THE MOVE TO HOUSING OWNERSHIP IN TEMPORAL AND REGIONAL CONTEXTS

A previous longitudinal study of households who make the change from r enting to owning demonstrated the close connections between the tenure change and family composition. Specifically, there is a short period in which decisions with respect both to family changes and to house pu rchase occur. In this paper the authors extend that work and elaborate the findings by directly incorporating a measure of family compositio n change and analyzing its 'triggering effect' on the tenure change, a nd by enlarging the temporal and regional context analysis. Shifts fro m couples to families and increases in income trigger moves to ownersh ip. Also, there are interaction effects between the regional contexts and time periods. A notable finding is that the economic climate affec ts some groups of households more than others. From the 1980s on, low- income households and one-earner families have been seriously affected in their ability to enter the homeowner housing market.