IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v37y2000i9p1561-1582.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ontology, Policy and the Market: Trends to Home-ownership in Hong Kong

Author

Listed:
  • Adrienne La Grange

    (Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, saalag@cityu.eduhk)

  • Frederik Pretorius

    (Department of Real Estate and Construction, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, fredpre@hkucc.hku.hk)

Abstract

An important trend in housing delivery internationally has been rising rates of home-ownership. In Hong Kong, owner-occupation has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, and this is expected to continue. This paper seeks to account for trends to home-ownership in Hong Kong. It is proposed that two principal factors account for rates of home-ownership internationally: the interaction and combined outcome of housing affordability and household preferences—the 'market explanation' for tenure choice; and the 'ontological explanation' of home-ownership as a preferred household tenure choice, which assumes that ownership is the innately preferred tenure form. On face value, Hong Kong presents a relatively persuasive case for the ontological explanation for trends to home-ownership. Yet the findings of this paper suggest that the decision to buy appears to be systematically explicable by market factors: in the private sector, primarily by investment considerations, namely high returns to residential property investment and favourable user cost of housing capital; and, in the public sector, by a very fine-grained approach to household affordability with publicly assisted home-ownership initiatives. Hong Kong demonstrates again how carefully families weigh the bundle of services associated with their tenure options. The government plans to expand home-ownership further, yet there are major systemic implications for such an expansion.

Suggested Citation

  • Adrienne La Grange & Frederik Pretorius, 2000. "Ontology, Policy and the Market: Trends to Home-ownership in Hong Kong," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 37(9), pages 1561-1582, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:37:y:2000:i:9:p:1561-1582
    DOI: 10.1080/00420980020080261
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980020080261
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00420980020080261?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen Malpezzi & Stephen K. Mayo, 1997. "Housing and Urban Development Indicators: A Good Idea Whose Time Has Returned," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 25(1), pages 1-12, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ali Osman Solak & Burhan Kabadayi, 2016. "Bounds Testing Approaches to Housing Demand in Turkey: Is There a Real Estate Bubble?," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 6(3), pages 1132-1135.
    2. Hu, Mingzhi & Su, Yinxin & Ye, Wenping, 2019. "Promoting or inhibiting: The role of housing price in entrepreneurship," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ben C. Arimah, 2000. "Housing-sector Performance in Global Perspective: A Cross-city Investigation," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 37(13), pages 2551-2579, December.
    2. Urmi Sengupta & Allan G. Tipple, 2007. "The Performance of Public-sector Housing in Kolkata, India, in the Post-reform Milieu," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(10), pages 2009-2027, September.
    3. Jacques Simon Song & Thierry Messie Pondie & Loudi Njoya, 2024. "Urbanization in Africa: Does Energy Poverty Matter?," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 15(3), pages 11750-11783, September.
    4. Buckley, Robert M. & Kalarickal, Jerry, 2004. "Shelter strategies for the urban poor : idiosyncratic and successful, but hardly mysterious," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3427, The World Bank.
    5. Merrill, Sally Roe & Kozlowski, Edward, 2001. "Developing Housing Finance in a Transition Economy: The Case of Poland," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(3), pages 363-392, September.
    6. Stephen Malpezzi, 2000. "Tales from the Real Side: The Implications of Urban Research for Real Estate Finance in Developing and Transition Economies," Wisconsin-Madison CULER working papers 01-02, University of Wisconsin Center for Urban Land Economic Research.
    7. Filali, Radhouane, 2008. "Analyse des conditions de l'habitat en Tunisie: une approche par la statistique multivariée [Housing condition analysis in Tunisia: A multivariate approach]," MPRA Paper 12196, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Malpezzi, Stephen, 2001. "The Contributions of Stephen K. Mayo to Housing and Urban Economics," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 72-108, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:37:y:2000:i:9:p:1561-1582. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.