Replication Datasets
Note that all SAS files are presented here with .txt file extensions to permit display in a browser while avoiding unintentional invocations of SAS.
New Racial Meanings of Housing in America
Database compiled for American Quarterly article
To map the complex new realities of American housing, we need detailed information on the individuals and institutions involved in housing market relations that operate at multiple spatial scales. We exploit several under-utilized features of a widely-used data source, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Each year, portions of the raw loan-application register (LAR) and institutional transmittal sheet (TS) data are disclosed under HMDA (FFIEC, annual). HMDA records provide a limited set of variables measuring the characteristics of loan applicants, the outcome of applications, and a proxy of subprime status based on a "rate spread" calculated from a benchmark of prevailing interest rates (FFIEC, 2006a, 2006b). These data are widely used to document various kinds of inequalities in the allocation of credit. We use the data for this purpose, but we also take advantage of the little-noticed possibilities for analyzing the characteristics of institutions in an industry that has undergone dramatic, turbulent innovation in recent years. We built several databases, one of them focused on the peak year of the subprime boom (2006), aggregating the 34.1 million applicant records to develop market specialization measures for each of the 8,886 separate organizations filing disclosure reports. These lender-level summaries are then merged with a more specialized institutional database compiled by the Federal Reserve (Avery, 2009) to track the increasingly complex structure of bank and financial holding companies and their many subsidiaries. Then we merge the detailed lender databases with the applicant records for conventional loan originations collateralized by single-family homes in the 1,086 metropolitan counties across the continental U.S. Finally, we enhance the database with the detailed analysis of state laws on subprime and predatory lending built by Bostic et al. (2008).
These databases provide an exceptionally detailed view of borrowers obtaining mortgage credit for homes in different cities and suburbs, and of the various lenders providing that credit -- banks, thrifts, and mortgage companies, and their "parent" conglomerates and bank holding companies. Since HMDA records also indicate whether a loan was sold in the same calendar year as origination, we also have a partial view of the securitization networks that were so decisive in transforming local mortgages into "electronic instruments" (Sassen, 2009) and "postindustrial widgets" (Newman, 2009) in an expanding transnational network of debt and investment (Gotham, 2009). The database is far from perfect: industry lobbyists never tire of pointing out that HMDA includes no measures of applicant creditworthiness (an absence that reflects the hard work of lobbyists who fought proposals to add credit history to HMDA several years ago; see Immergluck, 2004). Yet the database provides the broadest possible coverage of the market and some of the corporate actors involved in the "front end" of loan origination.
References
Bostic, R.W., K.C. Engel, P.A. McCoy, A. Pennington-Cross, and S.M. Wachter (2008) The Impact of State Anti-Predatory Lending Laws: Policy Implications and Insights (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies).
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) (Annual) Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, Raw Data (Washington, DC, Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council).
Gotham, K.F. (2009) Creating liquidity out of spatial fixity: The secondary circuit of capital and the subprime mortgage crisis, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(2) pp. 355-371.
Immergluck, D. (2004) Credit to the Community (Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe).
Newman, K. (2009) Post-industrial widgets: Capital flows and the production of the urban, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(2) pp. 314-331.
Sassen, S. (2009) When local housing becomes an electronic instrument: The global circulation of mortgages, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(2) pp. 411-426.
Stockton in Great Depression II
data transfer for Maianna Voge
The layout codes below are for the 2010 files; there are a few minor changes in the record layouts during this time period, but nothing as major as what happened with the release of the new pricing information in the 2004 disclosures. Curl up one night with the FFIEC website...
Shapefiles for New York City
data transfer for Kathe Newman
Download and unzip to C:\DATA\ and then open "Kathe.mxd"
Revised PUMF file for 2005 Survey of Household Spending
data transfer for Tamara Ibrahim
Subprime Shares for Tracts in New Jersey
data transfer for Kathe Newman
Revised to include 2009
Revised to include 2008
Revised to include 2007
2004, 2005, and 2006
njshares.sas. Compare carefully with Phil's code. The tract tabulations I've provided do not screen out loans with quality or validity edit failures, and also impose no criteria on applicant income (other than excluding "NA" values).
kathe.xls Tract tabulations for each census tract.
Conditionally Accepted at Urban Affairs Review, with James Defilippis, Revised October, 2007
Master SAS data file. Compiled from various sources. Create a directory c:\sasdat\james and place this data file there, and then the models can be executed in
Working Paper, with Tyler Pearce, Markus Moos, Holly Foxcroft, and Emmanuel Kabahizi, June, 2007
Sas program editor batch file. Prerequisites: the three loan-application register exports from the 2004 HMDA national file, along with the export files of metropolitan area codes and labels, and extracts from Summary File 3 of the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and Housing. Revise04.sas is a substantially revised version of system04.sas, below, with OLS regressions of metropolitan-level mortgage flows and loan-level logistic regression models of prime/subprime mortgage market segmentation.
Extracts of housing and demographic information, aggregated to metropolitan area summary level, from SF 3 of the U.S. Census of Population and Housing. For variable labels, see revise04.sas. Metropolitan area codes are as defined in the new December, 2003 OMB definitions; more than four dozen new metropolitan areas cannot readily be matched to the metropolitan summary level provided for 2000 Census data.
Working paper, with Tyler Pearce, Markus Moos, and Holly Foxcroft, March, 2007
Sas program editor batch file. Prerequisites: the three loan-application register exports from the 2004 HMDA national file, along with the export file of metropolitan area codes and labels. The file includes codes to create composite variables from different elements of the HMDA fields, estimation of an instrumental variable based on a random sample of applications rejected specifically for reasons of bad credit; cluster analysis of metropolitan- and tract-level variables, and the implementation of a multidimensional scaling algorithm applied to state-level variables published in: Wei Li and Keith S. Ernst (2006). The Best Value in the Subprime Market: State Predatory Lending Reforms. Durham, NC: Center for Responsible Lending.
Metropolitan-level aggregations of basic lending indicators for all metropolitan areas in the United States and Puerto Rico. This file is created by summing the individual loan-level records in system04.sas; see the datastep, "data system04.msasum." Metropolitan areas are as defined in the December, 2003 OMB revision to metropolitan definitions.
(The link is a pre-publication version of what was eventually published in the edited book.)
List of neighborhoods in 23 U.S. metropolitan areas that qualify as gentrified, according to fieldwork and statistical criteria developed in Daniel J. Hammel and Elvin K. Wyly (1996). "A Model for Identifying Gentrified Neighborhoods With Census Data." Urban Geography 17(3), 248-268, and refined in Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel (1998). "Modeling the Context and Contingency of Gentrification." Journal of Urban Affairs 20(3), 303-326, and Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel (1999). "Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification." Housing Policy Debate 10(4), 711-771.
Sas program editor batch file to implement tract-level taxonomies shown in Tables 2.3 and 2.4 in the Atkinson and Briidge chapter: tracts are analyzed with a standard urban-ecological approach, and then classifed in the spirit of market segmentation analyses to highlight trajectories of inner-city inequality. Interpretive labels attached to the final cluster solution: vanilla playgrounds, gold coast enclaves, racialized redevelopment, precarious diversity, latino frontier, loft lightning, cells and apartments, downtown sweep, yuppies in training, and elite polarization.
Basic demographic and housing information, derived from U.S. Census tabulations, for the census tracts presented in 'gent.xls,' above.