Abstract
The homeownership rate in the United States has continuously been about 20 percentage points higher than that of Germany. This homeownership gap is traced back to before the First World War at the urban level. Existing approaches, relying on socio-economic factors, demographics, culture or housing policy, cannot explain the persistence of these differences in homeownership. This article fills this explanatory gap by making a path-dependence argument: it argues that nineteenth-century urban conditions either began to create the American suburbanized single-family house cities or compact multi-unit-building cities, as in Germany. US cities developed differently from German ones because they lacked feudal shackles, were governed as “private cities” and gave easier access to mortgages and building land. The more historically suburbanized a city, the lower its homeownership rate today. Economic and political reinforcing mechanisms kept the two countries on their paths. The article’s contribution is to give a historical and city-focused answer to a standing question in the housing literature.
Highlights
Jim Kemeny once noted that English- and German-speaking countries have different housing regimes
The homeownership rate in the United States has continuously been about twenty percentage points higher as compared to Germany. This homeownership gap is for the first time traced back to before World War I on the urban level
The article’s contribution is to give a historic and city-focused answer to a standing question in the housing literature
Summary
Sebastian Kohl Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Jim Kemeny once noted that English- and German-speaking countries have different housing regimes.
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