1st Edition
Homeownership, Renting and Society Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Acknowledgments
List of figures and tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The historical origins and persistency of suburbanized versus compact cities
1.1 How Germany became a country of multi-unit buildings
1.2 How the US became urbanized in single-family-house cities
Chapter 2: Historical differences in housing finance
2.1 Germany: mortgage bank regime with non-profit associations
2.2 United States: Deposit-banking regime
Chapter 3: Fordist mass production and the Handwerk tradition of single-family houses
3.1 The German Handwerk production of single-family houses
3.2 Mass-produced single-family houses in the United States
Chapter 4: The broader picture of OECD countries: generalization of findings, horizontal ownership and homeownership ideology
4.1 Exploring the generalizability: from two cases to OECD countries
4.2 Differences in the legal tradition of horizontal ownership
4.3 The origins and country-differences of the homeownership idea
Conclusion
Appendix
References
Biography
Sebastian Kohl is a researcher at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.
It is well known that the US has a much higher homeownership rate than Germany. Cultural, land scarcity and welfare state explanations have been mobilized to explain the difference. Sebastian Kohl rejects such explanations and comes up with three explanations rooted in nineteenth century developments: differences in municipal governance over land use, mortgage lending institutions and the organization of residential construction.
Manuel B. Aalbers, associate professor of Geography at KU Leuven, Belgium
