The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890–2006
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We construct the first annual market rent and home sales price series for American cities over the twentieth century using 2.7 million newspaper real estate listings. Our findings revise several stylized facts about U.S. housing markets. Real market rents did not fall during the postwar period in most cities and rose nationally by 60% from 1890 to 2006. We also document higher sales price growth between 1953 and 1987 relative to previous series. Real prices reached almost four times their 1890 level by 2006. Prices grew most in metros with high demand and low levels of construction. We find that the rent-to-price ratio fell from about 8% in the early twentieth century to 3% by 2006, consistent with declines in the cost of owning housing relative to renting. For the typical year in our period, the annual return to owning housing was 9%, driven mostly by rental returns of 7.7%, with capital gains contributing only 1.3%. While capital gains were close to zero from 1890 to 1940, they grew to nearly a third of total returns from 1970 to 2006.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".