The Move to Housing Ownership in Temporal and Regional Contexts

Abstract

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.