An assessment of tenure-specific housing market areas for housing planning

Planning for housing in Britain has embraced the use of housing market areas (HMAs) as appropriate geographies to address calls for greater market responsiveness. Tenure is a crucial dimension of the housing market, so it must be central to assessing local housing demands. Despite the wide cleavages between social and private rented sectors, and between both of these sectors and the owner-occupying majority, the geography of tenure-specific HMAs has remained largely unexplored. This paper assesses the importance of tenure-specific HMAs for housing planning within the current policy frameworks aimed at meeting housing needs. The paper then reports analyses to delineate tenure-specific HMAs, with these boundaries then compared with HMAs defined by analysing the whole market. The case for a national system of tenure-specific HMAs based on migration is found to be unproven. Nevertheless, such HMAs can provide the basis for meaningful affordability measures and a tool to address segregation and reshape housing markets in cities.