Housing indicators and research for policy from the perspective of applied economics

Abstract

Research on urban housing in European economies is urgently in need of new insights regarding both the integrating West and the transforming East. This paper focuses primarily upon those West European economies with mixed housing systems. There, new policy emphases and socio-economic challenges have confronted housing policy-makers since the end of the 1970s. The traditional postwar obsession with physically defined shortages has been replaced by concerns abqut affordability (Gibb, 1992). Now that deficiencies in internal amenity and condition have been largely redressed, policy is more concerned with strategic roles for housing in neighbourhood and urban regeneration (Brink, 1992). The means for pursuing housing policies have also changed: housing allowances have widely replaced rent distortions; there is a growing emphasis on market as opposed to state provision (Gibb, 1992); and there is rising pressure to establish value-for-money in spending and in linking housing programmes to social, urban and environmental policies (Maclennan, 1992a). All of these changes present obstacles to sound urban housing strategies. Those who implement and 'defend' housing policies in the face of fiscal stringency are increasingly having to point-up and measure the effects of those policies on health, employment, urban change etc. Moreover, there is increasing need to construct strategic urban policies which cross municipal boundaries, in recognition of the fact that housing systems and areas may have a functional integrity over wide geographic areas. At the same time, the national census which in most European countries contains no information on income, condition or neighbourhood quality is still directed at issues that were pertinent 40 years ago. Not only is there a systematic disregard for market data, other than in relation to migration, but few national or local governments have a conceptual understanding let alone hard empirical evidence, of market processes and outcomes.