Sebastian Kohl

The Power of Institutional Legacies: How Nineteenth-century Housing Associations Shaped Twentieth-century Housing Regime Differences between Germany and the United States

The Power of Institutional Legacies: How Nineteenth-century Housing Associations Shaped Twentieth-century Housing Regime Differences between Germany and the United States

Urban History Matters: Explaining the German–American Homeownership Gap

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.

Heidegger and socio-ontology: A sociological reading

This paper uses the work and employs the tools of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to attempt to improve sociology. Heidegger’s thinking is employed primarily to undo a paradox of sociology. Sociology focuses on the social, but starts with the assumption of essentially non-social egos that somehow generate a social world. This ‘egologism’ has caused sociology to occupy itself with a number of pseudo-problems. We argue that Heidegger develops what we call a ‘socio-ontological’ approach, which means that human beings are always already social and dwell originarily in a social world. To present this ‘social foundation for sociology’ is the contribution of this paper.

Urban Heritages: How History and Housing Finance Matter to Housing Form and Homeownership Rates

Contemporary Western cities are not uniform, but display a variety of different housing forms and tenures, both between and within countries. We distinguish three general city types in this paper: low-rise, single-family dwelling cities where owner-occupation is the most prevalent tenure form; multi-dwelling building cities where tenants comprise the majority; and multi-dwelling building cities where owner-occupation is the principal tenure form. We argue that historical developments beginning in the 19th century are crucial to understanding this diversity in urban form and tenure composition across Western cities. Our path-dependent argument is twofold. First, we claim that different housing finance institutions engendered different forms of urban development during the late 19th century and had helped to establish the difference between single-family dwelling cities and multi-dwelling building cities by 1914. Second, rather than stemming from countries’ welfare systems or ‘variety of capitalism’, we argue that these historical distinctions have a significant and enduring impact on today’s urban housing forms and tenures. Our argument is supported by a unique collection of data of 1095 historical cities across 27 countries.

More Mortgages, More Homes? The Effect of Housing Financialization on Homeownership in Historical Perspective

Recent research has emphasized the negative effects of finance on macroeconomic performance and even cautioned of a “finance curse.” As one of the main drivers of financial sector growth, mortgages have traditionally been hailed as increasing the number of homeowners in a country. This article uses long-run panel data for seventeen countries between 1920 (1950) and 2013 to show that the effect of the “great mortgaging” on homeownership rates is not universally positive. Increasing mortgage debt appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for higher homeownership levels. There were periods of rising homeownership levels without much increase in mortgages before 1980, thanks to government programs, purchasing power increases, and less inflated house prices. There have also been mortgage increases without homeownership growth, but with house price bubbles thereafter. The liberalization of financial markets might after all be a poor substitute for more traditional housing policies.

Historicizing housing typologies: beyond welfare state regimes and varieties of residential capitalism

Abstract Comparative housing scholars have, for many years now, imported typologies from non-housing spheres to explain housing phenomena. Notably, approaches attempting to account for divergent housing tenure patterns and trends have frequently been organized around typologies based on the assumption that a causal relationship exists between homeownership rates and the type of welfare regime or, more recently, the variety of residential capitalism a country exhibits. While these housing-welfare regime approaches have provided important research tools, we argue that the typologies they generate represent cross-sectional snapshots which offer little enduring cogency. Based on long-run data, we show that the postulated associations between homeownership, welfare and mortgage debt are historically contingent. This paper makes the case for employing historicized typologies, proposing a country-based typology linking historical housing finance system trajectories to urban form and tenure, with regional dimensions. We argue the need for typologies which can accommodate longitudinal, path-dependent dimensions, both within and between countries.

Homeowner nations or nations of tenants : how historical institutions in urban politics, housing finance and construction set Germany, France and the US on different housing paths

The thesis gives an answer to the question of why different countries ended up with different rates of homeowners and tenants in the 20th-century. The literature identifies Germanspeaking countries of low homeownership rates around 40% and English-speaking countries of high homeownership rates of more than 60%, with France falling in between the two groups. Moreover, most of these differences have persisted through the second half of the 20th-century and can be shown to reach back to different urban homeownership rates around 1900. The homeownership-question is of importance beyond the mere question of tenure as studies have associated homeownership questions with stability in financial crises, with embourgeoisement of the working-class in life-style, attitudes and voting behavior or with different unemployment rates. Existing explanations have used post-1980 international, regional or individual data to explain homeownership differences through socio-demographic, economic or urbanization differences, through a public-welfare/homeownership trade-off or else through cultural preferences. These explanations fail to account, however, for the persistent country differences that existed already prior to the 1980s and prior to government intervention in housing. The thesis, by contrast, goes back to 19th-century differences of urban organization, housing finance and the construction sector to claim that countries were historically set on different housing trajectories establishing differences hard to reverse in later periods. The US and Germany are chosen for historic case studies of the often opposed country groups. France is included to use the variables found for explaining why a country of similar welfare type as Germany kept a persistently higher urban homeownership rate. The thesis claims that different complementary institutions in city organization, the housing finance and construction industry locked countries into inert physical and institutional structures of either the compact tenement city-form in Germany or the suburbanized form of a city of homes like in the United States. More concretely, functional complementarities of public welfare cities, housing cooperatives, mortgage banks and a raftsmanship production of solid single-unit homes led to the German tenant-dominance, whereas private cities, savings and loans (SLAs) and a Fordist mass production of single-family homes created the American production regime in favor of more accessible homeownership. Though the thesis establishes the argument for Germany and the US in historic case studies, it tries to make plausible that it can be extended to other German- and English-speaking countries. The innovation of the thesis concerning the particular explanatory puzzle lies in its reference to relevant historical prior causes, its inclusion of the urban level of analysis and the combination of three institutional factors – urban organization, housing finance, construction – that even singly have not been put forward yet in comparative explanations. The thesis contributes to the literature on path dependencies that identifies distant occurrences as longterm causes for hard-to-reverse historical trajectories. On a theoretical level, the study contributes to research in a yet little noticed type of market, i.e. markets for durable goods whose use stretches over time, and which therefore requires history-directed explanations.