajectory of children who are subjected to displacement.

Author

• Warren Robert Lowell, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author