Opening a homeless shelter can actually boost nearby home prices by as much as 36%.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Homeless shelter openings and housing sale prices
SSRN · 6463855
The Takeaway
While homeowners often fight shelters fearing property value drops (NIMBYism), this study of Florida real estate found the opposite. The researchers suggest that shelters act as a local amenity by moving people off the streets and into managed facilities, which improves the immediate neighborhood more effectively than leaving the population unsheltered.
From the abstract
Despite pushback against human service providers due to claims of concentrated costs, little causal evidence exists on residents’ willingness to pay to be further from service providers. We fill this gap, asking how opening a homeless service provider affects local housing prices, using parcel-level data on house sales and services in Florida from 2009-2024. We estimate non-parametric local polynomial regressions and spatial difference-in-differences (bandwidth 0.1 miles) of home sale prices at