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Lyndsey Rolheiser is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure. Lyndsey received a PhD in Urban Economics from MIT, a MA in Economics from Simon Fraser University, and a BSc in Mathematics and Finance from the University of Alberta.
Her research explores real estate as a spatial asset and centres questions around the people residing/working within it and regulating it. Lyndsey’s research interests include neighbourhoods and housing, commercial real estate and climate change, and transportation infrastructure and land use. Lyndsey employs a variety of methods and theoretical groundings to tackle these topics. She has published in the Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, American Journal of Public Health, Urban Studies, and Urban Geography.
Current work focuses on the effect of air pollution on commercial real estate economic indicators. A substantial amount of past literature investigates the relationship between air pollution and housing, but little is known about the effect on commercial real estate. In a new working paper, Lyndsey and co-authors find that increasing exposure to air pollution has a negative effect on office market values consistent with the notion that air pollution-induced decreases in commercial real estate values are driven by a reduction in the assets’ productive capacity. Additionally, they document that the negative impact on building-level income is concentrated in the apartment sector, which is consistent with a broad set of local dis-amenity mechanisms identified in previous residential real estate literature.
Recently accepted work by the Journal of Urban Economics asks the question how the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Lyndsey and co-authors show that the two factors accounting for the majority of the difference are commute mode and city of residence. While the shift of commute mode from transit to car commuting for Black commuters accounts for one quarter of the decline in the commute time difference over the past forty years, there remains a persistence in the difference in some cities. These cities tend to be large, segregated, congested, and expensive.
Lyndsey has had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of students— undergraduate economics, planning, and real estate students; masters and Ph.D students in planning, public policy, and real estate; and mid-career executive MBAs. She has developed and taught undergrad and graduate level courses in housing economics and policy; undergraduate real estate principles and a Ph.D level quantitative methods course.
