NBC Connecticut – Owning a home is the gateway to the middle class and the traditional path to building wealth and passing it along to one’s children.
NBC Connecticut Investigates wanted a better idea of home ownership trends and crunched some recently released census figures.
For starters, overall home ownership in Connecticut went down in the decade between the 2010 and the 2020 census -anywhere from down roughly 1% in Windham County, to homeownership dropping almost 5% in Fairfield County.
We asked Jeffrey Cohen, UConn Business School professor of real estate, for his take.
Telemundo Miami – WASHINGTON DC – Con la tasa hipotecaria a 30 años más alta de las últimas dos décadas, fruto de las subidas de tipos de interés, y con una acuciante falta de oferta, los estadounidenses tienen cada vez más complicado comprar una casa y el número de solicitudes de hipotecas, así como el de compraventas, está bajando y seguirá haciéndolo en los próximos meses.
CBC Radio – Jeffrey Cohen, a professor at the University of Connecticut’s School of Business, has been researching the benefits of bringing addiction and mental health treatment facilities near public transit routes. His research project ran between 2013 and 2018 is currently a working paper under peer review.
Professor Jeffrey Cohen has been named a Research Fellow for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he will work on issues involving real estate and economic inequality.
Cohen, who is the Kinnard Scholar in Real Estate at UConn, earned the prestigious appointment after serving as a visiting scholar for the Fed for 20 years. The honor is bestowed on only a handful of academics each year.
“I’m very interested in questions of how real estate wealth accumulated differently over time for Black and Latino homeowners and residents, compared with others, and what can be done to try and remedy any potential inequalities that are found,” Cohen said.
His most recent research studied how proximity to highways affects home values in Connecticut, including how the interstate system, built between 1940 and 1960, destroyed some communities and created value for others. Cohen found a direct correlation between the proximity to Interstate 84 and increased home values, which disproportionately benefitted Caucasian families.
Appointment Is a Researcher’s Dream
In his new role, Cohen will serve with the Institute for Economic Equity, a relatively new arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He will conduct research, give presentations, attend seminars, and contribute to the Fed’s ‘brain trust’ on issues of inequality. Cohen said he is familiar with many of his colleagues at the Institute and is excited to collaborate with them.
“They are extremely bright and well-published individuals who share a vision of enhancing equality for underserved populations,” he said. The connection is a researcher’s dream both in terms of colleagues and access to insightful data, he said.
Cohen, who joined the UConn School of Business in 2014, teaches in both the undergraduate and MBA programs and he will continue with those and all his other responsibilities. He was the principal investigator on Phase One of a State of Connecticut Department of Transportation and U.S. Department of Transportation grant investigating how a new rail commuter line connecting New Haven, Hartford and Springfield, Mass., would impact real estate value near the stations. He was also the principal investigator evaluating the property value impact of the CTfastrak bus-line project on Phases 1 and 2 of these projects. His work with the State of Connecticut on these transit-oriented development projects date back to 2016.
In addition, he is currently the principal investigator on a multi-year, $500,000 project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Systems for Action, studying how the CTfastrak bus line has impacted the costs and outcomes of treating substance use patients, and how these systems can be aligned.
The St. Louis Fed is one of 12 regional Reserve banks that, along with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., comprise the Federal Reserve System. As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System formulates U.S. monetary policy, regulates state-chartered member banks and bank holding companies, provides payment services to financial institutions and the U.S. government, and promotes financial literacy, economic education, and community development.
Hartford Courant (Yahoo News) The Greater Hartford home sale market snagged a top-10 spot in a new national ranking of hottest housing markets in the country in June, adding to a string of similar flattering mentions since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
UConn Today – Developers are planning to build thousands of new apartments across Connecticut, tapping into an exploding need for more housing options for everyone from millennials to empty nesters.
“There has really been an unprecedented demand for modern rental housing, not only in Connecticut but in many places across the nation,’’ says Jeffrey Cohen, finance professor and the Kinnard Scholar in Real Estate at the School of Business. “We’re seeing some complexes being developed on empty parcels and many other unused properties being converted into apartments.’’
The Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies is ranked among the Top 3 programs worldwide in research excellence, and boasts two of the most productive contributors to prestigious real-estate academic journals.
The Journal of Real Estate Literature ranked real estate programs based on the number of research articles accepted by the top three academic journals in the industry between 2016 and 2020. UConn had previously ranked Number 7.Continue Reading
If you watch the evening news, with long lines at food banks and homes destroyed by weather-related disasters, you might think the vast majority of Americans are in a financial spiral.Continue Reading
UConn Today – Can a robust, mass-transportation system enhance treatment outcomes for people in recovery for substance use disorder while also reducing the cost of providing care?Continue Reading
Boston Globe Real Estate – Realtor Michelle Oates was in her Andover office on Sept. 13, 2018, when she was told to evacuate. As she and her colleagues stood paralyzed in the parking lot, sirens blaring in the distance and helicopters hovering overhead, selling houses was the last thing on her mind.