The right to buy: migration and gentrification

Iain Bamford, Columbia University

(Project no. 1014742)

The UK’s Right to Buy law (introduced in 1980) allows current residents of public housing to purchase their homes. In this paper, we use quasi-exogeneous variation in take-up of the policy due to an eligibility rule that excluded some social housing residents from the policy to examine several hypotheses. First, we look at internal migration decisions by new homeowners vs ineligible social tenants to examine the link between social housing and regional inequality. Second, once purchased, previously publicly-owned homes in desirable neighbourhoods could be sold on. We examine how demographic changes in these neighbourhoods (“gentrification”) affected outcomes for incumbent residents.