Home ownership among low income households

Workshop 3. Session B. Abstract. Norway is one of the European countries with the highest home ownership rate. At any time about 80 percent of Norwegian households are home owners and between 90 and 95 percent will attain home ownership sooner or later in their life course. Normally home ownership attainment is strongly correlated with income. In Norway the high ownership rate will of necessity reduce the range of such a correlation. However, the correlation is undoubtedly to be found in cross sectional data. A nation wide survey carried out in 2004 showed an ownership rate of 30 in the lowest decile of household income and 98 in the highest one. Different Norwegian governments have tried to make housing policy measures as public loans and housing allowances more suitable to facilitate home ownership attainment even among low income groups. In succeeding low income households may enjoy the happiness to be an owner in a housing market moving upward, but at the same time be exposed to considerably larger risks. In the paper we discuss the design of a coming research project where we will analyse both the chance of attaining home ownership and the risk of falling out of an owner position. We will use a longitudinal data base containing data on income, financial assets and deficits, ownership registrations, prices from the house transactions, household composition and moves for the whole Norwegian population. We intend to select a sample consisting of all Norwegian households who at least in one year in the period from the outset of 2000 until the end of 2004 have belonged to the lowest income decile (approximately 300 000 households)