Housing markets and independence in old age: expanding the opportunities

This report highlights the benefits of specialised private retirement accommodation and recommends a number of simple policy changes at no cost to the public purse to help increase its supply and address the challenges of housing an ageing population.

Ensuring the right to the city: pro-poor housing, urban development and tenure legalization in São Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo is one of Latin America’s most modern and developed cities, yet around one-third of its 10 million inhabitants live in poor-quality housing in sub-standard settlements. This paper describes the response of the São Paulo municipal government that took office in 2001. Through its Secretariat of Housing and Urban Development, it designed a new policy framework with a strong emphasis on improving the quantity and quality of housing for low-income groups. Supported by new legislation, financial instruments and partnerships with the private sector, the mainstays of the new policy are integrated housing and urban development, modernization of the administrative system, and public participation in all decision-making and implementation processes. The programmes centre on upgrading and legalizing land tenure in informal settlements, and regeneration of the city centre. The new focus on valuing the investments that low-income groups have already made in their housing and settlements has proved to be more cost-effective than previous interventions, leading to improvements on an impressive scale.

Intrinsic and rational speculative bubbles in the U.S. housing market 1960-2011

This paper examines the dynamics of the residential property market in the United States between 1960 and 2011. Given the cyclically and apparent overvaluation of the market over this period, we determine whether deviations of real estate prices from their fundamentals were caused by the existence of two genres of bubbles: intrinsic bubbles and rational speculative bubbles. We find evidence of an intrinsic bubble in the market pre-2000, implying that overreaction to changes in rents contributed to the overvaluation of real estate prices. However, using a regime-switching model, we find evidence of periodically collapsing rational bubbles in the post-2000 market

The impact on housing supply in England of planning delay and uncertainty

The time taken to consider development proposals within the English planning system continues to provoke great policy concern despite a decade of inquiry and policy change. The results of an extensive site-based survey and hedonic modelling exercise across 45 local authorities are reported here. The analysis reveals a slow, uncertain system. It identifies planning delay as a serious problem for housing supply and its ability to respond to increases in demand. Only a relatively limited set of factors seem relevant in explaining differences in times and the results suggest that 80% of councils’ performances are statistically indistinguishable from each other. These findings question the policy emphasis put on rankings of local authorities, though some influence from local politics is apparent. Development control is consistently a lengthy and uncertain process due to its complexity. Therefore, success in lowering planning delay is only likely through radical simplification.

Analysis of the intermediate housing market mechanism in the UK

Government policies have backed intermediate housing market mechanisms like shared equity, intermediate rented and shared ownership (SO) as potential routes for some households, who are otherwise squeezed between the social housing and the private market. The rhetoric deployed around such housing has regularly contained claims about its social progressiveness and role in facilitating socio-economic mobility, centring on a claim that SO schemes can encourage people to move from rented accommodation through a shared equity phase and into full owner-occupation. SO has been justified on the grounds of it being transitional state, rather than a permanent tenure. However SO buyers may be laden with economic cost-benefit structures that do not stack up evenly and as a consequence there may be little realistic prospect of ever reaching a preferred outcome. Such behaviours have received little empirical attention as yet despite, the SO model arguably offers a sub-optimal solution towards homeownership, or in terms of wider quality of life. Given the paucity of rigorous empirical work on this issue, this paper delineates the evidence so far and sets out a research agenda. Our analysis is based on a large dataset of new shared owners, observing an information base that spans the past decade. We then set out an agenda to further examine the behaviours of the SO occupants and to examine the implications for future public policy based on existing literature and our outline findings. This paper is particularly opportune at a time of economic uncertainty and an overriding ‘austerity’ drive in public funding in the UK, through which SO schemes have enjoyed support uninterruptedly thus far.

Housing supply and planning delay in the South of England

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. If these results are representative of the country as a whole, they indicate that planning delay could be a major cause of the slow responsiveness of British housing supply.

Data interpretation in social housing management

The use of business management techniques in the public sector is not a new topic. However the increased use of the phrase "housing business management" as against that of "housing administration" reflects a change in the underlying philosophy of service delivery. The paper examines how data collection and use can be related to the operational requirements of the social landlords and highlights the problems of systems dynamics generating functionally obsolete data.

Forward pricing and the housing market: the pre-sales housing system in Taiwan

In countries that have experienced rapid economic development, the need to establish more efficient markets in which private property can be constructed has induced some innovative solutions. One such solution is the phenomenon of a pre-sales market of the kind that can be observed in Taiwan, Korea, and more recently in China. Developers sell their property before building is started in order to acquire financing for the development companies. This paper discusses the process and, by recognising the analogy between the pre-sales market and forwards markets, analyses the implications for developers