Shared Ownership and Affordable Housing: A Political Solution in Search of a Planning Justification?

Planners in England routinely include shared ownership (SO) housing in the affordable housing element of new developments. Government policies in a number of European countries have also backed intermediate housing market mechanisms as a solution to housing affordability. The rhetoric of such mechanisms makes claims about its social progressiveness, its role in facilitating socio-economic mobility and helping people move from rented accommodation into full owner-occupation. SO schemes in England have been justified on the grounds of being transitional tenures and planners have accepted SO on this basis. However, given the paucity of rigorous empirical work, there is a concern that this is a policy based on assumption rather than evidence. This paper delineates existing knowledge, clarifies dimensions of the intermediate housing market and highlights underlying policy issues based on a large data-set of shared owners in England. Our analysis indicates that SO may not be appropriately classified as affordable housing, and justifiable policy requires further evidence.     

The mobility problem in Britain: new findings from the analysis of birth cohort data

Social mobility is now a matter of greater political concern in Britain than at any time previously. However, the data available for the determination of mobility trends are less adequate today than two or three decades ago. It is widely believed in political and in media circles that social mobility is in decline. But the evidence so far available from sociological research, focused on intergenerational class mobility, is not supportive of this view. We present results based on a newly‐constructed dataset covering four birth cohorts that provides improved data for the study of trends in class mobility and that also allows analyses to move from the twentieth into the twenty‐first century. These results confirm that there has been no decline in mobility, whether considered in absolute or relative terms. In the case of women, there is in fact evidence of mobility increasing. However, the better quality and extended range of our data enable us to identify other ‘mobility problems’ than the supposed decline. Among the members of successive cohorts, the experience of absolute upward mobility is becoming less common and that of absolute downward mobility more common; and class‐linked inequalities in relative chances of mobility and immobility appear wider than previously thought.     

Increasing inter‐generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy‐makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.     

Metropolitan influences on migration into poor and nonpoor neighborhoods

Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and three decennial US censuses are used to examine the influence of metropolitan-area characteristics on black and white households’ propensity to move into poor versus nonpoor neighborhoods. We find that a nontrivial portion of the variance in the odds of moving to a poor rather to a nonpoor neighborhood exists between metropolitan areas. Net of established individual-level predictors of inter-neighborhood migration, black and white households are more likely to move to a poor or extremely poor tract rather than to a nonpoor tract in metropolitan areas containing many poor neighborhoods and a paucity of recently-built housing in nonpoor areas. Blacks are especially likely to move to a poor tract in metropolitan areas characterized by high levels of racial residential segregation and in which poor tracts have a sizeable concentration of blacks. White households are more likely to move to a poor than to a nonpoor tract in metropolitan areas that have comparatively few African Americans.     

‘We Can All Just Get on a Bus and Go’: Rethinking Independent Mobility in the Context of the Universal Provision of Free Bus Travel to Young Londoners

This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with 118 young Londoners (age 12–18) to examine how the universal provision of free bus travel has affected young people’s independent mobility. Drawing on Sen’s capabilities approach, we argue that free bus travel enhanced young Londoners’ capabilities to shape their daily mobility, both directly by increasing financial access and indirectly by facilitating the acquisition of the necessary skills, travelling companions and confidence. These capabilities in turn extended both opportunity freedoms (e.g. facilitating non-‘necessary’ recreational and social trips) and process freedoms (e.g. feeling more independent by decreasing reliance on parents). Moreover, the universal nature of the entitlement rendered buses a socially inclusive way for groups to travel and spend time together, thereby enhancing group-level capabilities. We believe this attention to individual and group capabilities for self-determination provides the basis for a broader and more child-centred view of independent mobility than the typical research focus upon travelling without an adult and acquiring parental permissions.     

要素跨国流动与比较优势变形:实证与理论拓展

比较优势理论是国际贸易理论的基石。通过考察"金砖国家"外资流入与显性比较优势指数变化,发现两者存在正相关性。在全球化经济下,对比较优势的把握应深入到要素层面,即要素质量、数量和要素组合共同决定比较优势。要素跨国流动对要素价格、质量、组合以及规模经济形成产生影响进而影响比较优势,由此,中国应立足提升要素质量的规划,参与全球化经济。     

社会分层与社会和谐

一、社会分层与社会和谐:社会学永恒的话题在所有的社会中,人们一生下来就面对着不平等,即缺少平等的途径以得到社会所提供的满足欲望的物品(戴维·波普诺,1999:239)。因此,在所有的社会中,都如同地质结构一样,存在着高低有序的等级层次,即社会分层。社会分层是社会学永恒的话题。自社会学的经典时代起,就形成了马克思和韦伯两种传统,此后,关于社会分层的研究就从未脱离西方主流社会学的视线。1在国内学界,社会分层研究也是方兴未艾,其态势正如边燕杰(1999)所言,“制度转型时期的社会分层研究成为近年来社会学研究的一个热点,也是社会科学、…     

城乡移民与社会流动

本文基于第五次人口普查数据和2002年流动人口调查数据,考查了当前中国社会的城乡移民规模、移民方式和特征,以及移民的社会流动.本文的结论是,中国的城乡人口流动在很大程度上表现为劳动力流动而非移民运动,来自乡村的流动人口在城市中遭遇了多种形式的社会排斥和社会隔绝,使他们很难在城市中定居下来,融入城市社会生活,从而完成移民过程.但另一方面,流动人口通过城乡移民过程还是实现了一定程度的社会经济地位的改变--收入提高和职业地位上升只是由于社会隔绝壁桑的作用,农村移民所能获得的上升劝机会较少,上升流动的空间和渠道狭窄.     

社会流动与分化视阈下的共同体构建与社区整合研究

社区的发展与管理必须从宏观的经济社会背景着眼,从社会流动与分化的趋势着眼。社会流动与分化的加速,促进了社区的全面转型,催化了社会群体重组,产生了社区居民群体内部的冷漠、离散甚至矛盾分裂的状态,为基层社会管理带来不和谐、不稳定因素。社区的整合是社会整合的缩影,也是社会整合的基石。本文以台湾地区长荣社区为例,分别从社区整合的三种类型--社会整合、系统整合与文化整合来探讨社区整合的不同途径,探索社区如何从地理的初级整合逐步上升为依靠共同利益、共同情感、共同意识的高层次整合。