Accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal, the home buy­ers’ tax credit ini­tia­tive (U.S.) was “intended to help spur hous­ing sales” by offer­ing finan­cial incen­tives to first time home-buyers and cer­tain repeat buyers.

How­ever the ini­tia­tive encour­ages “excess mobil­ity”, sug­gests Edward Glaeser, a pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at Har­vard, and this is some­thing we should not be promoting. Why? Less-mobile home­own­ers are good cit­i­zens due to their greater civic engage­ment than those who move res­i­dence often.

One of the rea­sons for sub­si­diz­ing home­own­er­ship is the widely held belief that home­own­ers are good cit­i­zens. Ten years ago, Denise DiPasquale and I wrote a paper inves­ti­gat­ing the links between own­er­ship and civic behav­ior. Con­trol­ling for income, edu­ca­tion, age and other vari­ables, we found that home­own­ers were 16 per­cent more likely to vote in local elec­tions, 11 per­cent more likely to know the name of their mem­ber of Con­gress and 10 per­cent more likely to say that they have recently worked to help “solve local problems.”

But we also found that almost one-half of the effect of home­own­er­ship dis­ap­peared when we con­trolled for the time that the per­son had lived in the home. Own­ers are typ­i­cally much less mobile then renters, and peo­ple who stay put are more likely to become civi­cally engaged.

If you think that civic engage­ment is impor­tant enough to jus­tify home­own­er­ship sub­si­dies, then we cer­tainly shouldn’t be encour­ag­ing excess mobility.