Two Seminars Organized by the Spatial Warsaw Center

The Spatial Warsaw research center has invited Dr Sándor Juhász (Corvinus University of Budapest) and Dr Kristóf Gyódi (Faculty of Economic Sciences University of Warsaw, DELab UW) to deliver two lectures as part of its seminar series.

The researcher from the Hungarian university will present a study titled „Urban social inequalities through social media data”. The event will take place on Monday, 17 November, at 17:00 in room B111.

The second seminar, featuring Dr Gyódi, will be held on Thursday, 20 November, at 15:00 in Auditorium E. The speaker will deliver a lecture titled „The Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulations on Housing Market Outcomes in U.S. Cities”.

We cordially encourage you to read the abstracts of both presentations, which are provided below.

All those interested in online participation are kindly asked to contact Dr Kateryna Zabarina at: K10@a.{gr\#zPZmo=By65R~]#[3+lyC{eVTs}i2ccgG~^+BCk.

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"Urban social inequalities through social media data"

This talk presents three studies on how social connectivity reflects urban inequalities across the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, using large-scale social networks derived from Twitter data. The first study shows that low-income individuals maintain more spatially concentrated social ties centered around their home neighborhoods. The second reveals that longer commutes expand the structure and composition of social ties within cities. The third demonstrates that highways act as barriers, fragmenting local social networks and reinforcing spatial divisions. Together, these studies highlight how socio-economic characteristics and infrastructure shape inequalities in urban social connectedness, offering new insights into the geography of social opportunity through the lens of digital interaction data.

"The Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulations on Housing Market Outcomes in U.S. Cities"

The short-term rental (STR) market—driven by the rise of platforms such as Airbnb—expanded rapidly throughout the 2010s, especially in major cities, reducing housing availability and affecting neighborhood dynamics. In response, many U.S. cities implemented stringent STR restrictions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., New York, Boston, Chicago), while others introduced regulations more recently (e.g., Philadelphia) or maintained a relatively relaxed regulatory environment (e.g., Indianapolis). Regulatory efforts have typically aimed to preserve housing availability for local residents and to protect affordability. While existing empirical research has shown that enforced STR regulations reduce STR supply, less is known about the broader impacts on the housing market. This work seeks to fill that gap by identifying the effects of STR regulations on STR supply, home values, and rents. The analysis draws on ZIP code–level data from 2015 to 2023 for 27 U.S. cities. This study leverages variation in the timing of STR regulations across 27 U.S. cities from 2015 to 2023, employing Two-Way Fixed Effects and Callaway and Sant’Anna’s (2021) doubly robust estimator to estimate causal impacts. The results show a strong and statistically significant reduction in STR supply: on average, ZIP codes in regulated cities have 40% fewer listings due to these policies. The impact on the housing market, while more modest and heterogeneous across the cities, is still significant, with substantial decrease in home values and rents.