This paper examines geographic mobility and housing downsizing at older ages in Britain and America. Americans downsize housing much more than the British largely because Americans are much more mobile. The principal reasons for greater mobility among older Americans are two fold: (1) greater spatial distribution of geographic distribution of amenities (such as warm weather) and housing costs a...

The cooperative housing sector is directed at low and medium income residents who cannot afford to buy their homes in the regular private market. Due to social housing legislation, it is possible to build cooperative housing below regular market costs and use tax benefits, therefore providing affordable dwellings to their owners. Traditional cooperative housing used to provide less comfort and ...

BACKGROUND The structure of long-term care (LTC) for old people has changed: care has been shifted from institutions to the community, and death is being postponed to increasingly old age. The aim of the study was to analyze how the use and costs of LTC in the last two years of life among old people changed between 2002 and 2013. METHODS Data were derived from national registers. The study po...

Evidence about the mental health consequences of unaffordable housing is limited. The authors investigated whether people whose housing costs were more than 30% of their household income experienced a deterioration in their mental health (using the Short Form 36 Mental Component Summary), over and above other forms of financial stress. They hypothesized that associations would be limited to low...

OBJECTIVES A number of studies have pointed to the pressure that housing costs can exert on the resources available for food. The objectives of the present study were to characterise the relationship between the proportion of income absorbed by housing and the adequacy of household food expenditures across the Canadian population and within income quintiles; and to elucidate the impact of recei...

BACKGROUND In this cross-sectional study, we investigated whether clinical, social, financial, and care variables were associated with different accommodation settings for individuals suffering from severe and persistent mental disorders. METHOD Electronic record data of 250 patients who fulfilled the criteria for persistent and severe mental illness were used. Multiple linear regression mode...

In recent years, there has been concern in many sections of the community about the cost of housing in Australia. This is not the fi rst time that such concerns have surfaced: the 2003/04 Productivity Commission Inquiry on First Home Ownership was preceded by studies into housing issues in 1977–78 and 1990–92.2 But the current episode of high housing costs has been quite prolonged, and there ar...

The paper studies the impact of the portfolio constraint imposed by the consumption demand for housing (the “housing constraint”) on the household’s optimal holdings of financial assets. Since the ratio of housing to net worth declines as the household accumulates wealth, the housing constraint induces a life-cycle pattern in the portfolio shares of stocks and bonds. For reasonable degrees of r...

OBJECTIVES We quantified the economic cost of selected environmental factors among North Carolina children living in substandard housing. METHODS We gathered data on direct medical care costs for specific childhood medical conditions associated with environmental factors commonly found in substandard housing. Medical claims data for 2006 and 2007 were obtained from BlueCross BlueShield of Nor...

This study models demand by owner-occupied housing ‘‘stayers.’’ Most consumers do not move routinely in response to small changes in income or housing price, so the ‘‘own rent’’ and ‘‘move stay’’ decisions are modeled as multiperiod optimization in the presence of transaction costs. The empirical section uses the ‘‘American Housing Survey’’ to provide a panel of household stayers for a metropol...