Urban Housing

Abstract

Housing consumption in chapter two was treated as being equivalent to current consumption of services rendered by land occupancy. This treatment seems to oversimplify reality in two respects. First, housing is a service created by land, capital and perhaps labor combined to produce a house. In this sense it appears that the treatment of housing by Muth (1961, 1969), and (1967) is more appropriate than that of (1964) where housing services are provided by land only. In particular the analysis of chapter two, which is similar to Alonso’s treatment, can only be used to examine the spatial variation of population density (number of households per unit of land) because it is not refined enough to make the important distinction between the spatial variation of structural density (density of housing services per unit of land) and population crowding in the housing stock. Second, housing in chapter two has been treated as perfectly malleable, being adjusted costlessly in response to parametric changes. In fact housing is not perfectly malleable and its adjustment is costly. Therefore a more detailed study of housing requires a clear distinction to be made between the housing stock and the flow of housing services. This distinction calls for a dynamic framework.