Selected Issues in Regional and Urban Housing Policy

Abstract

This chapter continues in a similar vein to the last by examining a selection of policy issues — in this case at the regional and urban levels — on which light can be shed by the use of formal models. At the regional scale, the central issue to be tackled is the extent to which regional economic convergence is aided or hindered by housing market structure and the role that policy plays in the process. There is, of course, now a voluminous literature on international and regional growth convergence, but relatively little of this explicitly takes into account housing markets. In the UK, the work of Bover et al (1989), Cameron and Muellbauer (1998, 2000) and subsequent work arising from these studies provide major exceptions and place strong emphasis on housing as a destabilising influence. By contrast, for the USA, the influential work of Blanchard and Katz (1992) on Regional Evolutions pays only limited attention to housing issues.