ABSTRACT
In a sense US housing policy is to have no policy and rely on private enterprise. Private enterprise has, however, been stimulated by the increased demand for owner-occupied housing resulting from the tax concessions and mortgage guarantees which the federal government makes available to home-owners. Many American economists and policy-makers have argued that groups with special needs and the ‘house-poor’ can best be provided for by means of the filter down process resulting from new private enterprise building. When housing is mainly built by private developers responding to market forces, it is inevitable that the building rate and the percentage of GNP devoted to housing will vary markedly from year to year. Americans have been willing to pay a high proportion of their incomes for housing and, in contrast to Sweden and Britain, this proportion has not fallen since the war.
