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Negative Equity and British Housing in the 1990s: Cause and Effect

This paper is concerned with the emergence in Britain in the early 1990s of a large group of domestic mortgage holders with negative equity (i.e. whose property had fallen below the value of the mortgage advance used to purchase that property). The emergence of negative equity is traced to the conjunction of the long-term trend towards wider home-ownership in Britain and the effects of deregulation of the financial system in the 1980s. Using individual records from a major building society, the temporal, geographical and social distribution of negative equity is assessed. The results suggest that negative equity was far more likely to affect certain social groups living in particular places and that these appear to be the people least well placed to 'help themselves' out of debt. The concluding section attempts to draw out some of the policy conclusions from these findings.