Hello and welcome to the Git repository of my research paper "How does closeness to a university affect housing affordability for students in New York?"
This research paper seeks to analyze the impact of the vicinity of a university in New York state on housing affordability, with the goal of finding the relationship between higher education and housing prices, if it exists. The state of New York has been chosen specifically due to the presence of numerous notable universities like NYU, Cornell University, and Colombia University.
The data analyzed includes 67,157 housing prices in New York collected from realtor.com (2023), broken down by state and zip code. The dependent variable for analysis is house price, and the price is the current listing price unless it has been recently sold, in which case the price is the recently sold price; and the key independent variable is the vicinity to a notable university for a given house. In this paper, the independent variable will be estimated by calculating the distance from the house's ZIP code centroid to the nearest university's coordinates, which are obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics (2024).
Analysis reveals that university proximity is indeed significantly correlated with housing price, but so are all other variables such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, density of public schools in the area, house and acre size, acceptance rate of the nearest university, etc. No doubt housing price is a complex value that is influenced by a plethora of factors. Without an instrumental variable analysis, it will be difficult to discern the causal effect of university proximity on house price.
- Research Paper: Research Paper.pdf
- Presentation slides: Presentation Slides.pdf
- Final Python script: Free Real Estate 4-F.ipynb
- raw data: folder containing all the raw data obtained and used in the project
- images: images generated for the project
Note: I presented this paper with a slightly different title, "How Proximity to a University Affects Housing Affordability for Students in New York." I had wanted to change the title of my paper to this one, but stuck with the original title and genuinely forgot to change the title back on the presentation. Anyways, the two titles refer to the same paper.