Powering the vertical city: Electricity supply uncertainty in the high‐rise housing market

Abstract

A stable electricity supply is critical to high‐rise cities. This article studies how electricity supply uncertainty, triggered by Taiwan's 2017 power crisis, affects housing prices and migration in a densely populated, high‐rise urban area. The crisis involved 2 weeks of electricity rationing followed by the August 15 large‐scale blackout that affected nearly six million households. Using within‐building comparisons across floors, we find that the power crisis led to a persistent decline in the relative value of upper floor housing units. We interpret this as a revaluation of electricity reliability, as the crisis revealed larger than expected outage costs for upper floor units that depend more heavily on elevators and other electricity‐powered systems. The effects vary with households’ adaptation capacity and infrastructure resilience. We also find reduced in‐migration and slower taxable‐income growth in low‐income, high‐rise neighborhoods, suggesting that unreliable electricity supply can reshape residential sorting and reinforce spatial inequality.