By the mid 1990s there were more than 23 million dwellings in the United Kingdom. Nearly 70% were owned by their occupants; almost 30% were owned by public authorities; the remainder (mainly older houses) were rented from private landlords. About 50% of families now live in a post-1945 dwelling, usually a two-story house with a garden. Most homeowners finance their purchase through a home mortgage loan from a building society, bank, insurance company, or other financial institution. The degree of overcrowding in the United Kingdom is lower than in most European countries.
New houses are built by both the public and private sectors, but most are built by the private sector for sale to owneroccupiers. The main providers of new subsidized housing are housing associations, which own, manage, and maintain over 600,000 homes in England alone and completed over nearly 30,000 new homes for rent or shared ownership per year in the mid-1990s. Local housing authorities were in the past primarily concerned with slum clearance; however, large-scale clearance virtually ended in the mid-1980s, with emphasis shifting to modernization of substandard homes and community improvement.
Preliminary data of the 2001 census indicated that there were about 21,660,475 households in England and Wales. About 33% of all households lived in semi-detached houses.
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