Urban heritages: How history and housing finance matter to housing form and homeownership rates

Contemporary Western cities are not uniform, but display a variety of different housing forms and tenures, both between and within countries. We distinguish three general city types in this paper: low-rise, single-family dwelling cities where owner-occupation is the most prevalent tenure form; multi-dwelling building cities where tenants comprise the majority; and multi-dwelling building cities where owner-occupation is the principal tenure form. We argue that historical developments beginning in the 19th century are crucial to understanding this diversity in urban form and tenure composition across Western cities. Our path-dependent argument is twofold. First, we claim that different housing finance institutions engendered different forms of urban development during the late 19th century and had helped to establish the difference between single-family dwelling cities and multi-dwelling building cities by 1914. Second, rather than stemming from countries’ welfare systems or ‘variety of capitalism’, we argue that these historical distinctions have a significant and enduring impact on today’s urban housing forms and tenures. Our argument is supported by a unique collection of data of 1095 historical cities across 27 countries.