Real estate values and the location of economic activity: A case study of the urban form of Cleveland, 1915--1980

Urban decay is a term that evokes images of abandoned homes, boarded up store fronts, and vacant lots. Yet, while it has afflicted dozens of American cities, economists have devoted very little attention to the phenomenon of urban decay. In my dissertation I take a first step towards closing that gap in the economics literature by completing a case study of the urban form of America's symbol of urban decay---Cleveland, Ohio.; My dissertation contains three components. Chapter II is a brief history of Cleveland. This chapter sets the stage for the following chapter. In Chapter III I present a new data set that I collected from the Cuyahoga County Archives and I use this data set to perform empirical analysis of Cleveland's urban form. Two themes emerge from this analysis. First, Cleveland was no longer a monocentric city by 1970. I attribute this result to the structural changes in Cleveland's economy as well as the automobile's emergence as the dominant form of transportation in Cleveland. Second, I find that Cleveland was not uniformly affected by urban decay.; In Chapter IV I use more sophisticated economic models to glean additional information about the urban form of Cleveland and the impact that urban decay had on land values in the city. Specifically, I find that land values on the East Side of Cleveland fell far more dramatically than land values on the West Side of the city. Conventional wisdom suggests that the dramatic decrease in land values on the East Side of Cleveland was caused by the demographic transformation experienced by that half of the city; by 1970 the East Side of Cleveland was almost entirely black when two decades earlier it had been nearly all white. My analysis in Chapter IV contradicts the conventional wisdom, for I find that the decline in East Side land values happened more than a full decade after the demographic transformation. However, while my analysis severs the link between demographic change and declining land values, I am unable to explain the precipitous decrease in East Side land values that occurred in the 1970s. This leaves several opportunities for exciting research in the future.