Mass housing requires mass housing finance

In this lecture Marja Hoek Smit argues that housing finance is critical to solve the housing problem, increasing, as it does, the number of households that can afford to acquire a house in the formal market, which in turn will make large scale development of middle and lower middle income housing possible.Access to housing finance is described as equally important for investors in rental housing of all types.The lecture discusses the positive characteristics of mortgage lending compared to alternative housing finance options, as well as the reasons for mortgage systems to remain small in many urbanizing emerging market countries. It calls for changes in policy to address these constraints. The Mass Housing Finance approach draws on housing finance system-, macro-economic- and urbanization data collected by the Housing Finance Information Network (HOFINET: www.hofinet.org) for more than 130 countries and on country case studies of successful approaches to expand access to housing finance.