Seek, Ngee Huat
Description
In recent years, home improvement has become more important
as a supplier of housing and this enhanced role in the housing market
can have a significant impact on the quality of the existing housing
stock, as well as on the distribution of dwellings among different
households. This thesis aims to explain why and how home improvement
decisions are made in order to understand the broader implications of
home improving as a housing adjustment process. Other areas of concern
are how...[Show more] improvers differ from other households, and the extent to which
improving is a substitute for moving in adjusting housing consumption.
The main data source of this study is a sample survey of two
hundred homeowners in Adelaide, who had undertaken home improvements
within the year prior to the date of interview. The Australian Bureau of
Statistics also provided some useful unpublished data on additions and
alterations to dwellings.
Home improving mainly affects the home ownership sector of the
market. Each year more homeowners improve their existing dwelling than
move. The preference for improving instead of moving, among homeowners,
stems largely from the high financial and psychological costs of moving.
Many of them move under circumstances where they cannot improve, such as
household dissolution or formation, or a change in workplace, or where
they desire some housing attributes which are impractical or uneconomic
to alter.
The typical housing consumption pattern of many Australian
homeowners over time is that~ after achieving theirĀ· objective of owning a
house, most of them stay in the same house for a good number of years, and
often make improvements to it as their demands change with their socioeconomic
circumstances over their life cycle. Home improving enables a household to adjust its housing consumption when the need arises, and as
and when it can afford to do so. Home improvements are made mainly for
consumption purposes, and to meet the demand for more and better housing
rather than to remedy physical deficiencies in the dwelling. The number
of households purchasing older dwellings in inner suburbs for improvement
is relatively small, although there is evidence that this phenomenon is
continuing in Australian cities.
Generally, home improvements are made by the more affluent
households, although the lower income improvers are able to reduce
expenditure by doing more of the work themselves. As a result, improvements
tend to be concentrated among the better houses in areas of higher
socio-economic status. The preference for home improving among home
owners may also change the composition of ownership with new construction,
particularly at the urban fringe, catering mainly for the younger and less
wealthy first home buyers. If left to the working of the market, home
improvement activity is likely to widen the quality differences among
the existing stock and accentuate the unequal distribution of housing
resources and residential segregation. On the other hand, improving the
existing stock can reduce the waste of housing obsolescence and deterioration,
and the rate of neighbourhood turnover which can be socially expensive.
To reduce inequalities, there is a case for providing financial
assistance to those who need it, but cannot afford to improve their homes.
More importantly, home improvement activity tends to slow down the rate at
which cheap low quality dwellings are filtered down and, as a result, fewer
of them reach the poor. Hence, the government should take a more direct
approach, through direct construction of public housing, or the acquisition
and upgrading of existing houses for the poor to ameliorate some of the
inequities resulting from home improvements.
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