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Abstract
Comparative housing scholars have, for many years now, imported typologies from non-housing spheres to explain housing phenomena. Notably, approaches attempting to account for divergent housing tenure patterns and trends have frequently been organized around typologies based on the assumption that a causal relationship exists between homeownership rates and the type of welfare regime or, more recently, the variety of residential capitalism a country exhibits. While these housing-welfare regime approaches have provided important research tools, we argue that the typologies they generate represent cross-sectional snapshots which offer little enduring cogency. Based on long-run data, we show that the postulated associations between homeownership, welfare and mortgage debt are historically contingent. This paper makes the case for employing historicized typologies, proposing a country-based typology linking historical housing finance system trajectories to urban form and tenure, with regional dimensions. We argue the need for typologies which can accommodate longitudinal, path-dependent dimensions, both within and between countries.
Notes
1. John Doling and Nick Horsewood (Citation2011), who analyse the trade-off effect between levels of home ownership and the generosity of pensions, are notable exceptions here.
2. Mark Stephens (Citation2016, Citation2017), also critical of this tradition, refers to it as the ‘welfare and housing regime literature’ and Peter Malpass (Citation2008a) refers simply the ‘housing-welfare state relationship’.
3. It is important to note that this is a national picture. The regional and inter-city pictures vary markedly, both in 1900 and today.
4. These authors are far from alone in talking about housing mainly in welfare terms. Other pertinent works are, for example, Allen et al. (2004), Kleinman (Citation1996), Ronald & Doling (Citation2010) or Groves (Citation2016). Barlow & Duncan (Citation1994) prominently link welfare to urban land planning regimes (speculative, self-promotion, public), which is, however, difficult to operationalize across countries, times, let alone in the long run.
5. The existence of a welfare trade-off and the negative homeownership-debt link becomes more pronounced once we include less industrially mature countries of Eastern Europe because those have high homeownership, but low debt and welfare. However, an attempt has been made here to control for institutional variance. We follow the authors in limiting ourselves to a bivariate analysis only. The picture would look different if further control variables were added.
6. We think of this exercise as an example, applying to housing research what other authors have done in historically informed typological work in other domains, such as Caroline Fohlin for the corporate finance typologies (Fohlin Citation2016) or Philip Manow for the religious origins of welfare typologies (Manow Citation2008).
7. For more empirical detail, please consult research published elsewhere (Blackwell & Kohl, Citation2018a).