Housing Tenure Outcomes of Children and Owner Occupants : A Literature Review

This paper reviews relevant literature pertaining to three key themes that have emerged in the housing tenure debates, specifically renting versus buying. These three themes have been identified as the educational outcomes of children, well-being outcomes and wealth outcomes. These themes while important to the consumer, have far reaching implications in policy and social services, dictating a significant portion of a person's quality of life. Through this literature review I take a thematic approach to examine the identified themes in detail, to understand their shortcomings, outcomes and come to a conclusion on the most beneficial form of housing tenure and recommendations for future research. While it was found in almost every examined case that home ownership is generally the best form of housing tenure when it comes to positive outcomes of the aforementioned themes. It was further concluded that these outcomes may be a mere correlation of examined variables and not an intrinsic cause of the beneficial outcomes. These findings support the need for future research into the causation of degrees of benefit from different forms of housing tenure and subsequent alteration to policy to reflect the trajectory toward the best outcomes of occupiers