Climbing up the housing career ladder

Someoneís housing career can be described as climbing up a ladder. You start at the bottom when you rent a room and end with buying your dream house. In between you take the steps of renting a dwelling and buying several dwellings. In The Netherlands, the housing career ladder worked until the late nineties. Since the nineties housing prices of owner-occupied dwellings increased much more than the incomes. Thus making it more diificult for households to buy a dwelling. This created missing steps in the housing career ladder, which resulted in stopping people from moving up the ladder. To enable people to walk up the ladder again, several ideas were presented for creating extra steps in the ladder by the government and housing associations. One of the most famous constructions is that housing associations give a discount on the selling price of their dwellings and share the profit with the owner when the dwelling is sold again. In most cases the dwellings are sold back to the housing associations and then sold again to somebody else. This enables households with lower incomes to buy a dwelling. Besides providing owner-occupied dwellings for households with lower incomes, housing associations also hope that the livability of the neighbourhoods were these houses are situated is going the be improved. Which is also good to increase the added value on the dwelling for the buyer; dwellings in better neighbourhoods are sold for a higher price. The question is if this construction is actually used as an extra step in the housing career ladder. Thus is it used by households at the beginning of the housing career ladder who have lower incomes? And when they sell the dwelling are they moving up the ladder, thus buying a more expensive dwelling? And does the livability of the neighbourhood actually improve? This paper will answer these questions. First, several of these selling constructions will be discussed. After that it will be examined if the households actually use this construction to climb up the housing career ladder. For this part, a large recurring survey among households who use one type of this construction will be used. Then it will be examined if the livability of neighbourhoods increased since the constructions are introduced. To examine this, a large livability survey among households living in these neighbourhoods is used. The paper ends with some concluding remarks.