Does the presence of deteriorating housing affect nearby property owner’s decision to maintain their units? Does demolishing these distressed houses increase nearby homeowner’s maintenance investment? In this paper, I examine these questions by testing whether exposure to targeted demolitions of abandoned and distressed housing affects changes in the external condition of nearby houses. Using two waves of a property inventory in Cleveland, Ohio, my models suggest that, compared with a control group of houses located near vacant housing, proximity to demolitions decreases the likelihood that a property’s condition deteriorated between 2015 and 2018 and increases the likelihood that it improved.
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Daniel Kuhlmann (2020) studied this question.
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