Canadian housing prices: the road to wealth?

Homeownership has been one of the best long-term investments in Canada. Despite demographic, economic and social trends that would normally be associated with relatively stagnant trends in housing prices, investment in housing continues to provide owners in most areas of the country with attractive rates of return. However, national trends hide considerable variation. Not all regions, or all groups in society, have been able to capitalize on the wealth associated with increases in housing prices. Many real estate analysts are also concerned that the appreciation in prices over the past couple of decades is not a trend that will continue in the future. There is cautious optimism, but owning a home in the future is unlikely to be the valued investment it was for many in the past.     

浅析节能省地型住宅的建设

论述了我国发展节能省地型住宅的必要性，针对在节能省地型住宅的推广过程中存在的问题，给出了一些行之有效的措施，最后指出通过有关各方的通力协作，定能使节能省地型住宅在我国普及，使我国住宅产业进一步走向成熟。     

Housing ownership and housing wealth: new evidence in transitional China

Ever since housing was transformed from the most important welfare benefit to the most valuable form of private property through radical housing reform in 1998, housing allocation mechanisms in China have been characterized by the coexistence of market logic and socialist legacy. Thus, the Chinese housing system exhibits a transitional nature as the country moves away from a socialist housing system towards a privatized housing system. Using the 2011 Chinese Household Finance Survey, we not only examine these changes in private ownership of housing, but also give an updated evaluation of the privatization process with new empirical evidence. We develop a conceptual framework and an empirical analysis to shed light on distinct housing inequality patterns in transitional urban China. Our results show that both socioeconomic characteristics and socialist institutions contribute to housing inequality, but they follow different paths in the reform and have different impacts on housing inequality.     

Exploring Dual Housing Tenure Status as a Household Response to Demographic,Social and Economic Change

This article proposes that single housing tenure categories do not enable an understanding of the ways in which households use, occupy and own residential properties in the context of broad demographic, economic and social changes. Adapting work on sub-tenure housing choice, housing tenure is overlaid with ownership of residential property to develop four tenure types: Owner, Owner-Owner, Renter and Renter-Owner. Applying this typology in the Australian case provides valuable new insights, with 1.5 million households having dual housing tenure status, including almost one in eight private renters. More broadly, reconceptualising housing tenure to include ownership of other residential property can contribute to theoretical debates about household income and wealth; social status and identity; and social practices and life planning, potentially generating new research questions such as the extent to which Renter-Owners reflect new patterns of living or a response to affordability constraints, and the social identity and political affiliations of those with a dual tenure status.     

Housing and poverty: a longitudinal analysis

Cross-sectional research suggests that the British housing system weakens the link between income poverty and housing outcomes, but this reveals little about the long-term relationships. We examine the relationship between income poverty and housing pathways over an 18-year period to 2008, and develop consensual approaches to poverty estimation, housing deprivation, and the prevalence of under and over-consumption. We find that chronic poverty is most strongly associated with housing pathways founded in social renting, whereas housing pathways founded in owner-occupation are more strongly associated with temporary poverty. Whilst housing deprivation is disproportionately prevalent among those who experienced chronic poverty, the overwhelming majority of people who experienced chronic poverty avoided housing deprivation. This evidence supports of the notion that the housing system, during this period, weakened the link between poverty and housing deprivation. Therefore it can be characterised as representing a ‘sector regime’ with different distributional tendencies from the wider welfare regime.     

The VFT Project: A Rail Union View

Homeownership has been one of the best long‐term investments in Canada. Despite demographic, economic and social trends that would normally be associated with relatively stagnant trends in housing prices, investment in housing continues to provide owners in most areas of the country with attractive rates of return. However, national trends hide considerable variation. Not all regions, or all groups in society, have been able to capitalize on the wealth associated with increases in housing prices. Many real estate analysts are also concerned that the appreciation in prices over the past couple of decades is not a trend that will continue in the future. There is cautious optimism, but owning a home in the future is unlikely to be the valued investment it was for many in the past.     

浅议房地产项目的财务分析

在对房地产项目财务分析的目的、指标与方法介绍的前提下,从基础财务数据的确定、基本财务报表的编制、进行财务分析、进行不确定性分析和进行方案比选分析五个方面详细阐述了房地产项目的财务分析过程,以便判别项目的财务可行性。     

Young People,Homeownership and Future Welfare

Homeownership has become a ‘normalised’ tenure of choice in many advanced economies, with housing playing a pivotal role in shifts from collective to asset-based welfare. Young people are, however, increasingly being excluded from accessing the housing ladder. Many are remaining in the parental home for longer, and even when ready to ‘fly the nest’ face significant challenges in accessing mortgage finance. This under-30 age group has become ‘generation rent’. As this policy review emphasises, this key public-policy issue has created a source of inter-generational conflict between ‘housing poor’ young people and their ‘housing rich’ elders. To fully understand the complexities at play however, this paper argues that we need to look beyond the immediate housing-market issues and consider how housing policy interacts with broader social, economic and demographic shifts, and how it is intimately connected to debates about welfare. This is illustrated with reference to the UK, although these debates have international resonance.     

住宅的空间设计与节能

针对中国建筑能耗的基本情况,提出改善住宅室内热环境是最基本的节能措施,并对住宅的主要空间与建筑节能设计进行了探讨,归纳总结了住宅的五种节能途径,以期为住户提供健康、舒适的生活空间。     

Homeownership,Asset-based Welfare and the Neighbourhood Segregation of Wealth

The asset-based welfare approach, which has foremost encouraged homeownership, has led to rising homeownership rates, house prices and household debt levels. While this shift has helped raise the net worth of some among the middle and working classes who own property, the implications for the spatial distribution of wealth in cities have not yet been explored. This paper examines the spatial implications of the rise of policies promoting asset-based welfare, by examining statistically how variables related to homeownership rates and housing prices relate to measures of urban wealth segregation among neighbourhoods. Canadian cites are used as the main case study for the empirical analysis. The findings suggest that while homeownership in general has an equalizing effect, rising rates of homeownership (and to some extent, rising house prices) are associated not with greater spatial equalization and dispersal of wealth, but instead with greater spatial segregation and concentration of wealth within cities.     

Constructing Homeownership Policy: Social Constructions and the Design of the Low-Income Homeownership Policy Objective

This paper offers a new perspective to explain how and why the U.S. federal government pursued a policy agenda that from the early-1990s promoted homeownership as the preferred housing tenure of choice for low-income households. Using policy design theory (Schneider &; Ingram 1997 Schneider, A. L. and Ingram, H. M. 1997. Policy Design for Democracy, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.  [Google Scholar]), this paper argues that the social constructions of homeownership, low-income households, and the private mortgage industry were instrumental in the development of policies to increase low-income homeownership. The benefits associated with homeownership, based on long-standing norms around success, stability, and the American Dream, justified government interventions to increase access to private mortgage markets for low-income households. This policy stance, however, did nothing to assist households with maintaining homeownership for the long term. The social constructions embedded in the rationales and implementation of these policies contributed to their failure to sustain homeownership and realize its benefits for low-income homeowners.     

铁路隧道三种机械化配套施工投资对比分析

通过选取目前最新设计的样本隧道数据,采用铁道部最新颁发的铁路隧道工程预算定额和机械化施工补充预算定额,分别计算了三种隧道机械化配套情况下隧道的造价,分析得出了大型机械化配套施工相对传统小型机具施工的投资增加幅度。     

Integrated framework of home comfort: relaxation,companionship and control

ABSTRACT

Home comfort is posited here as the state of relaxation and wellbeing that results from companionship and control to manage the home as desired. To date, studies of comfort have been dominated by building and natural scientists, laboratory settings and technical approaches, which understand comfort in physical, and primarily thermal, terms. Yet, the extensive research on the meaning and making of home by sociologists, human geographers, historians, anthropologists and philosophers highlights that there is much more to inhabitants’ expectations of the home than ensuring physiological ‘needs’ such as warmth. The home is imbued with emotional, social and cultural meaning, and is significant to individuals’ wellbeing in terms of it being (idealized as) a place of rest, family, continuity, control and security. For the first time, this paper brings together home and housing scholarship to conceptualize the findings of a qualitative study on the meanings of home comfort. In doing so, it offers a broad empirically and conceptually informed framework of home comfort and challenges the existing constrained notions and practices for the provision of comfort.     

Women’s mobility,neighbourhood socio-ecologies and homemaking in urban informal settlements

Abstract

The paper contributes to the growing research on relational thinking about housing and home by exploring the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The concept of ‘unbounding’ is used to trace the fluidity and connections established between migrant homes and neighbourhood socio-ecologies. Walking interviews exploring women’s livelihoods reveal that different expendable agencies of the urban environment (e.g. trash, weeds and animal excreta) create conditions for labour in which migrant women hold specific competencies to secure essential resources for home. Unbounding positions home within a socio-ecology of multiple houses that women traverse to support their urban living. The approach offers opportunities to examine the unique ways urban homeless populations strategically as well as affectively engage with under-recognized agencies and actors in informal settlements. Unbounding provides a useful lens with which to raise new conceptual and empirical questions about housing and home in relation to the city that contributes to the homes and livelihoods of marginalized populations.     

Loan Modifications and Foreclosure Sales during the Financial Crisis: Consequences for Health and Stress

Loan modifications and foreclosure sales are two ways mortgage servicers can respond when homeowners fall behind on house payments. We investigate the consequences of these events for health and stress by linking longitudinal survey data with administrative mortgage performance data that identify those survey participants who experienced a foreclosure sale, a loan modification, or neither. We find that between 2008 and 2013, loan modifications and foreclosure sales were both associated with a reduction in the stress of house payments, while foreclosure sales alone were associated with a reduction in the stress of home maintenance. Beyond these property-related stressors, the changes in survey participants' self-reported sense-of-control and mental, physical, and general health are most associated with transitions in employment, income, marital status, and residential quality rather than with loan modifications or foreclosure sales. These findings run counter to prevailing research, yet they inform the debate over how to address problems that arise when homeowners become delinquent on mortgages.     

Promoting home ownership in a social‐rented city: policies,practices and pitfalls

Amsterdam's housing market is dominated by the social‐rented sector. It comprises 56 per cent of the total housing stock, while home ownership comprises only 19 per cent, lower than anywhere else in the Netherlands, and among the lowest in the world. Central government policy is currently seeking to increase the share of home ownership in the Netherlands from 53 per cent (2001) to 65 per cent in 2010. This paper will summarise recent national and local (Amsterdam) housing policy developments, focusing on the recent practice of selling social housing in Amsterdam. Unlike the Right to Buy scheme in Britain, the Netherlands employs an ‘offer to buy’ strategy. Sales, however, have been disappointing so far. Two factors were found to be crucial in this regard: (1) the sluggish change in ‘policy mentality’ and bureaucracy and (2) the high prices in the home ownership market. By way of conclusion, the paper reflects on the desirability of shifting the tenure structure from tenancy to ownership and on the risks that an (over‐) emphasis on home ownership may bring.     

城市工业用(节)水分析

太原市是我国能源重化工基地，工业用水占城市供水总量的50％以上，而太原市又是全国水资源严重短缺的城市之一。就太原市工业用（节）水现状以及存在的主要问题进行了阐述，并提出了相应的对策、措施、指出协调好水资源与工业用（节）水发展的关系，实现经济的可持续发展是今后太原市工业用（节）水管理工作的重点。     

Shocking the Suburbs: Urban Location,Homeownership and Oil Vulnerability in the Australian City

Energy security is receiving increasing attention from governments and scholars at the global and national scale. Petroleum security and rising fuel prices are a challenge for cities whose housing systems are highly dependent on automobile transport. This study assesses transport and socio-tenurial patterns within Australian cities to identify how the combined present and future effects of rising fuel costs, mortgage interest rates and general inflation will be spatially distributed. Using an ‘oil vulnerability’ assessment methodology based on Australian Census data, the study reveals broad-scale mortgage and oil vulnerability across the outer suburbs of Australian cities. The paper concludes with some observations about spatially equitable policy responses to ameliorate the housing and urban impacts of rising petroleum costs.     

Immigration and Housing in an Emerging Global City, Sydney, Australia

By 2001, 33 per cent of Sydney's population of 4.2 million was born overseas. In the previous 15 years, 38 per cent of all immigrants to Australia settled in Sydney compared to the national population share of 21 per cent. Housing costs are highest in Sydney of any of the metropolitan cities in Australia and Sydney's emergence as a global city affects the housing market and has attracted diverse communities and skilled immigrants. This article presents Australian Bureau of Statistics census data to trace trends in home ownership and tenure among key immigrant groups in Sydney from the post-war era to recent times. It discusses the key factors that influence immigrant progress through the housing market and explores the dynamics of Sydney's residential mosaic.