HOUSING ECONOMICS– A REVIEW AND INTRODUCTION
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1979.tb00552.x |
| Date | 01 November 1979 |
| Published date | 01 November 1979 |
| Author | Duncan Maclennan |
Scottish Journal of Political Economy,
Vol.
26,
No.
3,
November
1979
Review
Section
HOUSING ECONOMICS-
A REVIEW AND INTRODUCTION
DUNCAN
MACLENNAN
University
of
Glasgow
G.
K. INGRAM (ed.),
Residential Location
and
Urban Housing Markets,
NBER,
Massachusetts,
1977,
pp.
403,
$15.
L.
BOURNE
and
J.
HITCHCOCK (eds.),
Urban Housing Markets: Recent Directions
in Research and Policy,
University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada
1979, E6
S.
CHARLES,
Housing Economics,
Macmillan,
London,
1977, E1.75
(paper), pp.
77.
S.
LANSLEY,
Housing and Public Policy in
Britain,
Croom Helm, London,
1979,
f3.50
(paper), pp.
192.
D.
MAW,
The Property
Boom,
Martin
Robertson, Oxford,
1979,
pp.
143.
D.
STAFFORD,
The Economics
of
Housing
Policy,
Croom Helm, London,
1977, E7.95,
pp.
163.
R. ROBINSON,
Housing Economics andpublic
Policy,
Macmillan, London,
1979, E10,
pp.
166.
(paper),
PP.
334.
I
INTRODUCTION
Review articles in economics
can
be sub-
divided into at least two categories. First,
there are reviews related to rapid or sig-
nificant developments in areas of technical,
theoretical or applied research which are
perceived to lie at the core of contemporary
economics. Second, there is a class of review
which relates to a relatively disparate
literature which deals with
a
nascent area
of theoretical or empirical investigation in
economics.
In
such instances the paradigm
or research programme is either not estab-
lished or not well
known
and the reviewer
is obliged to indicate the connectivities
between the work cited. Here the concern
is with housing economics. Although there
is
now widespread and growing interest in
this field of research a well developed,
integrated research framework does not
exist and hence this review falls into the
second category. In this class of review the
reader must be particularly careful to take
account of the biases and the omissions
of the reviewer.
Throughout the
1970s
in North America
there has been a burgeoning interest in
economic aspects of housing markets and
systems, and two recent volumes (Ingram
1977,
Bourne and Hitchcock
1979)
compre-
hensively indicate the progress of this
research. In the U.K. interest has stemmed
from at least three sources. The economic
input to and consequences
of
housing
policies in the U.K., previously viewed from
primarily a social or palitical standpoint,
have finally aroused the concern which they
should have always merited. At a local,
and indeed national, planning level an
early preoccupation with physical or social
indicators of housing need has now passed
as
slum
clearance and house building pro-
grammes have tended to assuage aggre-
gative quantity and quality defined housing
problems (Cmnd.
6851).
Thus, demand,
supply and the allocative and distributional
efficiency of policies are now operational
questions at even the local level. This
interest has been reinforced, in the U.K.,
by the introduction of local Housing Plans
which effectively compel
local
authorities
to consider the role
of
the private housing
sector and, in addition, public-private
interactions. This demand for an economic
understanding of the effects of policy has
been,
in part, occasioned by the growing
real scale and complexity of housing policy
expenditures in the U.K. Throughout the
1970s
public expenditure on housing con-
stituted an increasing share of aggregate
public expenditure, both by central and
local authorities, and in
1976
accounted
for around
10
per cent of the total (Stafford,
1977).
At the present time, this growth
warrants scrutiny purely from a macro-
economic standpoint. However, concerns
expressed regarding policy have generally
325
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