A finding that might affect housing policies (via):
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, found that homeownership makes workers less mobile, which brakes economic growth and worsens unemployment, especially in areas blighted by the decline of locally dominant industries. Strictly speaking, whether this is a social problem is debatable. The costs of unemployment are borne mostly by the unemployed, not by others. Workers in company towns might be wise to spread their risk rather than sink their savings into a house close to the plant—but, you might argue, that is for them to decide. Yet Oswald argues that homeownership helps to calcify whole economies, which weakens the case for subsidy (and introduces the case for new taxes to discourage homeownership). [Housebound. Clive Crook. The Atlantic. December 2007]
