How the Other Half Lives: An Exploratory Analysis of the Relationship Between Poverty and Home-Ownership in Britain

This paper examines the extent and nature of poverty amongst home-owners in Britain using data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Survey. It concludes that the proportion of the poor who are home-owners is very much higher than one might have surmised from an acquaintance with the great bulk of previous research on poverty and housing policy. It can be asserted with confidence that home-owners constitute about half the poor in Britain. The paper describes the socioeconomic characteristics of poor home-owners and compares and contrasts them with the poor living in the other housing tenures. It also examines how the outcomes of poverty differ between the tenures. Some of the policy implications of the analysis are also discussed