Choice and Demand in a Social Housing System: Policy Simulations for Glasgow

This paper the development of a model simulating an urban housing system dominated by non-market social housing, primarily to forecast demand for social housing under different scenarios. The urban system concerned is the city of Glasgow and its suburbs, a post-industrial city in West Central Scotland. There is an established literature concerned with the development of metropolitan housing market models in both the USA and the UK. The present model draws from both traditions but is heavily influenced by the work of Meen (1999). The Glasgow model is largely demand-determined with only a limited supply-side and market-adjustment through supply adjustment. Data for the model comes from the Scottish House Condition Survey 1996 and from extraneous housing, multiple deprivation, population and household estimates. The focus of the core part of the paper is on the demand-side. Demand in the model is composed of three elements: new household formation, net migration and the tenure and locational choices of existing households. It is this third element that poses the most difficulties and is modelled separately using a nested multinomial logit (NMNL) formulation. The results from the NMNL model attempts to explain the locational, tenure and mobility decisions of existing households. The results are then adopted as conditional probabilities in the simulation model. The paper then sets out the structure of the basic model and reports on the modelís performance across a range of possible scenarios. The paper concludes by examining the academic and policy implications of the model and suggests future avenues for refinement and further work.