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In France, social housing provides a significant proportion of housing services. The present contribution seeks to identify housing careers for social tenants, using event history analysis on a sample of over 40,000 households located in the Lille metropolitan area (in northern France). The data was provided by a local social housing company, and contains extensive geographical information. The analysis was conducted for the metropolitan area and for its three main cities (Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing). This made it possible to measure the effect of geographical location at both the agglomeration and neighbourhood levels. Our main results are threefold. First, access to better housing depends more on individual characteristics than on residential location; thus, it appears that comparatively favoured households may use social housing to increase their “upward mobility.” Secondly, forced mobility (eviction) depends on household histories and characteristics, but is spatially heavily concentrated. Finally, urban renewal, by increasing the quality of the built environment, tends - at least in some neighbourhoods - to make social housing more desirable (by giving households a stronger incentive to stay). It may thus improve the quality of life of people who are less likely to become homeowners or to access larger/more comfortable houses.

This article explores the housing experiences and aspirations of young disabled people in Scotland. Those who leave the family home in crisis experience several housing moves before settling; those who leave in a planned way tend to stay in their first home. Young people aspiring to leave the parental home are limited to a social housing tenancy, as a result partly of their economic circumstance and partly of a lack of knowledge of other choices. Social care professionals need to pay closer attention to assessing housing aspirations and helping young people consider all options. This should be an ongoing aspect of supporting all young disabled people.

Over the past decades, residential mobility has received a good deal of attention in the academic world. However, its mutual relationship with urban change has a more recent history. Even so, an increasing number of academic researchers and policy makers who focus on housing processes and urban transformations realize the importance of linking the two together. This is exactly what this special issue is about. Starting from the perspective of one of the working groups of the European Network for Housing Research - the migration, residential mobility, and housing policy group (http://www.enhr.ibf.uu.se), we plan to relate the knowledge on migration and residential mobility to the knowledge of processes of urban change. A range of papers on this topic was presented during the ENHR conference in Cambridge in the summer of 2004.

Concerning migration on a national level, two phenomena emerge: people migrating from one region to another and people moving from the countryside to the cities. The geographical shift of the population between regions in a country is a slow process. In Sweden, only a few percent of the population migrate yearly. Nevertheless, migration has caused and still causes considerable redistribution of the population toward the metropolitan regions in Sweden. This section will emphasize general trends in population concentration through urbanization and migration in Sweden and compare these trends with changes in other countries.

This paper explains how a relatively simple analytical spatial algorithm and a GIS visualization of inter-municipal migration patterns revitalized the negotiations for a formal merger (called Holland Rijnland) between six municipalities in the urbanized Leiden Region and ten municipalities in the adjacent rural Bulb Region, both situated in Randstad Holland. Though the regional housing market was just one of the negotiation topics, the political discussion around it almost stymied the entire merger. We discovered a lack of knowledge about three key questions: Would the new merger function as one housing market region within the broader context of Randstad Holland? Do the original two regions interact at all? Or do lower-order regions exist instead? We answered these questions with the aid of individual migration data from Statistics Netherlands and by applying a method called Intramax Clustering in the GIS Flowmap programme. We found that the intended merger is indeed a housing market region; that interaction between the two regions is limited; and that lower-order housing market regions do exist. These findings helped to restart the negotiations; since 2004 Holland Rijnland has been a fact.

Mobility has wide‐range impacts on the financial management of property issues, such as consumption and investment. In the literature of residential mobility, household life cycle is widely acknowledged as an important concept. An array of household demographic factors such as age has been repeatedly found to be significant in influencing mobility. Many previous researches offer few verifi able hypotheses or propositions and their results are conflicting. Some of them also suffer methodological inadequacies. This paper is an attempt to rectify this situation. There are two important contributions by the current research. One is a methodology that employs multivariate methods, which fills the gap of previous research. The second contribution is the large census dataset of Hong Kong which is rare in previous studies. The research is conducted under the framework of life cycle models with emphasis on economic and demographic variables of households. Demographic determinants are found to be more important in explaining population mobility among rental households while economic factors are more pertinent for owners. This may be explained by the different strategies adopted by renters and owners in satisfying their housing needs. Renters are envisaged to base their mobility decisions more on demographic factors. Owners, on the other hand, tend to view home buying as an investment as well and hence put more emphasis on economic factors. It is hoped that this research can shed more light on the topic of residential mobility by drawing on the experience of a large population residing in a small place, Hong Kong

In a career that spans four decades, Wayne Emery describes his life spent to date within the housing sector and the changes that he has witnessed to how services are delivered. In a refreshing way, he describes relatively recent policy moves and how the sector ‐ in Wales and elsewhere ‐ must continue to change to meet older people's wishes and needs.

Finding a suitable home can be difficult in a constrained housing market such as small rural village. Within Ambridge, only a small proportion of the homes in the village is known about, and it is rare for additional homes to be added to those where named characters live. This chapter takes a generational view of housing pathways and options, showing how Generation X, Millennial and Generation Z populations in Ambridge are housed. The chapter examines the extent to which characters rely on friends or family for solving their housing problems and considers the role of family wealth and wider dependence in determining housing pathways. The research shows that dependence on others' access to property is by far the most pronounced feature of housing options for these households. These pathways and housing choices are compared to the wider context in rural England, to consider the extent to which luck, in the form of the mythical ‘Ambridge Fairy’, plays a role in helping people to find housing. The ways in which the Ambridge Fairy manifests are also considered – showing that financial windfalls, unexpectedly available properties and convenient patrons are more likely to be available to people with social capital and established (and wealthy) family networks. The specific housing pathway of Emma Grundy is reviewed to reflect on the way in which her housing journey is typical of the rural working-class experience of her generation, within the wider housing policy context.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the structure of risk and the structure of pricing in housing markets where the interaction between segments is taken into account with the structures that come about in a housing market approach that ignores this interplay. Knowing how most empirical assessments of whether housing markets are in or out of equilibrium is related to macroeconomic variables and is ignoring the interplay between segments our aim is to highlight the extent to which a homogeneous market framework underestimates pricing and risk in real housing markets.

Framed in terms of a linearized housing market with two segments, the author derives expressions for house prices and house price risk in three scenarios. The author compares the structure of pricing and the structure of risk in a homogeneous housing market with those of two distinct heterogeneous housing markets where segments are linked as well analyzing as how prices and risk responds to shocks.

The author derives expressions for market segment prices and for the house price index in three distinct housing market scenarios and shows how heterogeneous housing market frameworks produce both expressions for house prices and for house price risk, as well as a response in both risk and prices to shocks to demand, that deviate from those of a homogeneous housing market framework. While significantly underestimating house price risk a homogeneous framework might also be taken by surprise of the price response accompanying shocks to demand.

The authors' simplistic expressions for house prices and house price risk provides a framework for bringing two distinct theoretical housing market camps onto the same playing field. The approach shows the value added of taking the interplay between market segments into account when analyzing housing market developments.