The Measurement of Intra-Distributional Mobility: An Investigation of District Long-Term Housing Vacancies

It is not unusual for government reports to place spatial inequalities into a league table, highlighting poorly performing jurisdictions in some form of yardstick competition. A case in point is long-term dwelling vacancies. Action on Empty Homes, which works closely with local governments in the UK, provides commentary about poor performance, including recording persistently higher rates in certain regions and mentioning the worst rankings at the local level. How the distribution of vacant dwellings changes is not well explored. How rigid this league is has been a feature of a discussion in the growth literature. A useful dynamic policy measure in this regard is how far the average jurisdiction changes its league position over a given period. A type of convergence proposed here, implied by Sala-i-Martin, features the time for the initial rankings to become discordant with the current order. One could see this sort of measure being used widely, wherever performances are judged relatively as a means of highlighting good practice. Using English data on vacant dwellings, this paper shows that there is a ‘long memory’ in long-term vacancy rates, both at the local and regional levels. The industrial and housing inheritances of districts in the North of England, evident in the league table in 2004, remain influential after 18 years, even with general population growth. Although the use of incentives to bring dwellings back into use is thought to be successful, it is suggested that the role of the buy-to-let investor may have been overlooked. Changes in the treatment of their rewards appear to coincide with a rise in long-term vacancies.