Australia's expensive housing market is often claimed to be primarily the result of a shortage supply due town planning constraints, leading political pressure on councils and state governments remove regulations, regardless their merit. We argue that this story myth provide evidence against three key elements myth. First, there has been surplus dwellings constructed compared population demand,...

As a stated policy objective, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development seeks to boost the national homeownership rate to 70 percent by 2006. To accomplish this goal, they estimate that 3.8 million additional families be added to the ranks of U.S. homeowners. Furthermore, HUD estimates that the homeownership gap between minority and nonminority families must be reduced by a full 15 p...

A number of organisations have concluded that Australia has suffered from a housing shortage in recent years, which is also predicted to worsen in the future. The housing shortage is in turn identified as a primary cause of rising house prices in recent years, with an increase in new housing construction offered as the solution to low affordability. The National Housing Supply Council (NHSC), e...

n terms of housing issues, the primary public policy focus of economists has been the affordability of homes, mortgage availability, land-use regulation, and rent control. Studies of land-use regulation focus on the effects of regulation on the price of owner-occupied housing. Work on low-income housing has concerned itself more with issues of measurement and the debate over supply-side versus ...

This paper presents the key findings from a 2004 NESC study on the Irish housing system, Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy. The paper begins by identifying the anxieties and concerns people have about housing. These cluster into three broad concerns: the stability of the housing market, the degree of inequality in housing opportunities experienced during the housing boom and the sustai...

We investigate the relationship between housing wealth, property taxes, and elderly labor supply. Using twenty years of restricted access data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) containing plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth from the recent boom/bust cycle and MSA-specific housing price indexes, we estimate longitudinal and difference-in-difference models. Our findings sugge...