Promotion Of Home Ownership Research Articles

Affordable Housing for First-Time Homebuyers: Issues and Implications from the Malaysian Experience

There is little evidence to inform discussion of the challenges of meeting housing needs of first-time homebuyers in conditions of rapid urbanisation in Malaysia. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges of promoting home ownership for first-time Malaysian homebuyers. This paper also offers suggestions regarding sustainable housing provision for them to own their home. In order to achieve sustainability in the housing delivery system, affordable housing schemes must be economically viable, socially acceptable and technically feasible. Government should be transparent about logistics, location, pricing and implementation to ensure that there is action behind the words.

Testing Home Ownership as the Cornerstone of Welfare: Lessons from East Asia for the West

In recent years, one driver behind the promotion of home ownership in Western countries has been the belief that owner-occupied housing assets provide a means to build up individual welfare security, potentially offsetting pension shortfalls in retirement. In contrast, many developed East Asian societies have both long focussed on advancing ‘asset’ or ‘property-based welfare’ systems as well as experienced the late-1990s Asian Financial Crisis which forced changes in housing and welfare practices. This paper examines how home ownership and asset-based welfare fared in these contexts and the lessons to be learned. It begins by considering the role of owner-occupied housing assets in different welfare regimes before empirically examining how asset-based welfare systems have been realized. It then considers how East Asian home ownership and asset-based welfare systems have stood-up to economic crises. The final section considers what the East Asian experiences contribute to an understanding of the housing assets–welfare relationship.

Measuring the impact of higher density housing development

PurposeThe introduction of higher density housing development within suburban areas has been favoured by state governments in Australia as a means of improving the efficiency of land use, reducing the costs associated with the delivery of government services and promoting home ownership. However it has been hypothesised that such development may have a negative impact on neighbourhood social structure, for example reducing diversity as measured by economic status and family makeup or in local housing market performance as measured by price. This paper aims to test this hypothesis.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology employs a quantitative approach with principal components analysis used to capture the main social structure of the Adelaide Statistical Division. Social constructs, the product of principal components analysis, are used to measure outcomes of higher density development as measured by community or household change.FindingsThe results in this paper show that densification has had significant impact on certain neighbourhoods in the Adelaide Statistical Division notably in relation to their built form but not necessarily in neighbourhood structure or housing market performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are significant in highlighting that increasing medium densities and improving tenure mix may not necessarily improve the opportunities for socio‐economic mix or for cultural diversity with implications for policy makers seeking to follow strategies based on the promotion of mixed communities.Originality/valueThis paper seeks to add new research on the outcomes of higher density development in Australia in three ways. First, social constructs, the product of principal components analysis, are used to measure outcomes of higher density development as measured by community or household change. Second, the paper investigates the development at the local level where impacts are likely to be most important. Third, the analysis identifies a before and after scenario for those suburbs where higher density development has been most significant.

Getting off track: how government actions and interventions caused, prolonged, and worsened the financial crisis

Throughout history, financial crises have always been caused by excesses - frequently monetary excesses - which lead to a boom and an inevitable bust. In our current crisis it was a housing boom and bust that in turn led to financial turmoil in the United States and other countries. How did everything deteriorate so suddenly and dramatically? In Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, Hoover fellow and Stanford economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began. The author tells how unusually easy monetary policy helped set the crisis in motion, as interest rates at the Federal Reserve and several other central banks deviated from historical regularities. He explains monetary interaction with the subprime mortgage problem, showing how the use of these mortgages, especially the adjustable-rate variety, led to excessive risk taking. In the United States this was encouraged by government programs designed to promote home ownership, a worthwhile goal but overdone in retrospect. Looking ahead, the author suggests a set of principles to follow to prevent misguided actions and interventions in the future.

Social Mix and Passive Revolution. A Neo-Gramscian Analysis of the Social Mix Rhetoric in Flanders, Belgium

Belgium's housing policy has always been instrumental in the pillarisation process. As a consequence, two competing historical models have existed: first, a model promoted by the socialist pillar based on social rental housing in urban settings; second, the model put forward by the hegemonic Catholic party, emphasising the promotion of homeownership of single-family dwellings in rural settings. When this second, anti-urban model, became the main housing model for the masses in the post-war period, its spatial layout was one of sprawl and disinvestment in urban neighbourhoods. However, from the 1970s onwards, various actors have contested this policy. In response, policy makers have turned to a discourse of inner-city social mix. However, this discourse was barely translated into practice and did not affect the hegemonic model. Following Gramsci, this paper analyses how social mix has primarily served as an instrument for passive revolution, by deviating and disempowering counter-hegemonic attacks on the leading model of suburban homeownership.

Case Analysis: HDFC: Housing Development and Finance Corporation, India

Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (H.D.F.C) was set up on 17th October, 1977 by I.C.I.C.I. out of the consideration that a specialised institution was needed to channel household savings including funds from the capital market into the housing sector. The main objective of H.D.F.C. is to develop significant expertise in retail mortgage loans to different market segments, to have a large corporate client base for its housing related credit facilities and to support or aid in the promotion of home ownership. Their mission is to be 'a World Class Indian Bank,' benchmarking themselves against international standards and best practices in terms of product offerings, technology, service levels, risk management and audit & compliance. The objective is to build sound customer franchises across distinct businesses so as to be a preferred provider of banking services for target retail and wholesale customer segments, and to achieve a healthy growth in profitability, consistent with the Bank's risk appetite. They are committed to do this while ensuring the highest levels of ethical standards, professional integrity, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.

On the political economy of the financial crisis and bailout of 2008–2009

U.S. policies to promote home ownership and other banking regulatory deci- sions helped to create a highly leveraged international market for mortgage-based securities. Declines in the price of housing, consequently, had major effects on the balance sheets and portfolios of financial institutions throughout the world. The political response to the financial crisis has been rapid and large. In general, differ- ences in the effectiveness of government policies show the advantage of standing institutions at crisis management relative to innovative legislation.

Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of view-points are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default—superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.

From trusteeship to development: how class and gender complicated Kenya's housing policy, 1939–1963

Colonial rule required the control of territory, nowhere more than in cities. In the early twentieth century, colonial policy in Kenya and the rest of East and Southern Africa had only grudgingly accommodated Africans in urban areas. After 1939 policy changed, not only in response to poor local conditions and social unrest but also because London's new colonial development policy made a place for African workers in towns. From 1940, new housing and colonial policies acknowledged the importance of the discourses of class and gender. Administrators stabilised an African working class by building better municipal housing, and then sought to fashion a middle class by promoting home ownership. They began to promote housing for families, having recognised that African women could help to make their men at home in the city, and to educate children to become good citizens. The evolution of Kenya's housing policy illuminates the characteristic pressures, calculations, and responses of colonial rule that were being played out internationally in the late colonial period.

Housing Development and Finance Corporation: The Indian Housing & Services Provider

Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (H.D.F.C) was set up on 17th October, 1977 by I.C.I.C.I. out of the consideration that a specialised institution was needed to channel household savings including funds from the capital market into the housing sector. H.D.F.C. since its seeding has emerged as the largest mortgage finance institution in the country. The main objective of H.D.F.C. is to develop significant expertise in retail mortgage loans to different market segments, to have a large corporate client base for its housing related credit facilities and to support or aid in the promotion of home ownership. H.D.F.C. is India's leading housing finance company and for all practical purposes is synonymous with the domestic housing finance industry. The primary objective of H.D.F.C is to enhance residential housing stock and promote home ownership. One of its major objectives is to increase flow of resources for housing through the integration of housing financial institutions with the domestic market. H.D.F.C. has developed a strong market reputation, large shareholder base and a unique consumer franchise. H.D.F.C. is respected as India's premier housing finance company in India as well as in the international markets. It has maintained a consistent and healthy growth in its operations while retaining as a clear market leader in mortgages business in India. The company has constantly engaged into innovative practices since its conception.

Temporary Housing, Permanent Communities

The Puerto Rico Housing Authority was created in 1938 as a consequence of the 1937 U.S. Federal Housing Act. Increased migration to Puerto Rico's urban centers had resulted in overflowing slums. Public housing became the prime solution. In 1964, Luis Muñoz Marín, first Puerto Rican elected governor and the first governor under the formally defined Estado Libre Asociado/Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, outlined the fundamental policies regarding urban housing and renewal efforts. These policies consolidated the main objectives of the public housing program: to destigmatize public housing, to make it transitory, and to promote home ownership. This article overviews the theoretical traditions and aims that have shaped public housing in Puerto Rico, details the policy and design interventions serving these aims, and explores the consequences of such interventions. The focus is on public housing design and placement as shaped by an assumption that the communities would be temporary, and the eventual reality of permanence.

HDFC The Indian Housing & Services Provider - A Case Study on Innovative and Entrepreneurial Practices by an Indian SME

H.D.F.C was set up on 17th October, 1977 by I.C.I.C.I. out of the consideration that a specialised institution was needed to channel household savings as well as funds from the capital market into the housing sector. H.D.F.C. has emerged as the largest mortgage finance institution in the country. The main objective of H.D.F.C. is to develop significant expertise in retail mortgage loans to different market segments and to have a large corporate client base for its housing related credit facilities. The main aim of H.D.F.C. is to support or aid in the promotion of home ownership. H.D.F.C. is India's leading housing finance company and for all practical purposes is synonymous with the domestic housing finance industry. The primary objective of H.D.F.C is to enhance residential housing stock and promote home ownership. One of its major objectives is to increase flow of resources for housing through the integration of housing financial institutions with the domestic market. H.D.F.C. has developed a strong market reputation large shareholder base and unique consumer franchise. H.D.F.C. is India's premier housing finance company in India as well as in international markets. It has maintained a consistent and healthy growth in its operations to remain the clear market leader in mortgages in India. The company has been constantly engaged into innovation and innovative practices since its birth.

Microsimulation Modelling of Tenure Choice and Grants to Promote Home Ownership

This article develops a microsimulation model of the Australian housing market that has tenure choice as its principal focus. The article sheds light on the role played by relative prices, wealth and borrowing constraints in shaping housing tenure choices. We explore the model's capabilities as an aid to policy making by reporting the findings from an impact analysis of grant programs designed to ease the transition of first home buyers into owner occupation. We find a large demand for home ownership that is not met because of borrowing constraints. The need to meet financial institutions' down payment requirements is particularly important. Government grants made available to first home buyers will ease down payment requirements, but the formal incidence of such a subsidy is found to be inequitable among potential first home buyers, and its impact is largely to bring forward purchase decisions.

Stock Return and Interest Rate Risk at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) with the stated objective of promoting home ownership by improving the availability of mortgage financing for private households. These enterprises engage in two separate and distinct lines of business: (i) assembling and marketing pools of mortgages on which they guarantee the timely payments of principal and interest and (ii) purchasing mortgage assets for their own portfolio, mostly funded with debt securities. This article examines the sensitivity of the returns on GSEs' equity shares to realizations of interest rate risk. 

Promoting home ownership in a social‐rented city: policies, practices and pitfalls

Amsterdam's housing market is dominated by the social‐rented sector. It comprises 56 per cent of the total housing stock, while home ownership comprises only 19 per cent, lower than anywhere else in the Netherlands, and among the lowest in the world. Central government policy is currently seeking to increase the share of home ownership in the Netherlands from 53 per cent (2001) to 65 per cent in 2010. This paper will summarise recent national and local (Amsterdam) housing policy developments, focusing on the recent practice of selling social housing in Amsterdam. Unlike the Right to Buy scheme in Britain, the Netherlands employs an ‘offer to buy’ strategy. Sales, however, have been disappointing so far. Two factors were found to be crucial in this regard: (1) the sluggish change in ‘policy mentality’ and bureaucracy and (2) the high prices in the home ownership market. By way of conclusion, the paper reflects on the desirability of shifting the tenure structure from tenancy to ownership and on the risks that an (over‐) emphasis on home ownership may bring.

Social Belonging, Social Capital and the Promotion of Home Ownership: A Case Study of Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Government is vigorously promoting home ownership, a major rationale being to increase the community's sense of belonging and reduce the rate of emigration. This paper evaluates whether home owners in Hong Kong have a higher sense of social belonging than renters and finds that tenure status is a spurious independent variable in assessing respondents' sense of belonging to Hong Kong. Logistic regression analysis suggests that the significance of tenure is greatly reduced when other variables, namely age, identity, income and foreign abode right are controlled. The analysis also shows that those possessing a comparatively high sense of social belonging tend to bear the identification of Hong Kong Chinese, be older, have high incomes, and hold no foreign right of abode. Of the control variables, the factor of 'identity' appears most influential. Hong Kong's relationship with China, the uncertain nature of a Hong Kong identity and the territory's economic trajectory as a higher order services economy has meant that housing policy, specifically the promotion of home ownership, is perceived by the government as influencing values and behaviour very narrowly defined as promoting social belonging primarily in a territorial or geographical sense, with wider implications of neighbourhood stability unconsidered.

Prosperity or Inequality: Deconstructing the Myth of Home Ownership in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, the demand for home ownership over the past decade has been phenomenal. Before the economic crisis and the property market slump in 1997/98, house prices in Hong Kong were among the highest in the world. A 'home ownership ethos' was cultivated, in which most people believed that the promotion of home ownership brought prosperity to the economy and benefited individual owners. This paper argues that the existing 'pro-ownership and anti-rental' housing policy does not benefit the economy or many of the lower and middle-income homeowners. On the contrary, it undermines the stability of the economy and widens social inequalities along various dimensions such as class and gender, and between the younger and older generations.

Market Segmentation and Consumer Characteristics of Commodity Housing in Guangzhou: An Analysis of Household Survey Data

The housing reform in China aims at commodification and privatization of urban housing. Using data from a household survey conducted in Guangzhou, the present paper examines the relationship between a household's socio-economic characteristics and the source of housing provision, and the factors governing the tenure form. The results show that households with different sets of characteristics are associated with particular housing types, defined with reference to the source of provision, and that owners and renters differ systematically in socio-economic characteristics. Open market housing residents earn the highest income, work mainly as managers in enterprises of various ownership types or as proprietors of petty trades, and are the youngest among residents of all types of housing. Those in work unit housing are the best educated, and work mainly as managers in state-owned enterprises. Those in housing bureau housing and resettlement housing are relatively old, less well educated, earn lower incomes and work mainly as technical and manual workers. With regard to the tenure mode, owners are likely to be those who are better educated, earn higher incomes, relatively young, work mainly as managers or are proprietors of petty trades, and have longer years of service in their present employment than renters. The results also show a rather high degree of privatization in the housing sector in Guangzhou and the rapid development of its open market housing sector. However, the ownership rate is low in the work unit housing sector, which suggests the need for further reform, if promotion of homeownership is an end.

The Hong Kong Government’s Strategy for Promoting Home Ownership — An Approach to Reducing the Decommodifying Effects of Public Housing Services

The Hong Kong Government is a well‐known believer in laissez faire values and capitalism. However, it provides massive public housing programmes. In order to reduce the adverse effects of the public housing programmes on capitalism, it has tried to promote the recommodification of public housing by encouraging and assisting public housing tenants to become home owners. The aim of this paper is to study the Hong Kong Government’s measures for promoting home ownership. It is argued that these measures are not very effective in reducing the decommodifying effects of the public housing services. Despite the fact that these measures aim to reduce people’s dependence on the government and to help them to re‐establish their relation with the private market, they are paradoxically also a kind of decommodification — people can enjoy some benefits independently of how they perform in the private market. Hence, it can be said that the government’s measures for promoting home ownership serve more to change the form than to reduce the degree of the decommodification of the public housing services.Le gouvernement de Hong Kong est un partisan bien connu du laissez‐faire et du capitalisme. Il fournit néanmoins des programmes massifs de logement public. Afin de réuire les effets adverses que les programmes de logement public ont sur le capitalisme, il a essayé de promouvoir la recommercialisation du logement public en encourageant et en aidant les locataires du logement public à devenir propriétaires. Le but de cet article est d’étudier les mesures que le gouvernement de Hong Kong a prises afin de promouvoir l’accès à la propriété. Cet essai soutient que ces mesures ne sont pas très efficaces pour réduire les effets de décommercialisation qu’ont les services de logement public. Bien qu’elles aient pour but de réduire la dépendance des habitants du gouvernement et de les aider à rétablir leur rapport avec le marché privé, elles sont aussi, paradoxicalement, une espèce de décommercialisation — dont les gens peuvent bénéficier indépendamment de leur performance sur le marché privé. On peut donc dire que les mesures prises par le gouvernement pour promouvoir l'accès à la propriété servent plus à changer la forme de la décommercialisation des services de logement public qu’à en réduire leur niveau.

Revisiting Informal‐Sector Home Ownership: The Relevance of Household Composition for Housing Options of the Poor

This article examines the linkages between the housing options of the poor and their household composition. It gathers field data among renters and owners in low‐income neighborhoods of Guadalajara, Mexico, and it argues that informal‐sector home ownership is not favorable to the conditions of female householders. Thus, housing assistance programs that focus solely on conditions of housing in informal settlements and that promote home ownership in peripheral areas practice a discriminatory approach to housing that cannot serve the needs of a growing percentage of low‐income households. Meanwhile, inner‐city rental units, with the greatest concentration of female householders, are being allowed to deteriorate and may soon be erased from the city's landscape on account of real estate pressure. The paper calls for housing policy‐makers and researchers to broaden their scope of concern to include renting and sharing as important shelter alternatives of the poor, and also to account for the variations in housing strategies of the poor based on changing patterns of household composition.