Housing and neighborhoods and a new national household panel

This paper considers the potential value of a new household panel to help understand issues related to housing and neighborhood conditions in the United States. The key scientific and policy issues that a panel study would be particularly valuable for addressing are primarily descriptive and include evaluating durations of exposures to housing and neighborhood conditions, and understanding factors determining household mobility that in turn determines the conditions that households experience and neighborhood compositions. For these purposes a national household panel has important advantages over existing data sources, and we offer several suggestions for key data elements to collect to maximize the information available for research in this area. We are agnostic about whether the creation of a new national household panel would be more valuable than devoting resources to enhancing the existing Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).