My article, Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality, has just been published in Environment and Planning A (download free PDF). It explores the representation of different communities in online rental listings from two perspectives: 1) how might biases in representativeness impact housing planners’ knowledge of rental markets, and 2) how might information inequality impact residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, and housing voucher utilization?
According to the most recent American Housing Survey, more renters in urbanized areas found their current homes through a site like Craigslist than through any other information channel. Although online listings have recently become a primary mode of information exchange in US rental housing markets, little is known about how they function or how well they actually represent the full market. This study assesses online rental market representativeness across 12,000 urban census tracts’ Craigslist listings.
It finds that listings spatially concentrate and over-represent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated tracts. Majority-White tracts are over-represented more than twice as often as Hispanic or Black tracts. Although large swaths of this market are affordable to low and moderate income families, homeseekers in whiter, wealthier, better-educated, and more-expensive communities have a surplus of information available online to aid their searches while other communities continue to face a relative deficit. The Internet helps democratize access to information but it does not necessarily equalize its supply, and the Internet’s ability to broaden housing information acquisition remains contingent on the behavior of landlords listing online.
If information is power in today’s cities and markets, then disparate access to it can influence community futures, opportunities, and equity. As the rental housing market moves online, technological self-selection and information supply biases construct new digital inequalities that shape housing search costs, choice sets, residential sorting, and the conclusions planners can draw about rapidly-evolving markets. Today online platforms capture an ever-greater share of the rental housing market’s information landscape, and data sources like Craigslist offer invaluable opportunities to understand affordability and available rental supply in real-time. They do not, however, provide a holistic view of the market, as this information exchange over- and under-represents certain communities.
Here is the article’s abstract:
As the rental housing market moves online, the Internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information inequalities. Biases in online listings’ representativeness could impact different communities’ access to housing search information, reinforcing traditional information segregation patterns through a digital divide. They could also circumscribe housing practitioners’ and researchers’ ability to draw broad market insights from listings to understand rental supply and affordability. This study examines millions of Craigslist rental listings across the US and finds that they spatially concentrate and over-represent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated communities. Other significant demographic differences exist in age, language, college enrollment, rent, poverty rate, and household size. Most cities’ online housing markets are digitally segregated by race and class, and we discuss various implications for residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, housing voucher utilization, and automated monitoring and analytics in the smart cities paradigm. While Craigslist contains valuable crowdsourced data to better understand affordability and available rental supply in real-time, it does not evenly represent all market segments. The Internet promises information democratization, and online listings can reduce housing search costs and increase choice sets. However, technology access/preferences and information channel segregation can concentrate such information-broadcasting benefits in already-advantaged communities, reproducing traditional inequalities and reinforcing residential sorting and segregation dynamics. Technology platforms like Craigslist construct new institutions with the power to shape spatial economies, human interactions, and planners’ ability to monitor and respond to urban challenges.
For more, check out the article. You might also be interested in this previous article about Craigslist housing market characteristics.