Housing Markets & Planning Policy

A Critical Reflection on Housing Market Area Definition in England

“…The model has a number of limitations. Its application is moderated by the outcomes of planning activity, including the location of social housing and green belt land (Jones & Watkins, 2009). It also neglects household preferences and variations in housing type, quality and stock.…”

“…In terms of housing market functioning (in the owner-occupied market), in the process of buying and selling a property at a uniform price (arbitrage), buyers consider transactions at any point in a given geographical area to be an appropriate substitute (Jones, 2002, p. 552). The fact that in housing markets the product is immobile and the consumers are mobile means that a housing market is created whenever an individual wishes to purchase a residential property, generally accompanied by a move from an occupied property to take up residence in another property (Jones & Watkins, 2009).…”

Online Housing Search and the Geography of Submarkets

“…This imbalance has often been attributed to a lack of data (e.g. Jones and Watkins, 2009;Sun and Manson, 2010) but in recent years the ways in which people begin to search for housing have fundamentally changed and this has created opportunities for much richer analyses of search activity. Whereas housing search previously began with a visit to an estate agent's office or by looking at the property pages of a local newspaper (Palm, 1976), the initial stages of housing search are now primarily an online activity via various market portals, including Trulia in the United States, Funda in The Netherlands, ImmobilienScout24 in Germany and Rightmove in the UK.…”

An Introduction to the Special Issue – Housing in Hard Times: Marginality, Inequality and Class

“…This inequality is not only longstanding and persistent, reflecting the legacy of de-industrialisation in the UK, but also has a strong spatial Housing studies, as a field of inter-disciplinary research, has long had an interest in poverty, marginality and inequality. This reflects its engagement with the concerns of policy and practice, as well as its origins and evolution as a sub-discipline within applied fields such as Social Policy (Clapham et al, 1990;Somerville and Sprigings, 2005), Economics (O'Sullivan and Gibb, 2003;Oxley, 2004;Ball, 2006), and Planning (Adams and Watkins, 2002;Jones and Watkins, 2009). A key analytical focus has been the differential impact of social and urban policies in different places at different scales, with a particular emphasis on the most vulnerable, marginalised and excluded groups within society.…”