ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the diachronic trajectory of three historical – institutional housing dimensions along which Germany and the USA has diverged into countries of different tenures: urban form, housing finance and residential construction. It probes to what extent these findings may be generalized to other country cases. More precisely, the chapter discusses whether countries with historically dense cities, high shares of bond-financed mortgage banking and a crafts-based family-house construction tend to have lower homeownership rates. Alternatively, whether countries with historically suburbanite cities, high shares of housing deposit banks and more mass fabrication of single-family house production tend to have higher homeownership rates. In principle, these generalizations hold over other German- and English-speaking countries. However, the historical path from dense cities to low homeownership has been broken by Scandinavian, Southern and Eastern European countries. The chapter then explores the generalizability: from two cases to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
