Housing Abandonment in the Urban Core

Abstract

The essential act of residential abandonment is the owner's decision to play end game, to minimize expenditures in the expectation, conscious or otherwise, of ultimately giving up claim to his property. This may result from the immediacies of current cash flow or from negative expectations of future value, or both. The detailed analysis of this phenomenon attempts to explore existing theory on abandonment and to document the resulting hypotheses empirically. The problems are approached in two directions: (1) environmental—using gross patterns of residential abandonment to examine the relationships of neighborhoods and abandonment, and (2) behavior—examining the abandonment decisions of a sample of Newark landlords. It was found that abandonment appears to be more a function of owner-tenant interplay, and neighborhood change than of the physical characteristics of the building itself. Analysis of abandonment's precursors indicates that the phenomenon will grow in national importance.