In its research brief “School Quality Influences Where Parents Choose to Live—and How Much They’re Willing to Pay for Their Homes,” the Urban Institute’s Housing Matters initiative presented recent findings by Assistant Professor Orestes Pat Hastings and Adam Goldstein (Princeton). Their paper “Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption” was published by Sociological Science in May 2019.

The Urban Institute’s Housing Matters initiative uses research, strategic advising, technical assistance, and communications to improve interrelated outcomes in people’s lives and communities. The Urban Institute is a nonprofit research organization staffed by nearly 500 social scientists, economists, communicators, mathematicians, demographers, and data scientists. It was founded in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson to “help solve the problem that weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of all of us—the problem of the American city and its people.”