Welcome to Stephen Malpezzi's special page on Housing, Real Estate, and Urban Development Indicators. This page, currently under construction, contains some papers and data on Urban Indicators and related topics.

Projected completion of this page: July 2002. Please excuse the mess until then!

Special for participants in the World Bank-sponsored online Development Forum on Land Policy Issues:

Click here to download Figure 1 from Craig, Pardey and Roseboom (1997), comparing agricultural land and labor productivity across countries, as a JPG file (77KB).

For a detailed review of the Housing and Urban Development Indicators Project, including analysis of the 1993 version of the indicators, see Shlomo Angel, Housing Policy Matters: A Global Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2000, available from fine bookstores everywhere).

For an introduction to the subject, and a review of a HUD-sponsored special issue of Real Estate Economics (1997) devoted to indicators, see Stephen Malpezzi and Stephen K. Mayo, Housing and Urban Development Indicators: A Good Idea Whose Time Has Returned, Real Estate Economics, 25(1), 1997, pp. 1-11. Click here to download draft versions of the text, table 1, and table 2.

Click here to download an Excel file containing a basic set of the 1993 indicators.

For more recent information on the Indicators project, see UNCHS's Global Urban Observatory.

Steve Mayo was the original driving force behind the global urban indicators project. Sadly, Steve passed away Thanksgiving day, 1999. For a brief review of his work, including the indicators research, see The Contributions of Stephen K. Mayo to Housing and Urban Economics. A special issue of the Journal of Housing Economics memorializing Mayo's work was recently completed, and spans and June 2001 and September 2001.

Other Indicator Working Papers

98-10) Malpezzi, Stephen, James D. Shilling and Yu-Yun Yang, The Stock of Private Real Estate Capital in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Measurement and Determinants, July 1998. 

(96-07) Malpezzi, Stephen, Gregory Chun and Richard Green, New Place to Place Housing Price Indexes for U.S. Metropolitan Areas, and Their Determinants: An Application of Housing Indicators. March 1996.

(99-16) Green, Richard K., Stephen Malpezzi and Stephen K. Mayo, Metropolitan-Specific Estimates of the Price Elasticity of Supply of Housing, and Their Sources., December 1999.

Stephen Malpezzi, Larry Ozanne, and Thomas Thibodeau. Characteristic Prices of Housing in 59 SMSAs. (The Urban Institute, 1980). This paper describes the construction of hedonic housing price indexes using data from the Annual Housing Survey (now called the American Housing Survey). Contains lots of handy hints on how to actually implement hedonic models, and some good tips on how to work with American Housing Survey data. Also contains some analysis of depreciation rates, racial differences in housing prices, and measuring house price inflation, among other topics. Click here to download:

Part 1  Part 2a Part 2b Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Other Indicator Datasets

Here's an Excel Dataset on Urban Decentralization ("Sprawl"), containing more detailed versions of the tables contained in Malpezzi and Wen-Kai (Kevin) Guo, Measuring "Sprawl:" Alternative Measures of Urban Form in U.S. Metropolitan Areas (in Word). See our PowerPoint Slides on Sprawl for an expanded set of Figures for the paper, and some other related info.

Here's a dataset containing measures of the U.S. private stock of real estate by metropolitan area, for various years, and related data from Malpezzi, Shilling and Yang,... (TBA)

Indicator Bibliography

Short Bibliography in Word

Other Indicator Links

The Urban Observatory is maintained by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. It includes some info on the latest housing and urban development indicators.

State of the Nation's Cities A great resource from our friends at Rutgers' Center for Urban Policy Research.

While you're here, check out our preview of A Primer on U.S. Housing Markets and Policy, which I've written with Professor Green, and which is forthcoming from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. This page, currently under construction, contains an outline, some of the data and tables (including more detailed tables than those available in the text!) and cool PowerPoint figures.