Empirical Evidence on Cross-Tenure Differences in Home Maintenance and Conditions

Abstract

For decades it has been widely believed that owners occupied higher quality dwellings than renters, and that a major reason for this difference was the superior investments in home maintenance undertaken by owner-occupants.' Grigsby (1963, pp. 235-6), Sternlieb (1966, pp. 176, 227), Taggart (1970, p. 123), Sternlieb and Burchell (1973, pp. 306-8), Peterson et al. (1973, pp. 46-47, 63), and Schafer (1977) have found that owner-occupants generally spent more on maintenance and engaged in maintenance activities more frequently than their absentee-owner counterparts. The implications of these studies are ambiguous, however, since a variety of other factors besides tenure, which could have explained the observed differences, were not controlled for. Recently, this conventional wisdom has been challenged in a rigorous empirical study by Ozanne and Struyk (1976, pp. 54-77), which examines dwelling conditions in a multivariate analysis. They claim that: