经济适用房还是公共租赁房?——对住房保障政策改革的反思

为了评估当前各地住房保障政策的改革,本文辨析了经适房的缺陷与成因.基于政策的演化过程通过前后对比发现,经适房政策正在向商品房与保障性住房严格分类管理的方向改革,影响其政策声誉与执行效果的制度缺陷已逐步得到改善.针对停建经适房转而兴办公租房的观点,本研究通过定性分析和模糊评价法发现,如果不能引入有效的激励机制和完善监管手段,采用公租房并不能消除经适房原有的大部分缺陷,除了一定程度上抑制腐败和扩大了保障范围之外,甚至有可能恶化住房保障水平.因此迫切需要对当前改革的理论与实践进行反思.     

安居基金:住房保障模式创新

现行的政府建设分配经济适用房和廉租房的住房保障制度存在许多问题和内在缺陷,应当改革.方向是政府不再出地出钱出力直接建设分配经济适用房和廉租房,转而用这些资源建立安居基金,以货币形式及时、普遍、直接地补贴低收入住房困难者,提高他们的住房消费能力,并进行动态调整.政府通过各种杠杆调节住房市场供给结构,使低收入住房困难者都能在市场上立即自主选择相应的住房,或租或购,达到效用最大化.     

Housing and populism

Abstract

The recent success of populist candidates in the UK and Continental Europe has sparked a major debate between those who view populism as a reaction of the economically ‘left behind’ and those who view it as a cultural ‘backlash’ by groups with declining social status, pointing to stark divisions between urban and rural areas, core and periphery. This paper bridges the economic and values-based approaches to populism by arguing that the geography of wealth inequality offers a convincing explanation for the pattern of populist vote share. Drawing on fine-grained house price data in the UK and France, it is shown that the pattern of house prices ? even within small districts ? plays a major part in shaping support for Brexit and Marine Le Pen. The findings illustrate how longstanding variation in local wealth shapes the geography of discontent and drives populist appeal. Populism, the article concludes, is primarily a politics of place, and place is a product, in part, of the housing market.     

Dismantling Swedish Housing Policy

Today it is often argued that welfare state retrenchment is more or less impossible. Even politicians who advocate radical cuts in principle do not manage to execute them in the face of the strong opposition such proposals meet. However, Swedish housing policy has experienced radical change, resulting in big savings for the state budget and dramatically increased housing costs for citizens. In comparison with changes in other parts of the welfare state, the reforms have been radical. This article argues that Swedish housing policy is very complex and technical. Reforms met little resistance because the general public did not understand their effects. Even today, when the effects are known, citizens' knowledge about the policy area is too meager to allow them to understand that the increased cost of their housing is an effect of political decisions.     

Race and Assisted Housing

This article explores racial disparities between assisted housing outcomes of black and white and white households with children. We compare the assisted housing occupied by black and white households with children, and examine whether young adult education, employment, and earnings outcomes in 2011 differ between blacks and whites who spent part of their childhood in assisted housing in the 2000s. We use a special version of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that has been address-matched to federally assisted housing, and the PSID’s Transition to Adulthood supplement, along with geocode-matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), CoreLogic real estate data, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Statistical methods include difference in means, logit and general linear models. We find no evidence of racial disparities in the type of assisted housing program, the physical quality of project-based developments, or the management of public housing developments in the 2000 decade. But black households with children are more likely to live in assisted housing that is located in poorer quality neighborhoods. Multivariate tests reveal that the worse outcomes of black young adults compared with whites disappear once socioeconomic differences are taken into account. The discrepancy in assisted housing neighborhood quality experienced by black and white children makes no additional contribution to predicting young adult outcomes. Nonetheless, black children living in relatively better assisted housing neighborhoods tend to have better outcomes in young adulthood than those who live in poorer quality assisted housing neighborhoods. We discuss sources of racial disparity in neighborhood quality, and the policies enacted and proposed to address it.     

No Home for Housing: The Situation of the Commonwealth's Housing Policy Advisory Function

The Commonwealth's policy capacity with regard to housing policy and provision has been erratic and patchy. Partly this is because housing was not traditionally a formal Commonwealth responsibility but something in which Commonwealth governments episodically intervened, and partly it was because Commonwealth ministers often did not exercise demand for policy advice in this area. When policy capacity was exercised it tended to define housing narrowly as a welfare initiative, thereby limiting its conception and excluding other important questions and problems involved with housing as a policy domain. This trajectory meant that the advisory deficiencies of the Commonwealth were often exposed at exactly those times when they were most needed. It also meant that the Commonwealth lacked the detailed knowledge and understanding of housing issues when it was called upon to deliver various programs. The article argues that the Commonwealth needs to adopt a more strategic housing policy that addresses longer term needs as well as the economic, social and environmental consequences of its housing policy.     

Development of an Index of Subsidized Housing Availability and its Relationship to Housing Insecurity

Housing insecurity is a known threat to child health understanding predictors of housing insecurity can help inform policies to protect the health of young children in low-income households. This study sheds light on the relationship between housing insecurity and availability of housing that is affordable to low-income households.

We developed a county-level index of availability of subsidized housing needed to meet the demand of low-income households. Our results estimate that if subsidized units are made available to an additional 5% of the eligible population, the odds of overcrowding decrease by 26% and the odds of families making multiple moves decrease by 31%. Both of these are known predictors of poor child health outcomes. Thus, these results suggest that state and federal investments in expanding the stock of subsidized housing could reduce housing insecurity and thereby also improve the health and well-being of young children, including their families' food security status.     

Mortgage Choice in Rural Housing

Rural homeownership is promoted in the United States by mortgage insurance programs administered by the federal government. We analyze the choice between assistance offered by two such agencies: the Federal Housing Administration and the Rural Housing Service (RHS). We find applicants are sensitive to the relative annual mortgage insurance premiums and guarantee fees. However, there are also persistent racial differences as well as institutional effects. We also find the application and origination process is substantially longer in the RHS program, but variation in closing times does not clearly impact mortgage choice.     

Housing for an Aging Population

We use the American Housing Survey to examine the distribution and occupancy of homes that have, or could be modified to have, accessibility features that allow seniors to successfully remain in the community as they age. Despite the aging population and the growing need for accessible housing, the U.S. housing stock is woefully inadequate: fewer than 4% of housing units could be considered livable by people with moderate mobility difficulties, and a miniscule fraction are wheelchair accessible. Recent construction is no more likely to be accessible than homes built in the mid-1990s, suggesting that the housing market is not responding to the aging demographic profile. Only a small fraction of seniors, even among those with mobility difficulties, and even among recent movers, live in suitable homes. Modifications that potentially improve accessibility are more likely undertaken by households with a senior, but only once that senior develops mobility difficulties.     

Fighting Housing Discrimination in Europe

ABSTRACT

There is no exact European equivalent to the U.S. Fair Housing Act. The member states of the European Union (EU) have transposed into law the EU Racial Equality Directive of 2000 that prohibits discrimination in, among other things, access to the supply of goods and services, including housing, on the basis of race. Most housing discrimination case law so far comes from nonbinding decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and European Committee of Social Rights under the revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe. This article explains how the European context of discrimination and segregation differs from the American, reviews the major legal conventions establishing equal rights in housing, protected classes, and key precedents. It discusses how mixing policies in social housing are the primary mechanism to reduce residential segregation in Europe. The special case of extreme discrimination against the Roma is presented, before concluding with some comparative observations.     

The Electoral Politics of Housing

This article surveys the territorial politics of housing policy with particular reference to the Conservative Party. It examines the how attempts to establish a new planning framework under the previous Coalition government came unstuck and sets out the implications of the planning impasse for home ownership and ‘generation rent’. The territorial and tenure dimensions of the 2015 General Election are considered and possible future Conservative conflicts over land release are explored.