Housing Studies

Exploring the housing preferences between owner-occupied and investment properties sheds light on housing market dynamics and consumer behaviours. Through discrete choice experiments we identify three segments: CBD, suburban, and exurban dwellers, and segment their preferences according to when purchasing a property to live in versus purchasing one as a small-scale investment. Our findings indicate that suburban dwellers are willing to pay $2.924 million and$2.246 million more, respectively, to live in a house rather than in an apartment or a townhouse. However, they would pay around $682,000 more to invest in a house compared to a townhouse. CBD dwellers are willing to pay$643 per month extra for a newer property and suburban investors would pay around $540,000 extra for a property near the coast. CBD investors prioritize capital growth, while suburban and exurban investors are more concerned with rental return. All segments prefer Anglo-Australian neighbourhood's, with suburban dwellers willing to pay$1,430 more per month for them.

In early 2020, while China’s centralised governance response rapidly brought COVID-19 under control, tenure inequality and private rental sector precarity continued unabated. Drawing on stakeholder interviews in Shanghai, nation-wide renter complaints analysis, and a review of government pandemic reactions, this paper reveals the stark contrast between the neglect of renters’ rights and stringent public health measures. Under this prevailing governance model, renters’ wellbeing – including the right to secure occupancy – was effectively over-ridden during the COVID-19 emergency. This approach will have further degraded the reputation and appeal of rental tenure, detracting from state aspirations for greater equality between renting and owner-occupation – the Chinese Government’s ‘tenure neutrality’ initiative, ongoing since 2017. The study highlights how pandemic responses exacerbated existing housing inequalities and argues for proactive government commitments to protect marginalised populations’ secure occupancy and avoid accentuating tenure inequality during crisis periods.

As a densely populated city, Hong Kong's housing market is the least affordable in the world. This paper aims to uncover the underlying socioeconomic factors behind the changing home-ownership patterns of new immigrants before and after the handover. While Mainland immigrants enjoyed the highest likelihood of homeownership among new immigrants before the handover, their advantage disappeared after the handover. The findings support the Assimilation theory's prediction that homeownership is lower among those less assimilated in general, but not among Mainland migrants. Those who were married, well-educated, employers; and had longer residences were more likely to be homeowners. Various admission schemes are implemented to attract talents, professionals and entrepreneurs to reside in Hong Kong but there is no accompanying housing policy to enable immigrants to become homeowners. The results show the home-ownership rate of new immigrants dropped by more than half after the handover. Immigrants may feel less secure calling Hong Kong their home if they don't own a "home".

The governance of informal settlements in China – primarily urban villages – remains a persistent challenge. Recently, some urban village houses have been transformed into long-term rental apartments (LRAs). This highlights a potentially novel approach to addressing the longstanding informality issue, but how the rental market in urban villages has thus been reshaped remains unknown. Examining the case of Shenzhen’s Yuanfen Village through the lens of regulating informality, this paper reveals that (1) new renovations are facilitated by the intermediary management of LRA companies with government consent; (2) the renovation into LRAs involves a balancing process among stakeholders but leaves the illegal aspects untouched; and (3) while the renovation improves the living environment, low-income households are inevitably displaced. This study contributes to a theoretical and practical understanding of regulating informality by challenging the monolithic formal-informal dichotomy and connecting the conceptualization and materialization of continuous and dynamic property rights that enable new possibilities for effective and inclusive management of urban growth.

Fiscal policy allocation is not purely determined by the labour-capital conflict, but increasingly around cross-class housing coalitions. Although rising house prices are conventionally understood as drivers of fiscal austerity, this view has been challenged. Alternatively, governments may use fiscal policies to support house price growth to meet the primary economic interests of homeowners and compensate non-homeowners through the welfare system. Using an econometric analysis of 19 advanced economies between 1980 and 2018, we show house prices have positive effects on taxation revenue as well as fiscal spending on public investment, welfare and education. A second multi-level analysis provides a political explanation of this observed outcome by demonstrating parties respond to rising house prices by proposing more welfare and public investment spending in their manifestos. Conterminously rising house prices and rents also lead to greater welfare spending, suggesting governments use fiscal policy to protect those excluded from homeownership from labour market risks.

Housing scholars have demonstrated that intimate partner violence (IPV) is a key driver of housing instability. Contributing to existing housing literature that foregrounds the importance of material and psychological housing instability, our empirical research focuses on a novel programme providing supportive housing for women, the majority of whom are allocated housing to protect them from IPV. Our data includes in-depth interviews with the supportive housing tenants and practitioners, as well as administrative data. Our findings illuminate the close interrelation between material and psychological housing instability, and demonstrate how problems inherent in the private rental market interact with issues caused by perpetrators' ongoing use of violence in ways that make it impossible for women to achieve either form of stability. The implication for housing scholars is to understand that although affordable housing is a protective measure, supportive housing models that rely on the private rental market, face profound limitations in achieving material and psychological housing stability for women who experience IPV.

Since 2017, Taipei City government has implemented a policy to expand the rental housing market with a set of incentives for landlords that brings more affordable apartments to the market. This study applied visual content analysis to online rental housing advertisements to investigate the private rental market’s ability to provide adequate housing. The results show limited supply in the affordable price range, structural deficits, and elements contributing to an unsafe and unhealthy living environment. Also, accessibility is not ensured, as 91% of the units are in walk-up buildings. In addition, the prospects of the current policy direction for improving tenants’ precarity in the private rental market are weak, as discrimination and lease insecurity are not being addressed. This paper discusses the potential adverse effects of the current policy direction, including hindering urban regeneration efforts and fuelling a ‘Generation Landlord’. A tenant-centred, multidimensional approach to affordability is recommended as a starting point for future policy design.

Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequalities. This study utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice to explore place-making practices in one type of illegalized housing, the residential use of industrial buildings. In contrast to studies of housing inequalities that have typically focused on marginalized communities, we found that the use of industrial buildings was adopted by educated, ‘local’ (i.e. ethnically Chinese) Hong Kongers who aspired towards socio-economic mobility. Place-making required spatial adaptations to sub-standard living environments and acclimation to routine, ongoing fears of detection from law enforcement. We argue that illegality is not necessarily an impediment to place-making, but may serve to mark the temporariness of residential spaces in industrial buildings, a temporariness that accommodates residents’ aspirational socio-economic trajectories more effectively than formal housing markets. In our study, the meaning of a place was not necessarily tied to rootedness or permanence, but rather a liminal temporality enforced by illegality.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has become a global issue and caused a major refugee crisis in Europe. The displacement of millions of people from Ukraine, who entered neighbouring countries, attributed to a housing demand shock in host cities and subsequent increases in rents and prices. The article investigates the housing market reaction in Poland’s five largest cities caused by the arrival of refugees from Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022. We use a difference-in-difference quasi-experimental scenario to test whether exposure to mass refugee inflow translates to housing market dynamics. According to our findings, an increase in a city population of 1 pp caused by the inflow of refugees led to a 0.72–0.74% increase in housing rents. Additionally, we found some evidence that the arrival of migrants may have slightly increased apartment prices; however, the impact is smaller than in the case of rents and statistically significant only in selected specifications. The paper contributes to the literature on the impact of immigration or refugee inflow on housing market dynamics. The rent increases reported in this study may have serious housing policy implications, both in the short and mid-run.

Prior scholarship has documented and tried to explain growing inequalities in individual wealth holdings—especially between homeowners and renters—but has not considered the role of residential position in the rural-urban hierarchy. We estimate fixed-effect models of one’s rank in national net, housing and financial wealth distributions during the 2010–2018 period, based on Norwegian register data on prime-age individuals. We find dramatic geographic differences in trajectories of wealth accumulation that are strongly conditioned by tenure. Residing longer in a more urbanized area—especially in the central Oslo region—results in a substantially higher net wealth position only for homeowners. This result is driven overwhelmingly by their greatly superior gains in housing wealth over the period. By contrast, the net wealth and financial wealth positions for those who always rent are virtually indistinguishable across the hierarchy, regardless of duration of residence. Our evidence suggests that the positive correlation between earnings and rent levels across the rural-urban hierarchy yields this result.

This paper examines the housing trajectories of complete cohorts of asylum migrants in Switzerland. It emphasizes the logistics of housing allocation by local authorities and how it shapes individual opportunity structure. We use full-population register data and analyse one key transition: the transition out of collective centre assigned upon arrival to the private and subsidized housing sectors. Event history models show the association between individual and contextual factors and the speed of access to private housing. Despite the quasi-autonomous management of refugee housing by region, priority rules regarding access to private housing were found to apply across the country. When choosing between different profiles, women, older asylum migrants, married individuals, and members of larger national groups are favoured in obtaining access to private housing. Nevertheless, the time spent in collective centres largely depends on the region to which a claimant is assigned, pointing to the minimal agency asylum migrants have during their first years of residence.

Insecure housing-particularly for low-income groups-constitutes a critical and enduring social problem. While Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) initiatives show promise as a solution to mitigate this issue, research assessing their impact remains limited. This paper makes three contributions to the empirical PSH literature: it develops a novel framework to measure the success of PSH tenancy outcomes; it expands the evidence-base to consider the role of tenancy issues and provider-initiated tenancy-sustainment supports; and it provides new evidence on a single-site PSH initiative in Queensland (Australia)-Brisbane Common Ground (BCG). We use 10 years' worth of administrative data on all 417 tenancies-both concluded and ongoing-taking place since the onset of BCG in July 2012 and up to November 2022. Our main analyses combine descriptive statistics, event-history analyses, and logistic regression models. Results reveal significant heterogeneity in the probability of experiencing positive PSH tenancies across socio-demographic groups, the intervening role of tenancy issues, and the partially protective role of provider tenancy-sustainment initiatives. The results, however, vary depending on the lens through which PSH tenancy outcomes are viewed. These findings stress the need for targeted PSH strategies that better cater for the complex needs of specific subgroups of tenants.

Housing system transitions often involve successive but overlapping periods of reform with crucial implications for housing inequality dynamics. Building on welfare regime and market transition discussions , this paper considers how the shifting roles of the state, market , and family in housing provision in China have led to changing housing tenures and differentiated access to them between populations with varying socioeconomic resources. Drawing on two national datasets, our analyses reveal that the four decades of reforms dramatically upended urban China's tenure structure with market homeownership becoming the dominant tenure. Nevertheless, we find a substantial and increasing role of the family in housing provision, especially for people with fewer socioeconomic resources. The advantages associated with better institutional resources under the previous socialist housing system not only persist in accessing state-provided tenures but have also extended their influence into market housing. Meanwhile, homeownership outcomes have become increasingly polarized among groups with different income and education levels. Our findings expose the reproduction and apparent amplification of tenure-related housing inequalities over the period of housing regime transformation.

Parental support increasingly influences young people’s housing outcomes. Using OLS models, this study examines the relative effects of parental and own socioeconomic status and political resources on young homeowners’ housing quality and their temporal dynamics in Beijing, China. We find that the market transition theory has explanatory power for both generations. However, the socioeconomic status of parents outweighs that of young homeowners in influencing their multifaceted housing qualities. These housing qualities are also positively associated with parents’, but negatively with the young homeowners’ political resources. This indicates power persistence theory does not stand for the younger generation, but parental political advantages derived from the socialist system are remanent in shaping contemporary youth’s housing stratification. The more recent the acquisition of homeownership by young adult children, the stronger the positive influence of parental attributes, but the weaker the influence of the younger generation’s own attributes. This demonstrates the intergenerational reproduction of housing stratification and socio-spatial inequality becomes more pronounced as housing affordability declines.

In recent decades, access to housing in community settings has been a priority for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in many developed countries. While community living is recognized as an important goal, it has often been harder to achieve in practice given a shortage of appropriate housing choices and difficulties accessing supports. More work is also needed to ensure that views and preferences of people labelled/with intellectual disabilities inform the development of new housing options. In this paper, we employ a qualitative, arts-informed methodology to examine the housing experiences and aspirations of a small group of people labelled/with intellectual disabilities in Ontario, Canada. Our analysis focuses on three related elements of participants' experience of housing and home: the immediate dwelling and living arrangements, the supportive relationships that sustain people in their housing, and the social and environmental amenities within the neighbourhood. We then discuss the broader significance of this research with respect to housing provision, highlighting issues of choice, support, and connection.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Work from home (WFH) received much public attention. Imposing such a measure was feasible in the context of labour markets' flexibilisation, which has reshaped urban live-work relationships. However, the pandemic's effects on those relationships have rarely been explored in housing and planning studies. This paper draws a research agenda based on a literature review of the changes in urban live-work relationships, which were accelerated and legitimised under COVID-19. The latter is considered an exogenous shock contingent upon several other shocks, embedded in structural crises and accelerating ongoing trends. The literature confirms the acceleration of hybrid work for those able to do so, which has fuelled debates on home usage and legitimated planning discourses based on urban proximity, densification and mixed use. Hence, we encourage critical research on (i) the conceptualisations of WFH and COVID-19, (ii) housing policy responses to accumulated uncertainties and regulations for quality and resilient housing, and (iii) the critical analysis of WFH-oriented planning.

Home is not only a concrete place and a complex system of relations, but also an end-in-view that connects perceived shortcomings in the current versions of home with the desired goals and the means to achieve them. Our case study centres on a dining improvement project which strives to create home in residential institutions for people identified as disabled by serving a ‘home-like meal’. We describe three versions of home that are enacted in residential institutions – home as a commune, home as a private space and home as an intimate sphere – and document how they influence the serving of meals. We combine pragmatic theory of valuation with ethnographic research of home-making practices to assess the feasibility of these ends-in-view in relation to the housing options available to the disabled-identified. We show that when the realization of the chosen goals proves unfeasible under present circumstances, the discrepancies between the desired and actual versions of home can be effaced through various re-contextualization strategies. Of the three versions of home encountered during our intervention/research, the home enacted as an intimate sphere is the one most firmly grounded in clients’ real wishes and needs, and therefore the one most favourable to positive change.

The surge in second-home ownership, particularly in China, has garnered significant interest. This study delves into the motivations and satisfaction levels of Chinese second-home owners, with a focus on Confucian cultural influences and 'face' consciousness. Surveying 327 s-home owners in Wentang Town, China, we employ a Structural Equation Model to unravel the intricate relationships. Our findings spotlight the importance of nostalgia in fostering place attachment, influencing both individual and family 'face. ' Place attachment, in turn, positively impacts satisfaction, primarily mediated through family 'face, ' underscoring the cultural significance of filial piety. Additionally, we identify a moderating effect of the distance between primary and second homes, emphasizing the role of Confucianism in shaping family-centric decisions. This study offers insights into the motivations and satisfaction of Chinese second-home owners, illuminating cultural nuances. It also provides practical recommendations for policymakers and the real estate industry, advocating for family-centric second-home experiences and improved transportation accessibility.