Owner Occupation Research Articles

Car Parking and Residential Development: Sustainability, Design and Planning Policy, and Public Perceptions of Parking Provision

A review of literature reveals that parking policy is currently influenced by a desire for environmental sustainability and improvements in urban design. Sustainability seeks to establish less reliance than previously existed on private car usage, for example by promoting compact urban development in areas well served by good public transport. Urban design policy promotes a departure from the 'roads first, houses later' philosophy (as dictated by many highway standards) to give precedence to the relationship between buildings rather than strict adherence to predetermined road design in new residential environments. A new design approach to car parking was heralded by influential reports from eminent practitioners (Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force of 1999) and commissioned research (the report by Llewelyn-Davies Consultants on Parking Standards in South-East England). This indicated that the previously adopted orthodoxy of minimum standards should be replaced by maximum ceilings (i.e. no more than one space per dwelling). Such a trend towards reduction of parking standards (and thus provision) is at variance with the projected growth in car ownership (set to rise to 30 million private cars by 2025). This research plots the recent evolution of UK Government policy on parking standards and design and considers recent innovations adopted both nationally and internationally in an attempt to deal with the private car. Review of the literature reveals a body of research and best practice coupled with a growing theoretical base grounded in 'new urbanism'. Research is presented that collates the opinion of owner occupiers in recently constructed speculative housing, in an attempt to understand 'customer' attitudes to both car ownership, by location, and the aspirations of government policy. The findings of such an opinion poll revealed that occupiers are reluctant to give up car parking provision. Even if they do not own a car (or use one infrequently and are therefore more likely to give one up), the very possession of a space is important in their perception of property value or investment. Beyond this qualitative study, examples of 'best practice' are presented that examine, amongst other things, car-reduced/car-free development and international work on both the accommodation and reduction of parking in residential environments.

Dutch Personal Income Tax Reform 2001: An Exceptional Position for Owner-occupied Housing

This paper examines how personal income taxation has changed across countries and whether and how this has affected the taxation of owner-occupied dwellings. It presents a partial analysis as it focuses on imputed rent taxation and the mortgage interest deduction. Furthermore, the paper places housing taxation in a wider context by describing different benchmarks which could be used to assess the taxation of owner-occupied housing in different types of personal income tax. These international and theoretical points-of-departure are used to evaluate the taxation of owner-occupied housing in the Netherlands. The paper concludes that all along political arguments have conquered theoretical premises to the advantage of the owner occupier in comparison to the private landlord. It also concludes that the theoretical base in 2001 has become so weak that owner-occupied housing is in an exceptional position in comparison with other private wealth thus becoming an easy victim for future tax savings.

Government Intervention and Impact on the Housing Market in Greater Dublin

This paper examines the conflicting outcomes of government intervention in the housing market with particular reference to taxation instruments. The use of fiscal policy as a demand-side measure within the Irish housing market is discussed. Outcomes include a high growth environment, unsustainable house price inflation and pressure on owner occupiers due to the activities of investors. The paper reviews policy mechanisms advocated under the Bacon Reports and the government's policy response notably in relation to stamp duty changes. The analysis seeks to assess the impact of the policy measures in relation to different housing markets and house types in Dublin. The discussion highlights that the short-term impact of legislative changes can be rapidly nullified by market influences.

Consumption and Investment Motives in Housing Wealth Accumulation: A French Study

The dual motives of housing behavior, consumption and investment, make the analysis of housing purchases quite difficult. Nevertheless, it is better to refer to a model that keeps the two-dimensional aspect of housing [Henderson and Ioannides, Am. Econ. Rev.73, 93–111 (1983)]. In the absence of institutional considerations, this model predicts that it is the difference between the investment demand for housing and the consumption demand that explains decisions to purchase dwellings for owner occupation and for renting out. We have tested the model on the French data of the survey “Actifs Financiers 1992.” Results show that the difference between the two demands cannot in itself explain housing purchases. Transaction costs, the tax system, the public aid policies for home ownership, and other market imperfections are inadequately dealt with. Moreover, estimation and identification of housing demand functions, both for consumption and investment, tend to show that there are portfolio motives in the factors that determine housing demand for owner occupation. French households behave in a different way than U.S. households: for them, the difference between the two demands for housing explains behavior and consumption motives dominate primary residence purchase [Ioannides and Rosenthal, Rev. Econ. Statist.XX, 127–141 (1994)].

Housing Subsidies and Work Incentives in Great Britain

In Great Britain the move away from rented accommodation to owner occupation is leaving behind a large group of households with low incomes, wages and hours of work, and high housing costs, who are increasingly in receipt of welfare transfers. The disparity along all of these dimensions between renters and owner occupiers has continued to grow since the 1970’s. The relationship between housing costs, wages and transfer programmes is complex and yet plays an important part in determining the incentive to work for individuals in low income or high housing cost households. While it is true that many individuals who are in these categories are out of the labour force (retired, sick and disabled), there are many who are not and whose incentive to seek work, or to work harder if already in work, could be modified by directly changing the rent levels they face or indirectly via changes to the structure of programmes designed to subsidise housing for the poor. Here we estimate a static discrete choice labour supply model which allows for housing benefit programme participation. We use samples of 42491 married women and 13340 unmarried women drawn from Great Britain Family Resources Surveys 1994/5-97/8. We find that women are quite responsive to labour supply incentives, housing benefit income has similar incentive effects to earned income which suggests any stigma is small. Our analysis is complemented by simulating housing benefit and direct rent subsidy reforms.

Deprivation and late presentation of glaucoma: case-control study

Objective: To identify socioeconomic risk factors for first presentation advanced glaucomatous visual field loss.Design: Hospital based case-control study with prospective identification of patients.Setting: Three hospital eye departments.Participants: Consecutive patients newly...

Are There Tax Arbitrage Opportunities in Private Rental Housing Markets?

Tax arbitrage opportunities in rental housing markets arise when high bracket taxpayers exploit the tax shelter and conversion features of the tax treatment of rental housing and as a consequence offer low bracket taxpayers rental housing at a cost lower than if they purchased the same quantity of housing for owner occupation. A microdata set has been employed to estimate the size of these tax arbitrage opportunities with respect to 1907 properties owned by Australian landlords. The measure of tax arbitrage opportunities is the breakeven tax rate at which the maximum rental rate a potential occupant is prepared to pay before turning to purchased housing is equal to the landlord's reservation rental rate. Potential occupants with marginal tax rates below the breakeven tax rate find that renting has a relative cost advantage over home purchase. When agency costs (the costs incurred in managing landlord-tenant relationships) are included in the tax arbitrage model, our estimates of the breakeven tax rate indicate that home purchase has a relative cost advantage over renting for most potential occupants. Renting is only financially attractive to low tax bracket individuals. This finding is consistent with Australian tenure patterns. However, there are more puzzling results. A majority of landlords belong to tax brackets below the top bracket, landlords in the lowest tax brackets typically make below normal profits, and reservation rental rates at the bottom of the rental housing market are relatively high. Down payment requirements, lock-in effects, and rent clientele groups are put forward as possible explanations for these findings.

Ontological Security and Psycho-Social Benefits from the Home: Qualitative Evidence on Issues of Tenure

It has been said that people need the confidence, continuity and trust in the world which comprise ontological security in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives, and furthermore that ontological security can be attained more through owner occupied than rented housing. Ontological security, however, can be elusive both in a real sense and in empirical research terms. As part of a study of the relationships between housing tenure and health, we explored through in-depth interviews with 43 adults the extent to which home owners and social renters in the West of Scotland obtained psycho-social benefits from their homes. It is important to acknowledge the regional context of the study, in particular the residualised state of social rented housing in the UK and the problematic, post-industrial nature of the Scottish regional economy. Interviewees felt protected by their homes when they were in a low crime area which was more likely to be in an area of owner occupied housing. For some interviewees owner occupation provided less protection than social renting from the threat of losing the home because of the risk of repossession. Inhabiting a house rather than a flat could promote autonomy over the home, as could having skills or income to carry out repairs and maintenance. Owner occupation was thought to be more prestigious than social renting, but whether being prestigious was desirable was sometimes contested. Interviewees also talked about ontological security in terms of the home being a site of constancy but this runs counter to the restless tendency to move house in order to progress in society and move up the housing ladder.

Movement Into and Out of the Private Rental Sector in England

The private rental sector in England is often regarded as a largely transitional tenure. It is seen as forming the lower rung of a hierarchical tenure ladder, up which households move over time on the way to an ultimate destination of owner occupation or, failing that, social rented housing. It has been recognised, however, that households may 'fall out' of the two main tenures and return to private renting. Drawing on data from the 1996-97 Survey of English Housing, this paper examines the characteristics of households that had moved into or out of the private rental sector in the previous 12 months. Although the sector remains a net exporter of households, it was found that only part of the reverse flow back into private renting could be accurately described as a process of 'falling out' of the two main tenures. A significant share of the movement from social housing into private renting was due to households who had moved in order to live in a better house or neighbourhood. The paper outlines the reasons for this phenomenon and discusses its implications for the role of private renting in England.

Wohnkosten und Besitzformwahl. Empirische Ergebnisse der Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe / Housing Costs and Tenure Choice. Empirical Results from the Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe

Zusammenfassung Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, welchen Einfluß die Kosten der Besitzformen Miete und Eigentum auf die Besitzformwahl der Haushalte haben. Die Werte der meisten relevanten Variablen lassen sich mit der als Datenbasis verwendeten Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe (EVS) des Jahres 1993 haushaltsindividuell ermitteln und müssen nicht durch „übliche“ oder mittlere Werte approximiert werden. Mit Regressionsansätzen werden kalkulatorische Mietkosten und Verkehrswerte (Wert des gebundenen Vermögens) bestimmt. Die Verwendung kalkulatorischer Werte gewährleistet die Vergleichbarkeit von Mieter- und Eigentümerhaushalten und stellt auf beobachtete marktpreisbestimmende Wohnungsmerkmale ab. Die Gegenüberstellung von Mietkosten und Selbstnutzungskosten (ermittelt als Kapitalkosten des gebundenen Vermögens, Steuervorteil und Erhaltungsaufwand) ergibt eine Kostendifferenz, die sich in verschiedenen Logit-Modellen als die erklärungskräftigste Variable erweist. Das Einkommen und soziodemographische Variablen dienen offenbar bei weniger sorgfältiger, d.h. haushaltsindividueller Operationalisierung der Kostenvariable auch als Proxies für bestimmte Kostenkomponenten.

Lease terms in Spain compared to the UK

Creating a leisure centre, whether with or without any retail floorspace, raises similar problems to the creation of a shopping centre. There are plenty of shopping centres in Spain, but the concept of creating an investment with growth potential is a comparatively new one in the country. Most of the shopping centres built there until quite recently were either built by the hypermarket operators, who were owner occupiers of the majority of the space, or a developer who sold as much of the development as he could to owner occupiers so as to finance the scheme. The concept of keeping the centre as an investment, selling the completed centre to an insurance company or pension fund, until recently, was unknown or at least untried.

The future for leisure property in the UK

Not so long ago, leisure was considered a Cinderella property sector. It was perceived to be driven by highly volatile discretionary spending, there were relatively few multiple occupiers (compared to, say, the retail sector), and what new development there was tended to be one-off single-use schemes often built for owner occupiers on a bespoke basis. As a sector it was almost completely ignored in property textbooks, and was considered very much to be a specialist part of the property profession. This contrasts with the present situation as the sector is now increasingly viewed as a distinct, albeit varied, mainstream property sector in its own right. In the 1990s the sector experienced strong expenditure growth and there is major representation by multiple occupiers in each sub-sector willing to take on long traditional institutional-type leases. This has stimulated institutional investment and helped cause a development boom of unprecedented magnitude, both in town centres to service eating and drinking (part of the move back to city-centre living) and out of centre in multi-use leisure parks (accessed by car), a form of development which hardly existed a decade ago. This paper is an edited version of a document on the future of leisure produced for the RICS Research Foundation and published as part of 2020: Visions of the Future; it considers, briefly, the main drivers for change in the leisure sector and then considers the implications for the property market.

The incidence of slum clearance in England and Wales, 1955–85

The article begins by showing the differential impact of slum clearance on regions, conurbations and major cities through the three decades of the slum clearance campaign which began in 1955. It discusses the main methods of clearance procedure, the nature of compensation and the relation of clearance to ‘unfit’ housing. House condition surveys revealed an increasing mismatch between patterns of unfit housing and those of slum clearance and this began, it is argued, in the 1960s. Factors such as the development of property markets, and the rise of owner occupation, had differential economic and political effects which in turn reacted on the incidence of clearance.

Estimating the Housing Wealth of Older Home Owners in Britain

Household surveys have recently started to collect data on the original purchase price of owner occupiers' homes. This provides a firmer basis for investigating the joint distribution of housing wealth, income and other personal characteristics than has hitherto existed. However, a number of difficulties arise which are discussed in this paper. A method is presented and validated, developed in the course of assessing the housing wealth of older home owners, for dealing with the specific problems associated with those who purchased their properties at discounted prices, whether through the Right to Buy or other routes. The method is based on data from the British Household Panel Survey, and subsequently applied to the UK Family Expenditure Survey to explore the housing wealth of older people. It also yields estimates of housing equity for younger people and can be implemented with other similar surveys.

Choice of mortgage instrument, liquidity constraints and the demand for housing debt in the UK

The research uses microdata to estimate reduced form mortgage demand equations based on truncated regressions, dissagregated by choice of mortgage instrument. The choice is between a standard annuity mortgage and a balloon type mortgage (the endowment). The estimates are used to indicate the differential impact of credit market rationing and financial liberalization on households. The results indicate significant variations in mortgage demand by choice of mortgage instrument. Econometric testing demonstrates that the choice between an endowment and a repayment mortgage can be used as an exogenous indicator of liquidity and portfolio positions and different user costs of owner occupation.

Housing for Health: The Role of Owner Occupation

Housing is widely regarded as playing an important role in the mediation and management of health inequalities. British policy-makers are increasingly looking to the research community to specify what it is about housing environments that impact on health, and to identify what housing interventions constitute healthy public policies. To feed into this debate, this paper begins by reviewing the state of the art of research on housing and health. It shows that the majority of work continues to focus on how housing affects health, while the limited attention to how health status affects housing outcomes has concentrated on medical priority for rehousing in the public sector. It is argued, however, that the market sector now merits closer scrutiny among those concerned with the health selectivity of the housing system. Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews, questions are raised about: how readily people with health problems and mobility difficulties gain access to owner occupation; how easily they sustain a position in that tenure sector; and how effective they are in maintaining their homes as healthy enabling living environments.

Costs and fiscal subsidies in owner occupation: Method and outcomes

This article formulates an answer to the followingquestion: Which concept is most suitable to compare the levels ofhousing costs and fiscal subsidies among owner-occupiers and how canthis concept be applied? First, the concepts of housing expenditure anduser costs of capital are evaluated. The preference for the latter conceptis then explained and the notion of subsidy is defined within the usercost framework. Finally, the use of the preferred concept is illustratedwith hypothetical calculations for sample households in Denmark,England, the Netherlands and Germany.

Inequities in health. Socioeconomic status and transitions in status in old age in relation to limiting long-term illness measured at the 1991 census. Results from the UK longitudinal study

Background: In the light of increasing interest in health inequalities, this paper aims to assess I) whether material deprivation in late middle age and early old age is associated with greater risk of limiting long-term illness 20 years later and ii) whether deterioration in socioeconomic status during the first 10 years carries a higher risk than remaining in a higher status. Methods: The Longitudinal Study comprised a 1% sample of people registered on the 1971 Census in England and Wales; data from successive censuses are linked with vital events such as deaths. The subjects were 23,320 people aged 55–74 years in 1971 and living in the community in 1971, 1981 and 1991. Logistic regression was used to perform the analyses. Results: The relative risk of having a limiting long-term illness 20 years later for people in rented accommodation without a car at age 55–64 years was 1.2 compared to those in owner-occupied accommodation with a car. For those aged 65–74 years in 1971 the excess risk was 9%. Moving out of owner occupation between 1971 and 1981 and losing access to a car were associated with excess risk similar to that for people already disadvantaged in 1971. Thus, socioeconomic circumstances In late middle and early old age and deterioration in such circumstances after age 55 years, are associated with limiting long-term illness among people who have survived in the community until at least age 75 years. Conclusion: Although health selection cannot be ruled out, it appears that health inequalities do not completely disappear in very old age.

Public Policy and Renewal of Old Housing: The Case of Nord-Pas-de-Calais

The rules and laws enforced in France in 1977 regarding the policy of old housing renewal have extended public intervention to the whole housing stock built before 1948. It came as a complement to the 1962 Malraux Law which exclusively concerned old city centres whose architectural value was preserved. Has the objective put forward to improve old housing by maintaining their residents (tenants and owner occupiers) been reached? The public policy of old housing renewal and its consequences on social occupancy are analysed in their relation to the ownership structure and to the property strategies of the actors who finance this rehabilitation. The paper examines Nord-Pas-de-Calais, one of the regions in France where the old housing stock is the lowest in quality. As for the social changes in the occupancy of these neighbourhoods, our 1995 study confirmed the results obtained in 1988. Four years after the end of the improvement programmes, these neighbourhoodshave retained a residential function for working-class occupants. However, two new trends emerged. On the one hand, despite a better integration of old housing in the policies implemented by local authorities since the 1982-83 decentralisation law, the incentive role of state aids to renewal is increasingly limited. On the other hand, property disinvestment has only been partially reduced. Some housing units remain unimproved and some buildings remain unoccupied. The housing supply is higher than the demand. Ownership of old housing is undermined by demand for housing estates in suburban areas.

Unravelling the "Australian Housing Solution": The Post-War Years

Australia has long been seen as the prime example of a ?home owning democracy?. More than 50% of the population were home owners by the turn of the 20th century. This figure climbed to 70% in the first 15 years after the Second World War. More than 90% of middle aged and older Australians alive today have owned their dwelling at some stage in their lives. However, in the 1990s there are clear signs that home ownership is on the decline. The proportion of households purchasing on a mortgage is falling across all age groups and income classes. Decline is particularly evident among younger and lower income groups, suggesting that underlying economic and demographic forces are at work. Governments at all levels in Australia are turning away from an almost exclusive concern with encouraging owner occupation in favour of targeting housing subsidies towards low income tenants in the private rental market, as well as the small social housing sector. This paper traces the rise and imminent decline of owner occupation in Australia over past 50 years, identifying the structural social and economic factors responsible and placing the analysis within a theoretical framework informed by regulation theory and David Harvey's analysis of the Keynesian and post-Keynesian cities.