The housing and credit markets are closely linked. This paper presents VAR evidence that house prices can generate financial and business cycle dynamics. An increase in house prices leads to a boom in mortgage and real estate construction lending. Leverage decreases in the short run before rising at longer-run horizons across households and most financial intermediaries, irrespective of their p...

The rise in housing costs in California has far exceeded the national inflation rate. During the past three years, housing prices in five coastal counties increased by more than 60 percent. For the highest quintile of cities, prices increased by an average of more than 30 percent per year. Evidently California housing markets differ qualitatively from those in the rest of the country. One strik...

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world. Under its laissez faire free economy, the government dominates the supply of land. The government has applied different measures to ensure affordability in public housing, in rent setting as well as various subsidised-ownership programmes. Starting from minimal intervention towards privatisation, Hong Kong has adopt...

Homelessness and drug use often overlap and the harms of substance use are exacerbated by homelessness. Responding to the twin problems of homelessness and substance use is an important aspect of strategies to end homelessness. The introduction and development of ten year plans to end homelessness in North America heralds a new era of systemic responses to homelessness. Central to many of these...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the "second" and "third" worlds. We adopt the labels "transition" economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and "developing" to refer to countries as disparate as Korea and Singapore (arguably now developed) and countries like Mozambique and Laos. It is ther...

This paper aims to understand residential mobility in non-market economies by conducting a case study of Chinese cities, a socialist society in transition. It is argued that residential mobility in China is mainly triggered by changes in housing supply and housing qualification, both of which are determined by housing policies. Using a retrospective survey (1949–94) in 20 Chinese cities, it was...

Reinvestments refer to repairs and maintenance activities, as well as rehabilitation investments undertaken with the purposes of improving existing housing assets and standard of life (1). Reinvestment behaviour of household (Hh) in housing has been investigated for more than four decades in the literature. Macro implications of individual behaviour however, remain largely neglected. Hhs’ reinv...