Volume 31.

1 March 2007 233–43 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00721.x

BOOK REVIEWS

Gill Valentine 2004: Public Space and the Culture of Childhood. Aldershot: Ashgate.

This book addresses the relationship between parents, children, upbringing and public
space. In the first chapter the author explains that this relationship is characterized by
fear: parents’ fear for the risk their children run in public space and the generally felt
fear for children and youth causing trouble in public space. The findings presented in
the book are based on a two-year study of parental concerns about children’s use of
public space in nine areas in England. Research locations vary from urban metropolitan
neighbourhoods to rural towns, and research populations from working-class parents to
middle-class families, all with children aged between 8 and 11. The research consisted
of a survey and additional interviews with parents and some focus group interviews with
children.
After a brief introduction, chapter 2 focuses on terror talk and geographies of fear.
It shows how the concept of risk is socially constructed and is related to specific spaces.
Parents communicate public space as potentially risk-full, while private space is
considered to be safe. Statistics, however, show the opposite: it is the private space of
home in which children are most at risk. Children are statistically more likely to be
abused in private spaces. The next chapter moves on to the gendered dimension of
geographies of parenthood. There are gender differences between fathers and mothers,
but also between parents’ attitudes to sons and daughters. It is pointed out that the culture
of fatherhood has changed more rapidly than fathers’ conduct. Bringing up children is
still foremost a mothers’ task. In addition, mothers claim to negotiate with their children,
while fathers take on a more authoritarian role. Many studies point out the restriction
of girls in public space, but interestingly enough the study by Valentine shows that girls
are perceived as more capable than boys by their parents. It is not made clear whether
this gendered attitude indeed results in more freedom of movement for girls. Chapter 4
continues with children’s competences in public space and the way children and parents
discuss this topic at home. Parents negotiate limitations on their children’s freedom of
movement in order to protect them. Children try to increase their freedom by playing
their parents off against other parents. In chapter 5 the consequences of parental
restrictions are explored. Parents try to find all kinds of substitutes for their children’s
out-of-home activities, such as adult-organized sports activities, music lessons and
childcare. But these privatized institutionalized activities are not open to all children to
the same extent. Inequality among children is one of the negative results. The decline
of public space in cities is another negative effect of parents’ efforts to keep their
children off the street. The next chapter elaborates on this issue, but from the point of
view of teenagers. Teenagers are often considered as the troublemakers in public space
and thus as ‘dangerous children’. There exists a wide-held assumption that the street
belongs to well-behaving adults and if children and teenagers would like to enter the
street they must behave in an adult-like way. That would mean that there is no place for
children in public space. The last chapter of the book is an evaluation of what the author
calls the crisis of childhood — which is a little bit exaggerated. It is a moral appeal for
adults to listen to children’s voices and to stimulate their participation in urban planning.
This is a fine collection of papers about an important issue: children’s loss of agency
in relation to their restricted freedom of movement in public space. It is made clear that
parents are very much concerned about this development, but that they feel isolated
when it comes to solutions. Terror talk and media exposure don’t give much space for
Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.

© 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell
Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
234 Book reviews

a more liberal approach to children’s wishes to increase their territory. In case of

problems, it is parents and particularly mothers who are seen as mainly responsible. The
focus on parents in the book is such that you almost forget that the families studied live
in quite different locations. Would it make no difference where children grow up — the
kind of neighbourhood and the social-economic class? Or is the weight of parental fear
in Britain so high that it doesn’t make any difference where a child grows up?1 The
study lacks recognition of children’s diverse living situations and the effect on their
time–space behaviour and on their parents’ risk assessment. If there is one central
outcome of children’s studies it is the growing diversity of childhood. Childhood is
plural. Specific contexts underlie diversity, but it is precisely the daily context of
children’s lives which remains rather bleak in the book by Valentine. Nevertheless, she
deserves the credit of being one of the first to place parental fears as an important topic
on the research agenda. The study was carried out in around 1995/1996 (the period of
the fieldwork is not explained in the book) and several chapters have already been
published in geographical journals. The value of the book, therefore, is not that it
presents much new material, but it is handy to have a collection of good-quality papers
around the same topic in one publication.
Lia Karsten, University of Amsterdam

Cele, S. (2006) Communicating place. Methods for understanding children’s experience of place.
Stockholm University Press, Stockholm.

Cynthia Enloe 2004: The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire.
London: University of California Press.

If you’ve ever wondered how a green plastic soldier materialized in your cereal box or
how Carmen Miranda wound up in a bikini top with a pile of bananas on her head,
you’re likely to find a kindred spirit — if not a source of more significant riddles — in
Cynthia Enloe. A political scientist turned affable feminist gadfly, Enloe spent the better
part of the past two decades addressing the role of gender, labour, war and nationalism
in our everyday lives, often replacing easy-baked answers with difficult questions. And
of the latter, she is positively overflowing. Her most recent book, aptly titled The Curious
Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, offers 367 pages so brimming
with queries on everything from militarized Miss America pageants to the evolution of
post-Vietnamese war masculinities that the text has room for only one definitive North
Star: the thesis that ‘women matter’, as both drivers of small-scale community change
and as agents of international political agendas.
Seasoned feminist academics may think themselves too erudite for such a simple
argument. But the essays, interviews and autobiographical prose compiled in this
anthology tackle such an eclectic array of material that the book rewards a wide variety
of readerships. Newcomers to international political theory will appreciate Enloe’s
piecemeal guide to ‘gendering’ the discipline: first, by redefining whose experiences
register as authoritative in the arena of political discourse, in order to avoid the naiveté
and inaccuracy born from discounting women’s diverse voices; second, by exploring the
concrete political workings of both femininity and masculinity; and third, by applying
the fruits of this labour to the ultimate objective of local and global demilitarization.
‘Veteran’ Enloe enthusiasts are more likely to appreciate the intimate digressions about
the author’s wartime suburban girlhood, as well as her musings on critical pedagogy —
the warning, for instance, that teachers too often privilege the performance of their
expertise in the classroom over their willingness to be constructively contradicted.
1 A recent study on children’s experience of place suggests that Britain is characterized by a massive
anxiety about the risks children run in public space, at least when compared with Sweden (see Cele,
2006).

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One thing that will surely unite neophyte and specialist readers alike will be an
appreciation of the book’s copious footnotes and tangible case studies from around the
world. Much like ‘the globetrotting sneaker’ featured in Enloe’s most frequently
reprinted essay by the same title (p. 43), Enloe is a traveller of great physical and
analytical distances. Her contributions move effortlessly between the refugee camps of
Pakistan, the maquiladoras of Mexico, and the military bases of her own American
backyard, stopping along the way to refer readers to myriad non-Western sources of
further insight: unsung feminist historians such as Piya Chatterjee and Kumari
Jayawaradena, for example, or transnational activist groups such as MADRE and the
Iraqi Women’s Rights Coalition.
The book’s introduction, ‘Being curious about our lack of feminist curiosity’, reveals
Enloe at her very best. In it, she presents the claim that semantics is the subtle straw of
which patriarchal empires are built, sustained, and — quite possibly — contested. Just
as George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English language’ famously urged
readers to interrogate euphemisms and passive linguistic constructions in political tracts,
this essay encourages a similar scepticism about loaded modifiers such as ‘natural’,
‘traditional’ and ‘always’, which allow us to sleepwalk through public and private acts
of speech while leaving unequal power relations uncontested. Taking aim (look, there I
go!) at the militarized and gendered assumptions embedded in our present lexicon, she
asks readers to observe what transpires when we replace an intellectually lazy phrase
such as ‘cheap labour’ with its more curious cousin, ‘labour made cheap’.
In the remainder of the collection, Enloe moves beyond contestations over
terminology into more literal battles over space and ideologies. She deconstructs the
NATO bombings of Belgrade and the understudied militarization of humanitarian aid
programs in post-conflict zones, and elucidates how, in war-torn societies as diverse as
Rwanda and Vietnam, ‘masculinity continues to be the currency for domination and
exclusion’ (p. 217) long after the ink on a cease-fire agreement has dried. In the book’s
final and most pressing political essay, ‘Updating the gendered empire: where are the
women in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq?’, Enloe expounds on why ‘a lack of gender-
security planning consciousness’ (p. 294) will ultimately destabilize Afghani and Iraqi
women’s prospects for political and social equality. More than two years later, her
predictions have proven all too prescient: the UN recently reported a dramatic surge in
rapes and honour killings since the onset of US occupation in both regions.
The most frequent and obvious criticism of Enloe’s scholarship is that she approaches
grave and janus-faced academic questions with a light-heartedness that occasionally
verges on flippancy. This critique rings true of The Curious Feminist at times,
particularly since the text privileges breadth over depth; she cutely titles one think piece
‘Hitler is a Jerk’, for instance, and her treatment of Afghani and Iraqi women’s political
participation merits more meticulous research than can be drawn primarily from New
York Times dispatches. But the book’s playfulness is also its great virtue. Complex
politics is, in Enloe’s hands, a set of Russian dolls: present her with an overwhelming
conundrum — say, the performance of masculinity in the US presidency and its
implications for foreign policy decision-making — and she’ll crack it open into its
constituent parts using vivid anecdotes and micro-political observations; tender
something that seems thimble-sized and ‘insignificant’ — a childhood toy or a yellowed
photograph — and she’ll build it back up into a profound statement about the
construction of militarized childhoods and patriotic mothering.
Enloe writes accessible feminist political theory not because she is incapable of
producing denser tomes — look no further than her earliest expositions on ethnic
nationalism for verification — but rather because she ideologically rejects the patriarchal
implications of wilful obscurity. ‘I’m so opposed politically to the notion that non-
accessibility is the equivalent of seriousness’ (p. 85), she comments in a conversation
with Marysia Zalewski in Part I of the text. Even so, she never dismisses the power of
theory, which she defines as ‘a level of explanatory generalization that is above the
particular’ (p. 88); of her first foray into explicitly feminist scholarship with Does Khaki

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Become You?, she tells Zalewski: ‘I was determined to write in a way that had theoretical
implications — in the sense that if I got it wrong, it mattered’ (p. 85).
Luckily for us, Enloe tends to get it right. Earning readers’ trust with theoretical
rigour and relentless open-mindedness, she convinces even the most resistant among us
to follow her into the belly of the analytical beast: ‘to look inside brothels, to peer into
respectable parlors, to press our noses against the sooty windows of factories’ (p. 270).
By the time we close the book and wipe the smudge from our faces, we are sure to
resume the work of everyday life with the conviction that feminism is not a chore, but
rather an invitation to political insight and awe.
Sarah Stillman, Oxford University

Jerry L. Simich and Thomas C. Wright (eds.) 2005: The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many
Faces. Reno, NV: University of Las Vegas Press.

In The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces, editors Jerry L. Simich and Thomas
C. Wright offer a collection of essays that introduces the reader to a variety of ethnic
groups in the area. Lamenting the popular imagination of Las Vegas only as a gambling
and entertainment center, they showcase a different side of the city and valley — one
that includes a multiplicity of population groups that have since changed the face and
feel of the place. Las Vegas, like many major metropolitan areas in the United States,
is in a moment of transition, affected by both globalization and transnational labor flows
that have made the city a dominant hub for tourism with a hotel-centered economy that
is utterly dependent on service labor. Notwithstanding the fact that Las Vegas has
actually been built with transition in mind (it builds new theme resorts almost as fast as
it demolishes old ones), its changing labor force is a phenomenon that is quite recent,
and this book provides a glimpse into the histories and contemporary conditions of these
transitioning communities. The overall argument in this book is simple: Las Vegas is
much more than what we imagine it to be, especially if we take a look at the many
ethnic group members that call it home these days.
Three opening essays frame this anthology: an introduction that sets the tone for
understanding Las Vegas through the lens of broad immigration patterns and ideas about
ethnic group formation; a first chapter that locates the origins of Las Vegas as a railroad
town, its emergence as a gambling center during the second world war and beyond, and
its current status as one of the country’s top immigrant destinations; and a second chapter
that examines the broad indications and trends of ethnic diversification in Las Vegas in
terms of community visibility, institution building and settlement patterns. What follows
are specific chapters on Southern Paiutes (Native Americans), Mexicans, African
Americans, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Croats, Poles, Filipinos, Salvadorans,
people from the Indian Subcontinent and Chileans. Each of these chapters narrates a
specific group’s history of immigration/migration into the Las Vegas area, its patterns
of community formation and cultural practice, as well as the major issues it confronts
and engages with. And each of them was written from a variety of different perspectives,
with authors, including the editors, writing from the angles of their specific disciplines
and fields of history, political science, sociology, anthropology, literature, social work,
law, ethnic studies and urban studies.
Las Vegas has been the subject of occasional discussion, especially among cultural
studies scholars whose insights center mostly on analyzing the large-scale derivative-
oriented fantasy production that is characteristic of its hotel industry and what this might
mean in the context of a so-called postmodern condition. This discussion is clearly not
an interesting one for the editors and contributors of this volume because their emphasis
is on the people who, to a large extent, enable the work of such a fantasy production.
For this reason alone, it is a landmark text, particularly in the field of ethnic studies and
urban studies, because it directs our attention to the significance of service and skilled

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labor that is oftentimes missed in cultural analyses. Such a labor force has also
predominantly comprised people of color. I emphasize labor of color here not to mean
that it is a principal node of discussion in this anthology, but to speculate on the gravity
and force of their importance in the Las Vegas economy given the attention paid by this
book’s essay writers to their remarkable participation in the hotel-casino industry. Add
to this the insistence of such ethnic communities on sustaining their homeland or
indigenous cultures despite or in spite of the dominance of world-class entertainment
in the resorts that they themselves work in. Perhaps, this is the anthology’s major
weakness: it offers substantial indications of labor force participation of minority groups
only in subtle ways.
Although The Peoples of Las Vegas succeeds in introducing its readers to the diversity
of its population groups — both old and recent immigrants alike, including an
indigenous one — such a feat only barely scratches the surface of rigorous urban ethnic
analysis. It is like the experience of attending an ethnic festival in which one is left with
merely sampling the varieties and specificities of difference without devoting significant
attention to, for example, the patterns of distribution and exercise of power within and
among the groups and the realities as well as possibilities of cross-ethnic interaction or
coalitional politics between them. It becomes, therefore, an exercise in devouring the
pleasures of ethnicity in its most innocuous and unproblematized forms, so that one is
left wondering how these groups might be substantively compared with each other and
how experiences of privilege and inequality might actually be differentiated even more
across groups when their histories and contemporary lives are collectively measured.
Nevertheless, this first attempt at configuring a city of ‘many faces’ is commendable
precisely because it opens an important conversation on the subject of urban ethnicity.
It is appropriately interdisciplinary and it pays adequate attention to specific ethnic group
histories and patterns. The framing chapters provide a thorough overview of the
historical, economic, political and demographic contexts of Las Vegas well within the
thematic of a transitioning city. The chapters on the local lesser-known groups like
the Southern Paiutes, the Croats, Filipinos, Salvadorans, those from the Indian
subcontinent, and Chileans are especially informative and rich with social analysis.
Overall, this anthology makes it worthwhile to be introduced to ethnic Las Vegas.
Rick Bonus, University of Washington

Cécile Péchu, 2006: Droit au Logement, genèse et sociologie d’une mobilisation. Paris:
Dalloz.

This book is the result of the author’s participant observation in the Comité des Mal-
Logés, and Droit au Logement, two organizations of or for homeless and poorly housed
people in Paris, from 1990 to 2001. The Comité des Mal-Logés was started by leftist
organizations in 1987 in response to fires which caused 17 deaths and left over 80
African people homeless. It started as a ‘defensive’ organization in which anti-racism
was used as a mobilizing factor at a time of rising support for Le Pen. DAL broke away
in 1990, and CML came to an end in 1991. Both organizations were made up of
‘militants’ and ‘members’ (i.e. homeless families) and helped the latter while also
campaigning on housing issues. They used squatting and camps as methods and were
careful in targeting the media. For Péchu, both are successful organizations, both in
rehousing families and in raising housing issues. DAL is said to have succeeded in its
demand for the application of the law on requisition of empty housing, and now has
branches across France and close links with social housing organizations.
The book has three foci: the mobilization process, militants and their motivation, and
squatting as a mode of action. Péchu’s model of mobilization includes housing shortage,
political context, actors’ resources and framing. She uses the term ‘improbable
mobilization’ to draw attention to the difficulty of mobilizing around homelessness.

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However she emphasizes that the social exclusion discourse prevalent in France
provided a favourable context. She also stresses framing and argues that the
organizations’ framing influenced media perceptions. The demands advanced by the two
groups were narrowly housing related and did not adopt the anti-capitalist rhetoric of
some earlier squatting campaigns, which she sees as a factor in their success. Péchu’s
analytical focus is on the militants rather than members and she notes the difficulty of
retaining members once they had got improved housing, and mentions that assistance
to individual families had to be made conditional on their continuing participation in
campaigning events. She argues that the poor do not lack resources, and that resources
are generated via action as well as obtained from militants. However, little attention is
given to the members (though many were interviewed), so the first point is not well
evidenced; and there is no systematic picture of the resources the organizations
possessed or how they were obtained. (On p. 28 Péchu takes issue with an argument of
mine about urban movements. I am not convinced that actors’ perceptions — assuming
they are in agreement — should determine the analytical category into which a
movement is placed, though they are an important object of enquiry in themselves.)
Péchu’s insider vantage point enables her to ask what motivates the militants, and
how their participation in CML and DAL relates to the wider ecology of political
organizations. She identifies three cohorts of militants in DAL. The three ‘leaders’ are
all ‘professional militants’ (one was previously Director of Greenpeace) and seem to
have complementary leadership skills (legal, media, etc.). The ‘multi-positioned
militants’ joined in 1990/1 and were not single minded in their commitment to housing;
by the mid-1990s they had left for militant positions elsewhere. Lastly were the
‘precarious militants’ who joined after 1993 in response to the publicity gained by DAL
and because of their own housing problems but felt they lacked ‘legitimacy’ as militants
compared with the other two cohorts. Péchu is insistent that becoming a militant is not
a result of déclassement but is a matter of socialization. Whether these are mutually
exclusive is debatable.
Péchu goes on to introduce the idea of ‘militant space’ (champ militant) to relate
militancy in the two organizations to the wider French political context. She argues that
with the return of the right to government in 1986, left activists turned from party politics
to social movement organizations, creating an ‘autonomous militant space’, separate
from ‘partisan space’. However I would see ‘autonomous militant space’ as something
that has to be demonstrated empirically; by an absent (or decreased?) overlap among
participants in partisan and militant spaces. Although she says that this space
‘characterized’ the political opportunity structure, it is better seen as a response to
changes in the latter and not as a replacement concept.
Lastly, the section on squatting is aimed at understanding the evolution of this
‘mode of action’. It presents a detailed overview of squatting in France from 1880
onwards based on primary sources. This demonstrates the great variety of groups who
have supported squatting, ranging from humanitarian and Catholic to anarchist and
extreme left. Péchu points out, against Tilly, that the use of the media goes back over
50 years before 1968. She shows how the changing connotations of squatting (and
varying media interest) make it difficult for groups today to judge whether to engage in
it or not.
At over 500 pages, the volume contains what are virtually three book-length treatments
of the chosen topics. It has numerous strengths. Péchu has an extensive knowledge of
both French and Anglo-Saxon literatures on social movements, and is very effective in
relating her findings to this literature. Equally, the historical study of squatting is a major
contribution in its own right, as are her insights into how French political culture affects
mobilization around housing, how social movement organizations work internally, and
how militants flow between organizations. Last but not least, Péchu includes an excellent
self-critical account of what it was like to study the two organizations as a participant
observer and (more unusually) what it was like to study a ‘marginal’ subject as a doctoral
student in an institution largely devoted to studying mainstream politics.

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The book has some weaknesses. The three foci lead the reader in somewhat different
directions, and mean the book lacks cohesion. Péchu’s focus on the militants and the
social movement character of the organizations means their service-providing character
is downplayed. Lastly, she does not use her interviews with the media, politicians, and
officials in government and housing organizations to give a sense of how the
organizations were viewed from outside. This is relevant when it comes to assessing the
effect of CML and DAL on housing policy.
Overall, this is an exceptional study which merits a very wide readership.
Chris Pickvance, University of Kent, Canterbury

Nicholas P. Retsinas and Eric Belsky 2005: Building Assets, Building Credit: Creating Wealth
in Low-Income Communities. Washington, DC: JCHS Brookings.

Karin Kurz and Hans-Peter Blossfeld 2004: Home Ownership and Social Inequality in
Comparative Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Both of the books in this review address the issue of access to home ownership and
contribute to the debate in the United States, Europe and Asia concerning the impact of
recent increases in home ownership (see for example Doling and Elsinga, 2006;
Hirayama and Ronald, 2006; Horsewood and Neuteboom, 2006). The impact of these
developments on households, the economy and welfare states remains a widely studied
question. The question is whether home ownership is a good investment, a source of
income and possibly a basis for asset-based welfare. The determinants and development
of access to home ownership figure prominently in this debate.
Although both of these books address access to home ownership, the approaches that
they take to this issue could hardly be more different. The work by Retsinas and Belsky
is written from the perspective of the United States, and it focuses on individuals in the
mortgage market and credit-rationing techniques. The work by Kurz and Blossfeld
proceeds from a comparative angle, focusing on social inequality, class patterns and
welfare systems. The former is normative, with researchers and policymakers searching
for ways to increase home ownership; the latter is more distant, seeking answers to
questions concerning the extent to which home ownership relates to class and income
in various welfare regimes.
The first book represents ‘the culmination of a conference exploring ways low-
income Americans can build assets and the critical role that access to credit plays in
making this possible’. The conference was organized by the Harvard Joint Center for
Housing Studies. All of the authors in the book discuss ways of increasing sustainable
home ownership for lower income groups by concentrating on developments in the
mortgage market. Many of the authors are affiliated with universities, lenders, the
government or non-profit organizations. The book was published as a part of the James
A. Johnson Metro Series, which aims to introduce new perspectives and policy thinking
on current issues, and to lay a foundation for long-term policy reform.
The book provides a clear description of recent developments and challenges in the
mortgage market that have created credit opportunities for households that were once
constrained. The joint aim of the authors is to seek further improvement in access to
mortgages and home ownership. Because current financial markets are not performing
efficiently, they are in need of repair. Mortgagees should be spared the high interest rates
and unfavorable terms of predatory lenders. Laws, regulations, counseling, and other
means of improving financial literacy seem to be the preferred policy instruments.
The central theme of the book is building assets. The introductory chapter by Belsky
and Retsinas elaborates on this issue. The editors consider home ownership the best path
to wealth accumulation, as other paths are either blocked (e.g. through minimum
investment requirements), very risky (e.g. individual stocks), or very slow (e.g. saving
accounts). Home ownership can be a path to wealth accumulation and less expensive

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borrowing. The editors observe that, without safeguards, home ownership could send
people plummeting towards bankruptcy instead of helping them to build assets. The
authors translate this risk into a plea for safeguards and the elimination of market
imperfections; it is not presented as a cause for questioning the goal of enabling home
ownership for as many people as possible. Following two introductory chapters, 12 other
chapters are presented in the five parts of the book. The first part of the book addresses
consumer choice; the subject of the second part is sub-prime lending, and the third part
discusses credit scoring. The fourth part of the book focuses on the role of regulation,
and the fifth part concentrates on solutions.
Part 1 revolves around the theme of making choices, particularly with regard to the
choice of consumers for financial services and financial institutions. Berry elaborates
on the fact that some costumers are not affiliated with any bank, while others adopt a
dual strategy, choosing to do business with both banks and non-banks. The other chapter
in this section addresses the accumulation of housing wealth. Nothaft and Chang make
clear that the recent increases in home equity were dispersed widely throughout various
demographic sectors. The results also show that younger people were more likely than
other home owners to use their housing wealth for refinancing, cashing out or taking
second mortgages. Lower income and minority households, however, appear to have
lost money by failing to refinance at opportune moments. These groups apparently did
not make optimal choices.
Part 2 of the book discusses the supply side of the mortgage market and elaborates
on the division of the mortgage market into a prime market, a sub-prime market and
non-profit, community-based organizations (CBOs). The latter organizations have
historically played an important role in helping low-income households gain access to
loans and providing assistance with negotiations. Apgar and Fishbein point to the risk
that the aggressive strategies of ‘predatory lenders’ could take business away from CBOs
and the risk that high-quality and labor-intensive underwriting is being driven out by
easy lending standards. They highlight the need for innovation and cooperation among
CBOs. Sub-prime lending and risk-based pricing have the potential to generate
efficiency gains and provide low-income households with access to loans and the
possibility of building assets according to Collins and colleagues. These developments
may therefore have positive effects on neighborhoods, given that home ownership is
associated with positive externalities for neighborhoods. If the risks are underestimated,
however, such trends could cause financial and social problems for individual
households, in addition to generating negative externalities in the event that foreclosures
become spatially concentrated. How well lender policies address such risk-based market
segmentation remains an open question.
Part 3 concentrates on credit scoring and shows some overlap with part 2. Credit
scoring has increased the availability of credit to consumers, while decreasing the cost.
In their investigation of household credit records, Bostic and colleagues find that the
credit records of renters have seriously deteriorated. This raises the question of whether
the records of tenants have deteriorated on average, or whether the result is due to the
combined effects of an outflow of favorable records and a deterioration of credit records
among immigrants. These developments obviously made it more difficult for tenants to
become home owners. Fishelson-Holstine discusses the quality of the data, revealing
that the information that is used for credit scoring could be improved considerably and
describing the type of data that would be needed in the ideal situation.
Part 4 addresses the role of regulation. Barr describes five federal laws that act to
eliminate barriers to credit. He evaluates these different laws according to their risks
and costs. Staten and Cate subsequently evaluate the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Kennedy discusses the possible implications of debtor protection, arguing that such
strategies could increase prices for sub-prime (predatory) lenders, possibly pushing
them out of the market. Sub-prime borrowers appear to be somewhat insensitive to
pricing, however, and it may therefore be difficult to predict the effect of introducing
debtor protection.

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Part 5 focuses on helping families to build, maintain and preserve their assets.
Sherraden and Barr emphasize that saving is another way to create wealth. The authors
issue a plea for increased saving among low-income families, as doing so could help
these families to qualify for loans in the prime market and provide them with a cushion
for emergencies. Seider and Tescher show that, although innovative programs may be
able to connect low-income consumers to mainstream financial institutions, much work
remains. This part of the book closes with a chapter by Cuts from Freddie Mac, which
presents results and developments from current innovations in risk management. For
example, credit-scoring tools and loan workouts have encouraged home retention instead
of foreclosure.
The book contains an impressive amount of new research results concerning
mortgage lending, wealth accumulation, and current trends in the USA. The chapters
are written by researchers, lenders and policymakers. The inclusion of a variety of angles
does provide a broad picture of the central theme, which makes the book recommendable
for researchers as well as policymakers in housing and mortgage markets. However,
these different angles are sometimes confusing. For example, in part 5 (‘Working
towards solutions’), it is not clear which problems are addressed and what the presented
solutions are meant to accomplish.
The second book is a comparative work presenting the results of a joint study by
researchers from 10 European countries, Israel and the United States. The authors seek
to contribute to the debate on home ownership, welfare regimes and social inequalities,
paying particular attention to the possibility of a relationship of home ownership rates
and inequality patterns with various types of welfare regimes. The central question
concerns whether individualized societies exist with regard to home ownership, or
whether home ownership continues to be structured by traditional class patterns. The
authors explore this question in 12 national contexts (Germany, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, Britain, Ireland, the United States and
Israel). Each chapter is devoted to results from one particular country and is written by
researchers from that country.
The book opens with an introductory chapter by Kurz and Blossfeld, which presents
the theoretical framework for the rest of the volume. The volume also includes an
overview of literature (primarily from the 1970s and 1980s) concerning the debate on
the role of home ownership in class position and social inequality. The authors attempt
to link housing tenure to Esping Anderson’s typology of welfare regimes. The first type
is the liberal regime, in which home ownership is the preferred form of tenure. Opposite
to this regime is the collectivist type, or the social democratic regime. A central feature
of this ideology is that housing costs should be distributed in such a way that they
guarantee adequate housing conditions for all households. In other words, the
distribution of housing costs should make access to decent housing less dependent on
the labor-market positions of households. Although this type of welfare has traditionally
been characterized by a preference for rental housing — particularly social rental
housing — the idea of private ownership has gained ground in this type of welfare state.
The third category in the typology is the corporatist tradition. The editors conclude that
this type of welfare state is not associated with a clear preference for any particular form
of tenure. The final category to be distinguished is the southern Europe welfare regime,
which is characterized by a limited role for the government in the provision of welfare
and heavy reliance on the family. Private ownership and private rental arrangements are
thus the dominant forms of tenure in the housing market.
The editors formulate two hypotheses. First, they expect the dependence of home
ownership on household class and income to vary according to regime type. Second,
they expect the role of intergenerational transfer to differ across welfare regimes. These
hypotheses are evaluated in the twelve country chapters. All of the chapters provide
interesting and readable overviews of housing and housing policy in the countries, as
well as an overview of social inequality. Moreover, the chapters present an enormous
amount of data and regression analyses on home ownership and its relationship to socio-

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242 Book reviews

economic and demographic variables. Unfortunately, the data that are presented differ
from country to country, thus making it difficult to draw clear conclusions.
The editors conclude that governmental policy plays an important role in the relative
costs of renting and owning. In countries in which the rental sector is regulated, home
ownership rates are relatively low. The rate of public housing and the extent of rent
control in the private rental sector are important features, which have a major impact
on the housing market. However, there is no clear link with Esping Anderson’s welfare
regime. There are important differences among social democratic countries; some (e.g.
Denmark) have relatively low home ownership rates, while the rates are high in others
(e.g. Norway). In Norway, housing costs are collectivized through subsidized state loans.
Israel can also be considered a collectivistic regime with a high home ownership rate.
The high rate that was observed in this country was achieved largely through the
provision of subsidized loans to Jewish immigrants. The Netherlands is considered as
an ambiguous case, because of its combination of a large social rental sector, cutbacks
in financial support for social housing, and the encouragement of home ownership. The
United States, Britain and Ireland are classified as liberal regimes. Each of these
countries has a relatively high rate of home ownership, although their backgrounds differ
considerably. The share of home ownership in the corporatist regimes (France, Germany
and Belgium) shows most differentiation. The German housing system appears closest
to the social democratic regime, while the Belgian system bears many similarities to the
liberal regime. The southern European countries share an emphasis on the role of family
in helping young people to buy homes.
The results show that class and income continue to be factors in attaining home
ownership. Even in social democratic regimes, the transition to home ownership is more
likely for households that have greater financial resources. By comparing the chances
of home ownership in Britain and Denmark, the editors conclude that class differences
in access to home ownership are greater in the liberal regime. Unfortunately, a
comparison with all other countries is not possible, particularly with regard to Germany
and the Netherlands, where home owners have relatively high incomes and class
differences are conceivably even greater. This conclusion seems dangerous, as the
chances of home ownership are likely to be even more dependent on the type of housing
system than on the type of welfare regime. As demonstrated in the previous overview,
housing systems can differ widely from welfare regime types.
The empirical results from the study on intergenerational transfer do not provide a
clear picture. The editors conclude that intergenerational transfer is more important in
Germany than it is in the Netherlands and that this might mean that the assets of parents
are less important in social democratic regimes. The Danish results, however, suggest
the opposite. According to the editors, the differences between Germany and the
Netherlands can be explained by the taxation of parent–child transfers and opportunities
in the mortgage market. This is another indication that differences between countries
could relate more to housing and mortgage systems than they do to welfare regimes.
It is unfortunate that such a large volume of data and solid analysis allows so few
conclusions concerning the central hypotheses. Moreover, the appropriateness of the
Esping Anderson framework as a classification for analyzing the role of home ownership
in social stratification could be debated. At the very least, the model is in need of
adjustment for this application. The book is a valuable addition to the home ownership
debate and provides many challenges for further research. The descriptions in the
country chapters are very useful for comparative researchers.
After reading these two books, each of which is written from a completely different
angle, it becomes obvious that they both address the same issue and even proceed from
similar assumptions. Each in some way considers home ownership as the best means of
building assets. One highlights the risks of low-income home ownership, and the other
describes rental policies for low-income groups. Surprisingly, neither volume provides
convincing evidence that home ownership is the best way to build assets. This leaves
the reader to wonder why Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, has

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Book reviews 243

such a low rate of home ownership (35%). One important hypothesis in the volume by
Kurz and Blossfeld is that, in liberal regimes, the achievement of home ownership
strongly depends on class and income. As the volume by Retsinas and Belsky shows,
those who are involved in such regimes point at increasing access to home ownership
in the USA, and report on a debate on improving access to home ownership for lower
income groups.
Marja Elsinga, OTB, TU Delft

Doling, J. and M. Elsinga (2006) Home Horsewood, N. and P. Neuteboom (2006)

ownership: getting in, getting from, getting
out, part II. Delft University Press, Delft.
Hirayama, Y. and R. Ronald (2006) Housing
and social transition in Japan. Routledge,
Taylor & Francis Group, London.
The social limits to growth: security and
insecurity aspects of home ownership. Delft
University Press, Delft.

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© 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.