M.C. Deurloo

Tenure Changes in the Context of Micro-level Family and Macro-level Economic Shifts

Almost all the work to date on tenure changes, specifically the move from rent to own, has been derived from cross-sectional analysis of this important housing market decision. Economists have emphasised the investment nature of the housing consumption decision, while demographers and geographers have investigated tenure change in relationship to the demographic characteristics of the household. Now, the developing notions of life-course analysis and the availability of longer panel series enable us to investigate not just the demographic relatives of tenure change, but the critical aspects of timing as well. Specifically, many couples choose to buy and make the transition to a family within 2-3 years. We show also that tenure change is influenced by both spatial and temporal economic contexts.

Housing Careers in the United States, 1968-93: Modelling the Sequencing of Housing States:

The research in this paper focuses on the housing career during a households life-course. The housing career is the sequence of housing states defined in terms of tenure and the quality/price of the dwellings that households occupy while they make parallel careers in family status and the job market. The research brings out, more than the literature on separate residential moves, that many households are in a stable housing state over long stretches of their life-course. Housing careers are notable for having a relatively simple structure and, in general, an upward trend in quality, price and tenure of the sequence of dwellings occupied. As expected, there is a close relationship between the type of housing career and a households income and income growth. Regional variation in tenure composition and the price of the stock have a strong influence on the development of the housing careers in different regions.

Residential Mobility and Neighbourhood Outcomes

When households move they obviously weigh both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighbourhood in their decision process. But, to the extent that housing quality and neighbourhood quality are inter-twined it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which households are more focused on one or another of these two components of the choice process. This paper uses both cross-tabulations of the neighbourhood choices, and logit models of the actual choices, to examine the relative roles of neighbourhoods and houses in the choice process. The research is focused on the question of the extent to which households trade up in house quality, or neighbourhood quality or both, as outcomes of residential mobility. The research measures neighbourhood quality in both socio-economic and environmental dimensions. The study shows that many households not only move up in housing quality, but quite consistently also make gains in neighbourhood quality, often independently of gains in housing quality. Not surprisingly, the largest gains in neighbourhood quality are related to households who make the city/suburban transition in their housing moves. The research adds another dimension to the growing and extensive literature on neighbourhoods and their role in residential choice.

The Move to Housing Ownership in Temporal and Regional Contexts

A previous longitudinal study of households who make the change from renting to owning demonstrated the close connections between the tenure change and family composition. Specifically, there is a short period in which decisions with respect both to family changes and to house purchase occur. In this paper the authors extend that work and elaborate the findings by directly incorporating a measure of family composition change and analyzing its ‘triggering effect’ on the tenure change, and by enlarging the temporal and regional context analysis. Shifts from couples to families and increases in income trigger moves to ownership. Also, there are interaction effects between the regional contexts and time periods. A notable finding is that the economic climate affects some groups of households more than others. From the 1980s on, low-income households and one-earner families have been seriously affected in their ability to enter the homeowner housing market.

Entry to Home-ownership in Germany: Some Comparisons with the United States

New research on migration, mobility and housing tenure choice using the concept of the life-course is providing an enriched analysis of the context within which housing choices are made and of the demographic and economic variables which are critical determinants of the decisions to move and to change tenures. The availability of panel series data for the US and Germany allows cross-national comparisons of the migration and tenure choice processes. There are substantial differences in the rates of mobility and the rates of moves of households from the rental sector to ownership, especially for couples, but the results confirm the overall similarities in the mobility and tenure choice processes despite the differing government commitments to housing policy. The models show that it is primarily couples and families who make the transition to ownership and that income and number of earners are important in both contexts and German households have even higher incomes before they make the transition to ownership. At the same time, the tax benefits in Germany have also made it possible for families with relatively lower incomes to move to the ownership sector.

Housing Consumption and Residential Crowding in U.S. Housing Markets

As families progress through the life cycle they generate different needs for housing space. The ability to satisfy these needs is clearly dependent on income, but at the same time it is affected by changes in household composition. The aggregate outcomes of the individual ability to adjust housing needs can be seen as a measure of the success of the housing market. This article examines changes in housing space consumption in the United States in the last two and a half decades at both the individual level and in aggregate outcomes. The research uses the data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the relationship of housing consumption to income, and the overall success of the adjustment process. Despite the concerns about housing affordability and income polarization in large metropolitan housing markets, the US housing market as a whole, as measured by crowding and roomstress, is continuing to provide a wide range of paths to increased consumption. At the same time the research shows that there is greater pressure on housing consumption in markets with substantial recent immigration.

Ethnic Clusters in Amsterdam, 1994-96: A Micro-area Analysis:

Ghetto formation is a recurrent item in debates on urban futures all over the world, the Netherlands not excluded. Many people express their fear for extreme separation between ethnic groups. Many Europeans tend to believe that the recent growth in the number of immigrants in the larger cities will lead to ghetto-like developments, as has happened in US cities with regard to the black population. However, little evidence is available to support that idea. In this paper, this question is addressed based on micro-level spatial data for immigrant groups in Amsterdam. Data were available for two recent years, which provided the opportunity to study the dynamics of ethnic concentrations. Conclusions are, first, that the spatial segregation of immigrant groups in Amsterdam is far from the ghetto-type segregation in US cities; and secondly, that there are indications of the instability of ethnic concentrations, which is considered an indication against the development of ghettos as well. Characteristics of the Dutch welfare state may provide part of the explanation.

Residential mobility in Dutch housing markets

A one percent stratified random sample of all Dutch households (comprising 62 000 households) is used to examine mobility in the Dutch housing market. Two techniques, proportional reduction in uncertainty (PRU), and logit analysis are used to evaluate the relative contribution of independent variables in explaining mobility across the tenure types and by housing market regions. The PRU technique is used to select the best variables and to simplify the categories of those variables before logit analyses. Given a reduced set of variables and combinations of categories, logit models are utilized to provide parameter estimates of the contributions of the independent variables. The PRU technique shows that it is possible to make considerable simplifications in the combinations of categories for variables, and the logit models (for owners, public renters, and private renters) indicate distinct differences in the combinations of variables which are most appropriate in each of these sectors. In particular, the logit analysis shows that the relationship between age and mobility is almost linear, but between income and mobility it is curvilinear, and that evaluating interaction effects adds significantly to our understanding of the reason to move or to stay. The models show that it is necessary to treat the three tenure sectors separately, even though age, just as we expected, dominates all sectors in terms of its explanatory power. Although there are not large regional effects, the models change for different regions of the country.

Falling out of the home owner market

Abstract By and large the tenure change literature has focused on the shift from renting to owning. The converse process, the move from ownership to renting, has received less attention. In this paper we provide a context for examining who ‘drops out’ of the home owner market. The results show that families with children are less likely to be able to remain in the home owner market than couples and, conversely, that two income earners are more likely to be able to stay in the market or buy another dwelling after a spell in renting than a one income earner. Although those results are somewhat expected, we provide additional new information on the nature of temporary moves out of the home owner market and returns at a later time, and on the seemingly greater role of accidental effects on exit from the home owner market than entrance into that market.

A Comparative View of Housing Choices in Controlled and Uncontrolled Housing Markets

The research reported in this paper evaluates the relative contributions of economic and demographic variables in determining tenure and housing type choice and the extent to which tenure choice in US and Dutch housing markets is similar. Data from the American Housing Survey National file (1983) for approximately 1500 owners and 4000 renters was examined in the context of the PRU (proportional reduction in uncertainty) and ANOTA (analysis of tables) models. The results provide convincing evidence of the role of income, rent of previous dwelling, size of household and marital status. Renter choices are more dominated by income than are the choices of owners. A comparison of the US results with those for the Dutch housing market reveals that the owner models are similar in both housing markets but for renters the importance of size of household suggests the impact of policy controls on access to housing in the Dutch housing market.