Demographics and housing in America

Family-building needs of the "nesting" generation and its offspring, the baby boomers born 1947-1964, dominated post-World War 2 housing demand and production to 1970. Centered on tract-house suburbia, annual housing starts averaged 1.5 million a year in the 1950s and 1960s. With growing real median family incomes, the average size of new dwellings increased and 63% of households owned their homes by 1970, compared to 44% in 1940. The baby boomers' arrival at the ages of household formation sparked the "Golden Housing Age" of the 1970s. Net household increase averaged a record 1.7 million a year and 19 million year-round dwellings were added to the national inventory compared to 11 million in the 1950s and 1960s, despite a plunge in housing starts during the 1974-75 recession. Real median family income declined after 1973 and inflation escalated housing costs but at the same time fueled demand for housing as an investment hedge against inflation. The singles and "mingles" life styles of youthful baby boomers boosted rental housing, condominiums, and compact townhouses. Married-couple households dropped from 74% of the total in 1960 to 58% in 1975. Household formation and housing starts dropped drastically with the 1980-82 recession but bounced back as the economy recovered in 1983-85 and restrained inflation braked housing cost rises. Projections show overall household increases reduced to barely a million a year in 1990-95, with renter household gains at just 175,000, compared to 1/2 a million a year in the 1970s, as the household-formation ages of 18-34 are taken over by the baby bust generation. This will be offset by the baby boomers' maturing into middle age. By 1995 most of the giant generation will be in the peak-earning, high-homeownership ages of 35-54. Married-couple households in this age bracket will account for 56% of the household gain from 1983 to 1995, boosting national affluence and the demand for upscale housing, likely to be located in the suburbs.     

Evaluating indicators for housing policy: Residential satisfaction vs marginal improvement priorities

The research challenges the conventional usage of households' residential satisfaction as a guide for housing policy and development. A new housing indicator, ‘marginal residential improvement priority’, is introduced and is compared with residential satisfaction both theoretically and empirically. Within the context of neoclassical consumer theory it is shown that the former provides a superior indicator of households' housing preferences than the latter. It is then demonstrated empirically that these conceptual distinctions make for significant differences when the indicators are employed in a practical application. Using a sample of 971 households drawn from Wooster, Ohio, the paper considers their evaluations of four general dimensions of the residential environment and six specific features of the dwelling. Zero-order correlations between the indicators average only 0.40 across these ten dimensions. Households' relative satisfaction with these various aspects diverge substantially from the priority they place on improving these aspects in the future, with rank-order correlations not differing significantly from zero. More specifically, all household strata gave public services their lowest improvement priority and dwelling quality their highest, regardless of their relative degree of satisfaction with the dimension. Similarly, most groups gave high priority to improving interior condition and room size and low priority to improving exterior condition, independent of their satisfaction. Thus, if the efficacy of a limited amount of resources invested in a housing policy is to be maximized, they should not necessarily be directed toward those features of the residential environment with which households are least satisfied.     

Dimensions of Housing Deprivation for Older People in Ireland

Housing is an important aspect of living standards and quality of life for older persons, but the housing-related problems they may face encompass rather different circumstances, relating to the condition of the dwelling, how well equipped it is, whether housing costs represent a serious burden, and whether the neighbourhood environment is problematic. This paper brings out the importance of distinguishing these different dimensions of housing problems for older people, illustrated empirically using data for Ireland from an important new European dataset. Controlling for other factors, being older is associated with more housing quality problems but fewer housing cost and neighbourhood problems than for those of working age. The variables predicting deprivation among older people differ across the dimensions and the correlations between the dimensions are low. Over half the older people in the sample experience some form of housing-related deprivation, but a majority of these are reporting only one. Scores on a summary index for older persons are much less strongly associated with factors such as household income and poverty, marital status, and location and type of dwelling than for all households, bringing out the importance of distinguishing and studying the different dimensions and framing appropriate policy responses to each.     

Immigrant characteristics and Hispanic-Anglo housing inequality

This paper seeks to explain why Hispanic households in the United States live in housing markedly inferior to Anglos’. I argue that immigrant characteristics of Hispanic households and the metropolitan areas in which Hispanics live play important roles in determining such inequality in the housing market. Empirical analyses of homeownership, household crowding, and housing costs demonstrate that immigration plays a role in explaining relatively low homeownership and high household crowding for each of four large Hispanic populations (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Hispanics). The role of immigrant characteristics in determining housing costs is much weaker.     

Food Poverty,Vulnerability, and Food Consumption Inequality Among Smallholder Households in Ghana: A Gender-Based Perspective

We examined gender-based household welfare differences in Ghana among smallholder households. We measured disparities in welfare outcomes (food poverty, vulnerability, and food consumption inequality) across male and female household heads and identified the set of covariates influencing them. The study utilizes a dataset from a farm household survey undertaken in Northern Ghana from October to December 2018. A multistage sampling approach was adopted in selecting 900 farm households. The Oaxaca–Blinder mean and Recentered Inference Function decomposition techniques highlighted the sources of gender differentials in household welfare outcomes. The findings indicate a significant gap in food consumption expenditure per capita and household dietary diversity scores between male- and female- headed households, and these gaps are as high as 28.2% and 18.1%, respectively. However, there are no statistically significant differences in vulnerability to food poverty between male- and female-headed households. The Lorenz curves confirm inequality in gendered households’ food consumption expenditure and dietary diversity scores. This study highlights the existence of systemic female-headed household vulnerability to food poverty in Ghana. This study provides significant evidence of the need for policymakers to address food systems’ structural deficiencies and inequalities with gender in mind.

     

Urban segregation in Sweden housing policy,housing markets,and the spacial distribution of households in metropolitan areas

The postwar Swedish housing standard has been raised considerably. But there were also unforeseen and undesired side effects in the form of increasing segregation. Between 1965–1975 a great number of rental apartments were built in the periphery of the metropolitan areas. They originally received an overrepresentation of the poor, immigrants, social welfare recipients, and members of the working class. Today these areas face long distances, increasing deterioration and the lower socioeconomic level of their population is accentuated. The following wave of rebuilding in the central metropolitan areas also reinforced residential segregation. As the dwellings became larger and totally modern, the rents rose. Ownership forms often changed to tenant-owned dwellings which drove up the prices of tenant-owned dwellings. The older working-class population was replaced by wealthy families with middle-class backgrounds. The rebuilding in the city centers has in all likelihood been the motor in the overall relocations and migrations of the metropolitan populations during the 1980s. The movement of the middle-class towards the centers corresponds to an increased concentration of workers and various resource-weak groups on the peripheries. This analysis uses a new large micro data base integrating Swedish census and level-of-living survey data on individuals, households and neighbourhoods.Housing segregation has not been seen as a very serious problem in Sweden. Attention has primarily been aimed at providing spatial and modern dwellings for everyone. The construction of housing was explosive through the middle of the 1970s, and it has been supported by substantial general subsidies. Today, Sweden, together with Norway, has Europe's highest and most evenly distributed housing standard. Overcrowding and unmodern housing have for all practical purposes been abolished.     

Reconstruction of Birth Histories from Census and Household Survey Data

In this paper a new procedure for reconstructing birth histories from census or household survey data is developed. Given the number of children ever born, the number of deceased children, and the ‘own children’ birth history of each woman, it is possible to ‘fill in’ probabilistically the missing births of her deceased children and of children not present in the household. Thus, the procedure generates complete birth histories from which such measures as age-specific fertility rates, parity progression ratios, and birth interval measures may be estimated. For purposes of illustration and validation, the method is applied to the household survey data of the 1974 Korean National Fertility Survey, both to the entire sample of households, and to households with women from whom individual birth histories were collected. Age-specific fertility rates and parity progression measures estimated from the reconstructed birth histories are compared with those estimated by applying the ‘own children’ method, for the period 1960–74.     

Satisfaction and Motivation of Homeowners Towards Green Homes

Whilst green homes have been constructed by housing developers in Malaysia, developers should determine how satisfied homeowners are with their green homes. This paper first reviews data from a survey to determine the satisfaction level of homeowners towards their residence in terms of green features in Iskandar Malaysia. Next, factor analysis is carried out to identify benefits that motivate households to own green homes, and then followed by logistic regression analysis to determine the effects of motivators on housing satisfaction. Results show that homeowners are most satisfied with the green features of high ceiling, North–South orientation, double-glazed panel glass doors and windows, solar panel system and landscaped parks with facilities. Rain water harvesting system and low-flow water fixtures, on the other hand, are the least satisfied green features among homeowners. Four motivators are found that describe households’ belief about green homes: ‘Financial Incentives’, ‘Healthy and Sustainable Environment’, ‘Energy Efficiency’ and ‘Livability’. The findings also demonstrated that the extent of housing satisfaction may depend on what motivates homeowners to own green homes. It would seem that house buyers do not just demand a typical house to stay in but also sustainable houses that do not compromise the environment.     

Why is Housing Always Satisfactory? A Study into the Impact of Preference and Experience on Housing Appreciation

This study focuses on residents’ perceptions of residential quality concerning 23 different dwelling aspects. Respondents were asked to indicate their appreciation of these dwelling aspects on a scale ranging from 0 (“extremely unattractive”) to 100 (“extremely attractive”). The influence of two potential factors on the appreciation of dwelling aspects is examined: (1) preference and (2) experience. It was hypothesized that residents who live according to their preferences give higher appreciation scores than residents who do not. This should even apply to low-quality housing. Furthermore, it was argued that residents appreciate their current housing situation more than residents who do not live in that particular housing situation. This effect should be independent of preference. The impact of both preference and of experience could be confirmed. The results also showed an interaction effect between preference and experience: the positive effect of experience on appreciation is larger in residents who live in a housing situation that they do not prefer. This result would be expected if the impact of experience works to decrease the ‘gap’ in residential satisfaction due to the discrepancy between what residents have and what they want. In conclusion, why is housing always satisfactory? In this paper, housing is satisfactory because the ‘gap’ between what residents want and what they have is small; residents seem to have realistic aspirations. Furthermore, residents appreciate what they already have, even if this is not what they prefer.     

Trajectories of Fertility and Household Composition in the Demographic Profile of the Czech Republic

The household composition matrix is a representation of the demographic structure of households, specific to age groups of household members and household heads. As such, the matrix reflects also the environmental conditions, housing in particular, that mould households' demographic structure. By specifically depicting the presence of children in households, household composition could be viewed as gauging fertility within the context of housing conditions. This stance is examined in an application to Czech census data for the year 1991, at the commencement of an intense process of socio-economic transformation that accompanied the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Within this process, housing had an inadvertent impact upon the structure of households in general, and upon fertility decline in particular. By using the standard matrix representation of household composition, correspondence between trajectories of age-specific fertility and household composition emerge throughout the Czech Republic. This correspondence illustrates the potential household composition analysis carries for fertility measurement and estimation in rapidly changing economic environments.     

Perceptions of Fortune and Misfortune in Older South African Households: Social Assistance and the ‘Good Life’

It is commonly assumed that better living standards will boost subjective well-being. The post-apartheid South African government subscribes to this idea; its social policies aim to provide ‘a better life for all’. Since the coming of democracy in 1994, the state has built over 3 million houses and supplied electricity and clean water to poor households. By 2009, an estimated 43 % of households were beneficiaries of social grants. The question is whether this investment in services and social assistance translates into higher well-being of citizens. It is argued that older people’s experience of positive change in their life circumstances can be taken as a litmus test of progress in society. The paper reports results of a sample survey conducted in 2009 that inquired into the living circumstances and well-being of 1,000 older low-income households in two provinces linked by a labour migration route. Older households were defined as ones with a member 55 years and older. The sample was drawn among three approximately equal-sized subgroups: Rural black households in the former ‘homelands’ of the Eastern Cape Province, and black and coloured households in Cape Town in the Western Cape Province. The majority of the households in the survey had been interviewed in an earlier survey conducted in late 2002. Both material and non-material changes had occurred in the household situation over the 6-year period between 2002 and 2009. Access to housing and infrastructure had improved but financial difficulties and debts continued to plague many of the surveyed households. Rural black households appeared to be worst off among the three categories of older households with the lowest level of living; coloured households best situated with the highest level of living. Urban black households, many of whom were immigrants to Cape Town, appeared to have experienced the greatest fluctuations in their material circumstances between 2002 and 2009 and a mix of fortune and misfortune. Results indicated that social grants, which provided a modicum of financial security and peace of mind, made the crucial difference between fortune and misfortune for vulnerable households. Securing a social pension and other grants appeared to be the main route to good fortune for the rural households in the study. Households in Cape Town required wage income in addition to grant income to get by in the city. This mix of income sources diluted urban households’ dependence on social assistance. Regression model results suggest that income and financial security play a significantly more important role in boosting the well-being of low-income older households than access to services. Pooling of income, a common practice in pensioner households, contributed significantly to household satisfaction.     

Climate change and internal migration intentions in the forest-savannah transition zone of Ghana

Migration is at the centre of demographic research on the population–environment nexus. Increasing concerns about the impacts of environmental events on human population are fuelling interest on the relationship between migration and environmental change. Using data from the Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network Ghana project, we employ binary logistic regression to examine migration intentions of households in response to major community stressors including climate-related ones. The results indicate that the type of community stressor that affects households most does not differentiate migration intentions in Ghana’s forest-savannah transition zone: Even though the majority of the respondents mentioned climate-related events as the stressor that affects them the most, such events do not appear to directly explain migration intentions. However, socio-demographic factors such as age, household size and current migration status are significant predictors of migration intentions, with younger household heads, heads of migrant households and heads of smaller households being relatively more likely to have migration intentions than other household heads. We conclude that migration drivers are multifaceted and deserve further research because even in areas with perceived environmental stress, climate-related events may not be the primary motivation for migration intentions.     

Multidimensionl Poverty and The Role of Social Capital in Poverty Alleviation Among Ethnic Groups in Rural Vietnam: A Multilevel Analysis

This paper empirically examines the disparities over time across six dimensions of poverty (monetary, education, health, housing, basic services, and durable assets) between ethnic minority and majority households in rural Vietnam. Using the five-wave panel data of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) 2008–2016, we observe improvements in most non-monetary dimensions of poverty for both ethnic groups, while the monetary dimension shows the highest degrees of deprivation and the lowest rate of decrease during the studied period. Health is the only dimension in which ethnic minority households are not only better off than those of majority households during the studied period, but also report improvement. We further explore the role of social capital in ethnic minorities and non-minorities at household and community levels in multiple dimensions of poverty by employing multilevel models. Our study reports the significant effects social capital have at the community level on reducing poverty in the monetary, education, housing, and basic services dimensions for ethnic minorities, while social capital at the household level shows significant effects on monetary, basic services, and durable assets. These findings indicate that policy makers ought to consider the role of social capital when designing poverty alleviation strategies for the country.

     

Housing Conditions of Nuclear and Extended Households in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area

Arrivals of new immigrants into the south Florida area have put increased pressure on housing markets and fostered renewed efforts to provide more affordable housing. Many view household extension largely as a response to the lack of a sufficient amount of affordable housing. This paper examines the nature, proportion and housing condition of nuclear and extended households in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. The study also investigates how the incidence and housing situation of extended households has changed during the period from 1986 to 1990. This study illustrates that extended families in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area are not uniformly worse off than nuclear families, given ethnicity and income level. While the area's housing problems require attention, some of that attention should be focused on removing institutional barriers to household extension and to providing broader housing choices for minority ethnic groups.     

Parameters of Household Composition as Demographic Measures

Cross-sectional data, such as Census statistics, enable the re-enactment of household lifecourse through the construction of the household composition matrix, a tabulation of persons in households by their age and bythe age of their corresponding household-heads. Household lifecourse is represented in the household composition matrix somewhat analogously to survivorship in a life-table in demography. A measure of household lifecourse is the average household size, specific to age of household-head. Associated with the age-specific household size is the age-interval 0–4, which yields average number of children present in households, also by age of head. Trajectories of re-enacted household lifecourses for Phoenix and for the State ofArizona are depicted here to track the gamma probability density function. Through this relationship also the association between household size, children per household, and fertility emerges. To the extent that housing conditions or tenure impact average household size, or other aspects of household composition, fertility in particular is discerned as a housing- related demographic attribute of households. Household size and headship ratio, both specific to age of head, are here shown to be analytically related to the household composition matrix, their product yielding the age-specific headship coefficient. As a measure incorporating parameters of households and dwellers, thus also characterizingoccupied dwellingunits, the headshipcoefficient emerges as a demographic indicator of housing in a community.     

Some New Techniques for Applying the Housing Unit Method of Local Population Estimation: Further Evidence

The housing unit method of population estimation is often characterized as being imprecise and having an upward bias. In an earlier paper we argued that the method itself cannot be properly characterized by a particular level of precision or direction of bias. Only specific techniques of applying the method can have such characteristics. In that paper we presented several new techniques for estimating the number of households and average number of persons per household (PPH). However, the testing of these new techniques was limited by the lack of census results against which the estimates could be compared. Complete census data on population, households, and PPH are now available and can be used to test alternate estimation techniques. In this paper we replicate the tests reported in our earlier paper using 1980 census data for Florida’s 67 counties. These tests provide further evidence that the new techniques produce more precise, less biased estimates than previously used techniques.     

Cohort Succession in the US Housing Market: New Houses, the Baby Boom, and Income Stratification

Federal housing policy in the US across the postwar period supported the construction of new houses more than public provision or renovation of older structures as a means of ensuring a sufficient supply of quality dwellings. Understanding trends in new housing in particular is thus crucial to understanding the housing regime. Following Myers (Housing demography: Linking demographic structure and housing markets. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; Housing Studies, 14, 473–490,1999), this paper conceptualizes historical change in the housing stock within a demographic framework as the movement of cohorts of households through cohorts of housing stock. Recent evidence suggests that a new cohort of houses arose in the 1980s and 1990s (larger with more amenities than past vintages), and that buyers of those new houses were increasingly affluent. In this paper, I link the succession to a new cohort of houses to household cohort succession and examine the increasing affluence of new house buyers by age and cohort, focusing especially on the entry of the Baby Boom generation exactly when the new cohort of houses arrived. I use US Census microdata for 1960–2000 to develop a cohort longitudinal dataset, and analyze historical change in stratification in new house ownership. I find significant shifts between cohorts in income inequality among new house buyers, with implications for the capacity of the housing regime to meet the future needs of an increasingly diverse population.

Timely Indicators for Inequality and Poverty Using the Italian Labour Force Survey

Income distribution measures obtained from standard household income surveys are usually published with a significant delay, of about 2 years. In this paper we propose a methodology for obtaining timelier indicators using the Italian Labour Force Survey (ILFS), a database which collects detailed information not only on individuals’ labour market status, but also on their households and wages. We develop a framework to estimate household labour income and we use it to construct distributional indicators that are available 1 year and half before the standard measures. After discussing the limitations of our approach, we show that the ILFS-based indicators closely track those calculated on standard household income surveys. The suggested indicators are not meant to substitute standard income measures but can offer up-to-date information, with the aim of better monitoring the distributional impact of changing macroeconomic conditions.

     

Minimal Household Units: A New Approach to the Analysis of Household Formation

In this paper a new method for the analysis of household formation and the composition of households is described. The components, or building blocks, which combine to form households are identified and these have been called ‘minimal household units’. The focus of the analysis is on whether a minimal household unit sets up as a separate household or, if not, with whom it is shared. An economic theory of household formation is outlined, and a probit model is used to guide the estimation of the effects of economic and demographic characteristics of the minimal household unit on the probability of being a separate household, economic factors, such as the unit's income, and other social and demographic characteristics of the unit's members are shown to have a significant influence on the probability of its being a separate household.