Real estate and reality
Are you interested in cities and urban form? Do you ever wonder, for instance, why new housing developments spring up in certain places, but not others? So does Albert Saiz, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and director of both the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) and the Urban Economics Lab. In recent years, Saiz has published multiple papers examining the underlying, often hidden factors behind the supply of places to live in big cities. “There’s not enough work on the supply side of housing, so a lot of my research has been on that,” Saiz explains, listing several of the factors that affect new building projects — construction costs, land supply, local policies, geographic constraints. Or perhaps you’re interested in immigration and cities. What are the patterns in which immigrants arrive and stay within cities? How much integration or segregation do they experience? Over the...