This foundational text for understanding housing, housing design, homeownership, housing policy, special topics in housing, and housing in a global context has been comprehensively revised to reflect the changed housing situation in the United States during and after the Great Recession and its subsequent movements toward recovery. The book focuses on the complexities of housing and housing-related issues, engendering an understanding of housing, its relationship to national economic factors, and housing policies. It comprises individual chapters written by housing experts who have specialization within the discipline or field, offering commentary on the physical, social, psychological, economic, and policy issues that affect the current housing landscape in the United States and abroad, while proposing solutions to its challenges.

The analysis of the mortgage market is a specialised field but examines a financial market with extremely wide-ranging implications; it affects the stability of the whole economy. The key thing about this analysis is the increasing importance of the secondary mortgage market – which in the US is now several times larger than the market for government debt. The UK secondary mortgage market is also growing and the book will provide a timely resource to those active and interested in this important financial market. The 1990s saw an enormous growth of mortgage market analysis as an academic subject and there is a vast literature scattered among the key real estate journals. There is now a great need to not only bring this very complex subject area together, but also to abstract the main issues and to render them intelligible. The book will provide an organised research resource and also inform and motivate further research into the microeconomics of mortgage markets.