Affordable Rental Housing: Lost, Stolen and Strayed

This paper contributes to an exploration of the potential causes (as distinct from existence) of social and spatial polarisation. It focuses on the changing provision of low-rent housing in a spatial context, and hence on the role that the private rental market plays in the residential choices available to lower income households. The paper applies multinomial logit estimation to panel data to determine the factors that affect the probability that an existing rental dwelling remains at the same real rent value over the decade from 1991 to 2001, filters down or up or exits from the private rental market. It tests the hypothesis that the outcome is affected by neighbourhood characteristics.