House price increases and higher density housing occupation: the response of non-white households in London, 2001–2011

Abstract

London's housing prices have increased over recent decades at a much faster rate than incomes creating financial and quality-of-life problems for many of its inhabitants. This increase has occurred during a period of population growth, much of it of immigrant lower income individuals, families and households, and their descendants who are members of London's burgeoning ethnic minority populations. This paper explores whether members of such groups have suffered disproportionately from those problems and have had to respond by changing their patterns of housing consumption. It concludes that densification, whereby housing is occupied at higher densities, has been a common response to the problems, but that it has been experienced more than elsewhere in neighbourhoods where members of the ethnic minority groups are concentrated.